The new wrong shopping mall

In My Humble Opinion
1

I live in one of the many parts of Canada where winters are nasty. But that is even beside many points against this new shopping mall concept.

We now have two major shopping malls that are a collection of separate stores spread about a giant parking lot.

I find all aspects of this concept worse than a mall enclosed contiguously in the center of a large parking lot.

It seems worse for energy efficiency. More exterior walls exposed to cold and heat for each store. No shared warmed/cooled space for their front doors. Inefficient power distribution runs and infrastructure including plumbing and waste water. Extremely inefficient access for customers. Entrance doors all over the place often requiring very long round about walks outdoors or often re parking the vehicle. Narrow congested driveways amongst some stores. No efficient communal shipping receiving areas for stores.

So many obvious negative aspects. I am sure folks can point out more.

Is this concept some desperate but wrong attempt to “save” the mall, that is ignoring the more basic economic factors in play?

Maybe there are better examples of this concept in more temperate zones. But so far, ours seem 100% negative in design.

2

We have at least one of those here in Dallas. I hate it. I like to window shop and you can’t do it here.

And if it weren’t for GPS, I don’t know how TF I would find my way around their little town with in a town

3

Yes. Window shopping is not really an option unless the weather is fine and you are willing to walk a ridiculous round about long route. I often like to just tour about an indoor mall if I have time to window shop and people watch.
The two instances we have here do not even have any outdoor centered attractions. No outdoor cafe dining opportunities, even in nice weather.

4

There are a lot of dying malls in various areas. But from what I have read it is not the basic economic error of wrong place for the original mall. It seems that the owner operators are sometimes gouging. Cheap borrowing costs are encouraging over building of malls too close together, so thinning the traffic amongst them. Current malls not devoting enough to upkeep. They get shabby.
But this new style of mall does nothing to help any of that.

5

I think you’re talking about the difference between an open mall vs. a closed mall. In areas where most of the year the temperature is low to moderate, apparently open malls are not common. In areas where most of the year the temperature is moderate to high, open malls are common. The link below says that in fact energy efficiency is better in open malls, although this is mostly true in warmer places. The link below says that open malls are becoming more common in general. Please note that I’m just talking about the trends, not about my personal preferences:

6

Good article.
But.
In a northern zone I am not sure the energy balance is in favor of separate stores. In a normal mall I never have the experience of the forceful air exchange at the doorway. Cold outside air being blocked/exchanged for inside air. There are usually no doors to open close to enter/exit. Lighting is maybe an issue. But the separate store malls have extensive outdoor lighting as well.

Increased Visibility of stores? Maybe if you drive all around the parking lot and in and out the narrow roadways between the core area. Or are willing to walk that route. Signage? Unless you happen to walk/drive all around the ins and outs, you may never see it. More likely to see more strolling down one or more halls of a contiguous mall.

The rest of the points in the article are pretty much fluff.

In the two instances in my city, the malls have zero extra incentives. No parks, playgrounds, sidewalk cafes, Nothing of added benefit. Only negatives.

I only go to them to purchase something from a particular store that I know has that item. Then leave. Pretty much zero opportunity for any other store to attract my attention at all.

Maybe they are mistakenly transferring the open mall concept to places that are not appropriate.

7

heres our open mall … its never been filled up and all of the big-name outlet stores left as soon as their leases were up and its nowhere near full … if it didn’t have the only buffet in town and harbor freight they’d probably just tear it down

8

It’s a bit of a cycle. When I was young in the early 70s, they took an outdoor shopping mall in the suburbs of Toronto and enclosed it, becoming the Don Mills Shopping Centre. It was a mid-sized mall at the time, with one anchor (Eatons) and not particularly high end. Fairview Mall - which has the same owners - is located 4 km North was more successful and expanded significantly over the years with multiple anchors.

The owners demolished the mall about 8 years ago and rebuilt it as an outdoor shopping area:

I was there in June and it was quite pleasant with a ton of outdoor dining, a small ride-on-train for kids, and people eating ice cream on benches. I was also there in February and it was cold, windy, and miserable. It’s like someone forget we live in Canada and enclosed the original mall for good reasons.

