Unless there was a major redrawing of state borders while I was asleep last night (placing Philadelphia and it’s western suburbs in Jersey), King of Prussia Mall is in PA not NJ. Other malls in this area are also still in business. Plymouth Meeting Mall in Plymouth Meeting is still open and seems to be doing well.
I ride the train into center city Philly every day and get off at Market East Station which is located in an underground shopping mall, and the mall is always packed with people (other than commuters) in the evenings when I catch the train home.
I’m not saying that there aren’t dying malls, I’m sure that there are, I’m just saying that it appears that there are still many that are at least surviving or even thriving.
What killed them where I live was a combination of rents, failing anchors, the collapse of music and book store chains, and an inability to accommodate big-box stores.
The last remnant of enclosed mall space in my town sits right next to a Lowe’s, which replaced a K-Mart that moved to a much bigger space 20 years ago. They tore down half the mall and left the rest, which has a Radio Shack, a taekwondo school, a jeweler, a sporting goods store, and a barber, with the anchor being a Bon-Ton. That mall was packed with shops and people 25 years ago. Now they can’t rent what little space they have left.
They have been talking about tearing the rest down for a long time. The location is fantastic, so that’s not the cause of its demise. The word was that when everything was great they raised the rents to high levels and chased everybody out.
The other mall in town has been long since leveled, formerly containing Woolworth’s, Montgomery Ward, Hills/Ames… you get the idea. That died along with the companies that it housed. Now it’s Wal-Mart and Staples along with a modest outdoor mall, and it’s doing well.
Last, not all malls are dying. We have one a half-hour away that is still busy as hell and almost completely full. It managed to make the required adjustments and is in no real danger of going away.
One of the problems I always had with the big malls was the issue of shopping in several stores and carrying all that crap around. If you have a spouse who can sit out in the mall with your bags, that’s one thing. Otherwise you need to make constant trips to your vehicle, which kind of eliminates the benefit of an enclosed mall.
And then yeah, take all that stuff out, lock it in my car, go back inside. Trust no one will break into my car after having seen me put it in there. Whereas in a strip-mall/distributed environment, it’s ‘take to car, put in car, drive to somewhere else, resume shopping’ and less worry about Sammy Scumbag having watched me put valuables in the trunk and walk away.
That and, for me, it’s the fucking crowds. I hate crowds. People in groups are idiots. Walking super slow, seven wide, blocking escalators and doors, etc.
Every enclosed mall has vast volumes of space that isn’t bringing in any money (kiosks? It is to laugh!) but still needs to be heated and cooled. When they were built energy was cheap. Has maintaining all of that dead air contributed to their decline?
The difference is that one developer buys a large space, builds matching adjacent buildings and streets and parking lots. It’s a planned development with one owner, not a street with a thousand different owners and buildings of all different ages and designs. It’s very similar to an enclosed mall, just rip off the roof and let cars drive down the halls. And maybe build some apartments on top of Hot Topic.
There has been a massive increase in square feet of retail space per capita over the last 40 years. Yet income for the lower 80% of the population has been flat. The obvious consequence is that part of this space must close.
I think you may be just trading one kind of maintenance job for another. Fewer janitors, but a lot more landscapers. No longer maintaining one ginormous HVAC system and roof, but now maintaining 50 smaller ones.
**The rise of open-air malls: **We just are not as fond of controlled climates as we once were.
The gentrification of urban areas: A lot of those kids at the Malls in the 70’s & 80’s were there because they were bored stupid. Once they grew up a lot of them moved into cities so there would be more to do.
The rise in poverty in the suburbs: As gentrification rises, more folks of lower income move out of town. These folks haven’t got the free cash to spend in those malls.
**Internet: **Duh. Why fight the crowds, the stupid people in the parking lot blocking entire lanes to be 50 feet closer to the main door, and the traffic around the mall if you already know what you want? It can still be fun to window browse and such and you’ll never be able to try on shirts from the internet but for a lot of other things there is little reason to travel to the mall to shop. In addition, the rise of social media meant there was little reason to go to a mall to chat with your friends.
Other causes:
Bad management: The primary thing you can tell from this is when they upgrade things. Every mall I see that seems to be succeeding usually had some major overhaul to its ‘look’. Usually this was done in the 90’s to get rid of the 60’s and 70’s appearance. Every decaying mall I have been in seems to have the same brick or tile work dating back to 1974. Some other Malls renovated a bit too late.
Bigger mall down the road: Locally to me this was the plague of many malls. There was a larger one just down the way and the only reason to go to them was the quiet. King of Prussia damn near killed the Plymouth Meeting mall until they realized that IKEA wasn’t coming back and revitalized themselves with fancy restaraunts, Whole Foods, and a better food court. They still have some shortcomings. Another example local to me is the Moorestown Mall, which always lived in the shadow of the Chery Hill mall. Despite getting an overhaul before their neighbor they still struggle. They also tried being more of an outdoor mall but have the issue of several NJ highways crisscrossing their property. Many other malls simply could not adapt.
Only as good as the land you are on: I notice in DeadMalls a lot of the malls in my homestate are in the areas that have been in decline, especially with the collapse of PA steelmaking. Wheras a relatively rich state like NJ has very few dead malls, and the ones they have are that are dead are like that because they were ill conceived or eyesores.
Seedy malls: Once a mall got a bad rep, it could almost never recover. It would be worse than a urban area’s reputation after that. Even if the Mall wasn’t seedy a bad incident could keep people away for years . The mass murder at Springfield Mall in Pa or the Armored Car robbery a the Deptford Mall in NJ put a huge crimp in their sales for years. Some malls seems to start seedy, such as many outlet malls.
Anchor’s Away: A lot of the Anchor stores simply are no longer around and can’t be replaced. Once one of these leaves and nothing replaces it the Mall loses a lot of its appeal to the average customer.
Reputation: If anything Malls are something of a victim of their own success. They developed a reputation of being purely for consumerism, and were places where teens hung out after school, where the elderly did powerwalks in the mornings, and where Mall cops abused their power. The ‘mall-culture’ become something of a national joke, and while that won’t keep away someone who needs something, it did sort of reduce the casual reason to just go and be there.
I think you’re right. The mall isn’t dead; they just made too many of them, and it’s only the excess ones that are dying. The majority of suburban shoppers still go to malls primarily.
This is typical of real estate development, where–during the booms–a lot of stuff gets built on the assumption that whatever is successful now can be multiplied indefinitely.
Pure speculation, but perhaps this has had a bigger effect than just the loss of a few stores per mall. Without book and record shops, there’s a lot less time wasting opportunity for a lot of people. Presumably that sort of browsing was a big attraction for those that can’t spend hours looking at just clothes (or at least enough to persuade them it won’t be that bad).
