Living in Minnesota, we are just as fond of climate control - but its really expensive to heat the darn things - which means rent is high - which means that its hard for stores to turn a profit. In a strip mall, the space you heat is the store footage. In a big box store the space you heat is the store footage. In an enclosed mall - you pay to heat a lot of space used for not selling things.
Mall of America does pretty well, between locals and tourists it gets enough business to retain tenants, although one of its anchors is gone and hasn’t been replaced (Bloomingdales).
What about local taxes? Here in the UK we talk of the death of the High Street. Numerous shops and stores closing down in city centres. I assume these closures are in part to do with the internet and local taxes. Heavily taxed traditional walk in stores will always be struggling against internet retailers who do not pay these same local taxes.
I live in a section of the US where there are a lot of dead malls, and even more empty strip malls. I can’t think of a single mall which didn’t have a JC Penney, a Sears, or both. Like Mr.Miskatonic stated above under his #8, the anchors aren’t replaceable. There aren’t too many cities left with an independent department store or a smaller chain with downtown locations left to move into these spaces. If you throw in a gang issue, no one will move into vacancies.
What retailers still need large stores? Auto dealers and appliance stores like Frys. There are a lot of empty dealerships and a lot of space still left from Wards and Circuit City failures. Better to just turn the space over to hydroponic farming and recycle the asphalt.
One thing I have noticed is that the remaining big malls are just getting bigger. The King of Prussia Mall just added a couple of medium box stores & restaraunts (one being a Container Store) to its perimeter -sacrificing only a gas station and some parking that was waaaaaay too far from the main buildings to be a huge loss. THat would seem to be where the retail money is going.
We used to have several retail stores in mall and in retail districts and the weekend business was about half of your weekly revenue. You can do pretty well with very light traffic the rest of the week if you can pack it in on the weekends.
All of a teenager’s income is disposable and they are much more susceptible to impulse purchases than other shoppers. They are also much less value oriented and will buy cheap crap for a lot more than its worth if you can convince them they want it. Next to first time brides and new parents, they are probably the best customers to have except you are only in wedding mode for a few months, you are a new parents for a year or two, you are a teenager from when you get your first allowance to when you make your first rent payment after college (and sometimes for decades afterwards).
The “urban villages” we have now are the exact same thing as malls, except without the roof. Other than that, they have all of the same virtues and vices. Really, the question shouldn’t be “why are malls dying?”, but rather “why don’t malls have roofs any more?”.
And for those talking about “climate controlling all of that enclosed space”: It doesn’t cost to climate control space. It costs to climate control surface area and doors. And the new sort of mall without the roof probably has more total surface area than the old sort with a roof, and certainly has more doors.
You’re right of course. I’m not sure why I thought KoP Mall was in NJ. Certainly there are other malls that are thriving. But it does seem like a lot of the smaller ones aren’t.
My observation is not just limited to malls, but in EVERY town where I have lived there is usually one side of town with a mall and/or major retailers/restaurants. Then a “new mall” or (especially post 2000) major store opens up on the exact opposite side of town and all the other retailers follow suit. So what we end up with is constant new development with an increasing number of huge vacant buildings. In some cities this has resulted in 3 or 4 “sides” of town being consolidated into 1 shopping region.
The first time I saw a mall die was around 1990. It was a doubly whammy- “The New Mall” was built, and a college student was murdered in the bathroom by the movie theater in the “Old (15 yrs or so) Mall.” The new mall got retailers the old one never had, plus most of the existing stores switched. Then every store (Toys rUs, Service Merchandise, Lowes, grocery stores, restaurants) in the vicinity of the old mall moved to the new end of town, too. Plus, downtown died, too.
I think malls which went upscale and are regional are still doing well. The one in San Jose, though right next to a new upscale strip shopping center, just redid a wing for luxury shops and is jammed.
There is also the sales tax fight. The downtown shopping center in my town lost most of its anchor stores to a mall the next town over, and the sales tax revenue. A supermarket and Target saved it. Then they developed a massive open air center in our town, and it took a lot of the good stores out of the mall. It also has lots of restaurants, not food court stuff, which helps. So our sales tax revenue came back.
How to open air centers work in places where it gets cold and snows? Near me this isn’t a problem, but the same guy who did Inner Harbor opened up a high class open air center north of Princeton, and if you went near Christmas in bad weather you had the place to yourself.
Try the Mall of America in Minneapolis. It has one area so large that clouds form.
Mall of America does well because it’s sooo damn big with over 400 stores, an amusement park, an aquarium, and such that it’s a tourist destination in itself. 12,000 people work there.
If you go there their are a couple of “secret” items from when it used to be a Twins baseball stadium - like the location of the former home plate.
I’m not sure it’s fair to lump all of this new development together. Some outdoor malls are exactly like indoor malls except the roof. Parking lots are the same, suburban location is the same.
But many of the downtown developments are located in downtowns where a mall could never be, have extensive housing located above the retail stores, and have buried parking or multi-story parking that conserves space and doesn’t turn the new “mall” into the traditional island of retail surrounded by an ocean of parking lots.
The move to open-air malls is interesting, as it is sort of a return to roots for malls. A lot of the oldest malls started as open-air facilities which were later enclosed. Lenox Mall in Atlanta, for example, now Atlanta’s best known enclosed mall, started life as an open-air facility. Same for North DeKalb Mall, and many malls of that generation. A few of the early malls around here never lost their open-air character. Ansley Mall, for example.
Lenox was the shit back in the day. That’s where all the kids of Atlanta would burn the day away, especially down in the arcade. Which had skeeball. Good times, good times.