9

When we lived in the Columbus, Ohio area, we sometimes shopped at Easton Town Center, an open concept mall that bills itself as resembling the downtowns of early to mid-20th century America. Interesting idea - first the malls gradually kill off downtowns, then try to resemble them.

There are a few parking garages and some on-street parking, so that’s not a problem unless you’re going at peak times. And you can definitely window-shop. Energy efficiency should be OK compared to classic enclosed malls, since the stores are attached.

It was a decent place to go, especially since we never encountered one of their persistent problems, teenaged acting out with occasional violence. Eventually they established rules banning teens (or groups of teens) below a certain age if they weren’t accompanied by an adult.

I suppose the Easton-type concept wouldn’t work as well if frigid weather was the norm for a good chunk of the year. It’d be less attractive too in a place like Houston, where you try to avoid walking outdoors from late May through September.

10

A local shopping mall in the Nashville area is being turned into a Public Library, Community College, and Recreation Center.

11

In these parts, Landmark went from open to closed then back to open and is now being demolished. A hospital will be built on the site.

12

To give a perspective from someone in the real estate industry–in industry mags, business journals, conferences and random semi-drunken chatter among colleagues–the open air mall concept, which is frankly just a form of strip mall, is seen as outperforming enclosed malls tremendously for the last 30 years.

A traditional mall is typically anchored by a major retailer, historically this would be a Sears or a Macy’s type store. The concept that drives a traditional mall is people go here for intentional shopping trips, i.e. I want to “buy stuff.” This is important–because they are often going to “buy stuff” they are open to strolling around the nice, air-conditioned enclosed mall and window shopping. They also have a food court to keep people fed and content.

What is the potential competition for this? Well, online shopping. People who are just kinda in the mood to splurge, now do not need to stroll the mall to window shop, they can just pull up Amazon or a favored e-retailer and look around at what’s on sale, and buy it from the comfort of their own home.

Strip malls are frequently anchored by grocery stores, because they aren’t betting on the same type of mall traffic. While online grocery ordering is obviously a thing, grocery purchasing is still something massively, and overwhelmingly, done in person. It’s also something everyone has to do. When you anchor a midsize strip mall around a grocery store a lot of good things start to happen. The regular customers of that grocery store, who might go there 1-3 times a week, are going in and out of your mall regularly.

What do they see when they do that? They see the other stores, and maybe they don’t need them that day, but in the back of their mind they now remember–well there’s a UPS Store near Kroger, so if I need to ship something I’ll just do it next time I’m at the store. Or–oh yeah, there’s an ice cream place near Kroger, so I’ll take the kids there today after we grocery shop. Or–oh yeah there’s a small men’s clothing store near Kroger where I can buy a few dress shirts for my trip next week when I go to the grocery store.

Savvy strip malls also have a few “secondary anchors” other than the supermarket, these are businesses that relate to “recurring services” that people need to use regularly. Traffic to these recurring service businesses can further drive traffic to the mall and more exposure for the other stores. Examples of some of these secondary anchors are things like gyms and fitness clubs, SuperClips style haircut places, etc. Hell, I’ve seen government offices and doctor’s offices set up in these strip malls too. One that I’m familiar with has a DMV office. Hey, no one likes going to the DMV, but people have to do it, and hey, maybe I’ll stop at Cold Stone for some ice cream to alleviate the shittiness of having to deal with the DMV. Or maybe I’ll stop at the Mexican place after going in for my doctor’s appointment.

Easton Town Center that @Jackmannii has mentioned is pretty famous in the industry, while it is open air it doesn’t really fit the strip mall definition per say, it is a true open air traditional mall. Easton has a few things going for it though, one is that it has successfully marketed itself as a true “destination.” Easton isn’t really just subsisting on Columbus area money, it literally has shopping crazed types traveling 2-3 hours from other States even to visit, and there’s a Marriott right there to accommodate them–people do overnight trips just to visit Easton. It is also double anchored by a massive Nordstrom’s and a massive Macy’s, it is also just a few exits down I-270 from the Columbus airport, so people coming into town on business or whatever can easily stop by Easton to do some shopping.

