While I enjoy the site, it’s not some kind of scientific study or mall tracking site that be used as proof of any ideas about mall closings. It’s just a site where people write about a mall that interests them.
That’s true. Does anyone know of any website with a thorough, accurate list of closed malls in the U.S.? I can’t find one.
Wendell Wagner wrote:
>That’s true. Does anyone know of any website with a thorough, accurate list of closed malls in the U.S.? I can’t find one.
I couldn’t find one either.
Interesting quotes function…
I missed this comment.
I don’t know – whenever I’ve looked through it, most of the entries are grossly out of date, like the ones I cited, and haven’t been updated in close to a decade. Possibly some updates have been made, but the site is in need of a huge overhaul.
Here’s the update page.
I was talking about stuff you’d find in a mall, not a grocery. I know of a few malls with grocery stores attached, but they are low rent places.
Groceries and department like stores aren’t even new. 50 years ago a place called “Great Eastern Mills” in Nassau county had a big grocery store section and a big section that would be like Target today. Not in a mall, though.
That’s true in the US (for the most part) but not in other parts of the world. It’s common for malls in Canada to have grocery stores, even upscale malls. Conversely, it’s common for department stores in Europe and Asia to have large, well-stocked food departments.
It’s still woefully behind on an awful lot of the entries.
I know what you were talking about. My point is a little different. If I go to Roosevelt Field to shop at Macy’s, I’m likely to also stop into a shoe store, Godiva, Bath and Bodyworks , Sephora etc, even if I hadn’t planned to go to those stores and even though Macy’s sells shoes and makeup and shower gel and probably even chocolates. Macy’s did its job as an anchor store- it got me to the mall and I also shopped at other stores. I might even have lunch or dinner at one of the restaurants. But part of the reason people do that at malls is because they are not leaving their destination store (Macy’s in my example) with a full shopping cart.
Target and other discount/big box stores don’t really function that way, even when they are in enclosed malls. There’s a Target in an enclosed mall near me ( used to be a Macy’s as a matter of fact). There are other,smaller stores in that mall, but I don’t even know what they are- because when I’m finished at my destination store ( Target in this example ) I would have to either push the full shopping cart around the rest of the mall or go to my car, unload and then return to the mall. And I never choose to go to the car and come back just in case I might see something I want in one of the other stores.
We had a Target in our mall, which closed and moved to another location. It began before groceries, so I never saw anyone push a full shopping cart in or around it. It had some groceries, not many.
The old department store (like Macys in Herald Square or lots of Philadelphia stores) were set up so that you could leave with full bags and never go to those other mall stores. But they were considerably bigger than department stores today, with many more floors.
People buying clothes or small electronics or music at Target would often go to other parts of the mall, I did. Grocery stores are usually the last stop on a shopping trip, because of the nature of what you buy there, That’s true even in strip malls.
I don’t know about the Philadelphia stores, but Macy’s in Herald Square isn’t in a mall- it’s free-standing store that takes up nearly the entire block.And Macy’s absolutely draws people to the area who then also check out the stores across the street and on the next block.
Sure, if you’re buying a couple of items you might. I don’t see many people doing that at Target.
I wasn’t talking about buying groceries ( I don’t grocery shop in Target-not much of a grocery selection around here)- but even so, groceries/Target/Walmart are certainly going to be the last stop. That’s my point- if the purpose of the trip is to go to Target, Target is likely to be the first ,last and only stop.
in the Atlanta area it felt like the malls followed the suburbs - the close-in suburbs got malls in the 70s and 80s, and as sprawl moved outwards from the city, the malls started getting further and further out. The inner malls either adapted with makeovers and new tenants, or died.
Cobb Center Mall started from a Rich’s and added lots of tenants, a movie theater, child care, and an inner courtyard arboretum. I know at least one Halloween it was given over to trick or treaters so the kids could get candy without having to walk the scary streets of Cobb County (eye roll). It died a slow, strangled death and eventually the whole thing was knocked down, except for the Rich’s (which by that time was a Macy’s).
The former ‘prestige’ mall, the Galleria, is now mostly a convention center, home to corporate functions, baby shows, and an anime convention, which in three days provides the bulk of the revenue for most of the surviving food court vendors, I believe. Those kids like to eat.
And yet, virtually every “fun” event is scheduled around them. It drives me nuts, having spent the last 31 years in the restaurant business. If I’m working the dinner shift, then I’m working when these events are going on, and if I’m working the breakfast shift, these events all run too late because I need to be to bed by 8PM or so. And what’s that? Weekends off? HA!
We have two malls in my “town” (I put that in quotes because my actual town, Wenatchee, WA, is on the West bank of the Columbia River, in Chelan County, while East Wenatchee is across the river in Douglas County. When I moved here in 1983, there was the “Valley North Mall” here in Wenatchee, and the “Wenatchee Valley Mall” in East Wenatchee.
The Valley North Mall started out, apparently, as the “Valley North Shopping Center” in the mid-1960s. I’ve only seen a couple old photos, but I think it may have begun life as an open-air collection of stores, and was then enclosed some time in the 1970s. The Wenatchee Valley Mall, OTOH, was built not long before I moved here, and was enclosed from the get-go. The physical difference between the two was dramatic. Valley North Mall still had that '60s/'70s look, while the Wenatchee Valley Mall was quite modern.
Both malls contained a Kinney Shoe Store, and I worked for six months or so at the Valley North location. Our district manager was constantly riding my store manager’s ass because his store sales numbers weren’t nearly as good as the sales numbers at the store in the other mall. In six months, I never once laid eyes on the district manager, and I was convinced that he’d never actually set foot in either store. Because if he had, he would have understood why our store’s numbers were lower: You can’t sell shoes to people who aren’t there. The other mall also didn’t have a Volume Shoe Source selling cheap plastic shoes two doors down from the Kinney store.
The Valley North Mall slowly declined, while the Wenatchee Valley Mall just got bigger. Eventually, the management of Valley North got their act together. They gutted the “mall” portion between the two anchor stores, and converted the numerous small spaces into fewer, larger spaces, and all of the new spaces open to the outside and face the same direction - there is no more “inside” mall area. So it’s more like a large strip mall now. They also renamed the place “Valley North Center”, hearkening back to the original name.