When reading American books I often come across references of a character going to shop in a strip mall.
I’m not at all sure I understand this.
When are small shops considered to be in a strip mall and when are they not?
Starting point … Strip mall - Wikipedia
Thanks Bear, I went there before posting.
We’d call that a shopping centre.
What I don’t understand is what Americans call “a block of shops” by which I mean, half a dozen shops along a street frontage. Footpath and parking is on the street.
Is each shop it’s own independent building? Then I don’t know that I’d have a special name for it. Is each shop part of one long thin (probably unattractive) building? Strip mall.
Never heard the phrase “a block of shops”.
Canadian phrase, may-hap?
I think in the UK we’d call that a retail park.
Yes. So that would be a strip mall? A “strip” of shops running alongside the street?
And a group of shops situated off the street with carparking space off the street is also a strip mall?
I think so. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a strip mall that didn’t have it’s own parking lot, but I think it’s the nature of the shops which make them a “strip mall” rather than the details of the parking.
We did the etymology of “strip mall” just a month or so ago.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=611502&highlight="strip+mall"
Here in southern California at least many strip malls are on the location of former gas stations.
A developer would tear down the station build one building that consisted of 5-10 small shops with a small congested parking lot. The building is often L shaped to get the most building on a rectangular lot.
Business often found here include:
7-11 or other convenience store
Small ethnic restaurants
Cell phone stores
Nail salons
Many people consider than a blight on the landscape.
No, typically strip malls have their own parking lots and are set back from the street.
Here in Australia we’d probably call what you’re thinking of a “shopping strip.”
Thankyou for that Sam. I’m surprised such an arcane and obscure question has been discussed before. There are some very informative posts in that thread.
Thinking about it, it occurs to me that in America, strips of shops away from downtown are not common. At least not when I lived in Denver briefly.
If you want a shop then the will be a 7/11 on a corner somewhere, possibly with a petrol station, but not a block (cluster) of shops. If you want “shopping” then it will be in a central location of a suburb with supermarkets etc.
In New Zealand, Australia, and England it is still possible to find a line of shops bracketed by houses along a main street in the suburbs. However I must say they are disappearing.
What remains ubiquitous is the “corner shop”. The convenience store. Not many of them either.
In the small city I live in we still have two arcades. Closed in roofed over walkways leading from one street to the next, and lined with small shops. I suspect my children would regard them as simple shopping malls.
That’s the one!! Good man.
For me that is not a strip mall but I get the impression from various books that Americans are comfortable with a loose designation. No problem.
They’re not uncommon where I live- but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone refer to the cluster of stores by a specific term. Either the person names the specific store, or they make some to reference to the street (" I’m going to the avenue" or “I’m going to X Street”). The reference to the street might mean a group of six stores on one block of that street with houses on either side, but it’s also used to mean a miles-long commercial section of that street.
So at what point does a “strip mall” become a “shopping plaza”? Or maybe it doesn’t. I really don’t hear “plaza” much anymore. But it’s stretching it to call something with a supermarket, a drug store, a couple of “satellite” fast food joints and a couple aggregations of smaller stores in it a “strip mall”. And in modern usage, we seem to reserve the unmodified word “mall” for a gigantic building with the stores inside. At least when talking about shopping, as opposed to something like the mall in Washington, DC.
ETA:
Yes, I suppose it’s a “shopping center”, but that’s a REALLY loose term.
Except I think the term “retail park” connotes something a little more upmarket than what people appear to mean by “strip mall”. We have other terms, such as “shopping precinct” or “arcade”, that convey the appropriate degree of smallness and cheapness. You would generally not, for example, find a newsagent or a charity shop in a retail park. But you might in a precinct.
Why shouldn’t it be a loose term? You’re trying to describe a spectrum of retail from the tiniest to the hugest and with a thousand variations in-between. Nobody outside of the building and planning professions ever needs to use a technical term to describe it.
And you’re simply wrong to say that mall is reserved for a gigantic enclosed building. Obviously it isn’t. Mall is part of the utterly common term strip mall, and that is the correct term as well.
Recognizing that common usage doesn’t have any bearing on esoteric terms used by any industry…
The term “strip mall” is not used in the property management field. The term used is “strip center”:
Note the term doesn’t include the size of the center, but it is usually less than 20,000 sf of retail space. Other terms used to indicate size of the center and variety of tenants are: neighborhood center (25,000 - 125,000 sf, usually anchored by one supermarket/discount store), community center (125,000 - 300,000 sf, 2 or more anchors), regional center (up to 1,000,000 sf, 1 or 2 department stores, often an enclosed mall [enclosed walkways]), super regional center (over 1,000,000 sf, at least 3 department stores, enclosed mall) and power center (several large freestanding “big box” stores, few in-line small tenants). ICSC.org (International Council of Shopping Centers) has more information.