There are a few other “open air” traditional malls like Easton around the country, but I think Easton is the most prominent or one of the most prominent in the eastern United States and one of the most successful. A big limitation of this type of retail is the only ones I’m familiar with that have sustained success have generally been fairly upmarket, so these limits places developers can build them. The grocery store anchored strip malls succeed in almost all economic areas because everyone needs what they offer–in an upmarket area it will be anchored by a fancier store like a Wegman’s or Whole Foods, and have fancier ancillary stores, in a lower market area it’ll have like a Food Lion or something and have typical lower rent business.

13

Thanks to the Internet, most of us have a much better idea of what we want to buy and exactly where to get it than we did 30 years ago. Neighboring “anchor stores” are no longer required to get people to specialty stores. Nobody wants to walk into a mall to just get one thing; they prefer to park as close to the particular store and walk directly to it without having to first walk past perfume counters, cookie shops, and merry-go-rounds to get that back scratcher from Bed Bath and Beyond. That’s assuming you don’t just do the sane thing and order it online. Physical shopping isn’t the recreational, exploratory activity it once was.

14

In the Cleveland area, which is not much more temperate than Ontario, we have Legacy Village in Lyndhurst and now Pinecrest in Orange. They’re 10 miles/2 highway exits apart from each other. I had the impression that Legacy Village wasn’t doing too well when the Apple Store left but I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about since it was doing so well a copycat opened up down the road.

The “real mall” (indoor mall) in the area - which is basically across the street from Legacy Village - is still open and doing ok I guess.

All of the shops in all 3 of these places are super high end. I’ve been to them to get specialized stuff, but more often than not if I am visiting these places it’s a “destination dinner.”

15

In southern California, the trend in malls is to open them up. In the 90’s, almost every mall was enclosed, some so enclosed they were like fortresses. In the past decade, there has been a move to open up the mall to the sky, with the poster child probably the Westfield mall in Century City:

Even the venerable (and famous setting in multiple films) Del Amo Mall has opened up one end.

Then:

Updated:

16

Casting my lot with @Martin_Hyde and @Elmer_J.Fudd .

I spent years in commercial real estate – the shopping center and regional mall game. Long-time member of the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Enclosed malls used to aim to get you there and keep you there – food courts, movie theaters, no end of rides and attractions for kiddos. Cool on a hot day, warm on a cold day.

But … yeah … Amazon, et al. And nobody has the leisure time that they used to, so “shopping” (overwhelmingly) became “buying.” And open-air centers can lend themselves much more readily to parking near your intended store, getting in, getting stuff, and getting out.

Despite having been in the business, I always despised large shopping malls – always commenting that the parking lots at the trailheads (beautiful hiking trails) were always empty, but you had to drive in circles endlessly waiting for a space to open up at the mall.

#Murica !

17

I’ve never been there but I’ve heard that The Grove in Los Angeles is a tremendously successful open-air shopping center where many people like to go, even just to hang out. So some of these other open-air malls may be trying to emulate that, though perhaps it works less well in the snowbelt.

18

Fashion Island, in Newport Beach (Orange County, CA) was always successful, even being in close proximity to the (enclosed) Grand Behemoth – South Coast Plaza.

But … yeah … weather. Weather matters a lot in this regard.

19

A lot of these new open malls are attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the long-gone “main street”, where you’d have a lot of (independent, small-business) stores along a major thoroughfare. They’re completely different, of course, since everything in the mall is owned and managed by the same company, and most of the shops in the mall will be mega-chains, and they’re out on the edge of nowhere where real estate is cheap instead of being in the middle of everything. But that’s the feel they’re trying for, and maybe it even works for some nostalgic customers.

20

There were a few years when Fashion Island really struggled. When I was in High School (c1980) the vacancy rate was near 50%. It was only after Fashion Island kicked out JC Penny and other proletarian stores that its fortunes turned around, branding itself as a high end emporium to the wealthy.

South Coast Plaza made the same transition but did so in a less desperate manner - Sears was still an anchor store there until 2019. A big part of that mall’s success is that starting in the 1980s it started to surround itself with open air annexes across the street - South Coast Village on one side and Metro Pointe on the other which can be accessed via a pedestrian bridge. The old enclosed part is where you will find the really upscale stores; Orange County’s version of Rodeo Drive.