I have no idea what FDS is but other than that, Snnipe 70E is correct about the presence of shopping cart conveyors in two-story big-box stores. The Wikipedia article shows the device in a Target store in Nashua, NH and a Google search indicates that there are two-story Target stores elsewhere in the country as well.
This is another Wikipedia article, this time about Vermaport, a brand of shopping cart conveyor. The article mentions that the devices are in use in Kmart, Target, Publix, Bed Bath and Beyond, and IKEA stores.
Federated Department Stores.
Used to be a lot easier to figure out in the days when each city had several local department store chains. Today, with a few national players, and a few remaining regionals, it’s much more difficult.
I’d guess Von Maur, but as an earlier poster wrote, they already have plans for their local store.
Being a 150K metro, an upscale chain (Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks) is unlikely.
Big box stores are still uncommon in malls in the United States. Target will occasionally be an anchor in a smaller metro or a second-tier mall. Target has some two-story stores; I used to frequent one in University Heights, Ohio.
See my post one above. FDS= Federated Department Stores. Blooming Dales, Macy’s mainly.
I agree that this is normally true, but I know of a case in which the store separated its household items from the clothing right from the beginning and it’s kept that way even after the chain changed hands.
South Coast Plaza has several stores over 200,000 sq. ft. and three separate Macy’s locations.
Most stores in malls are aimed at women. There are far fewer male-oriented stores and studies have shown that men generally don’t like having to deal with giant mall stores to find menswear. That fits the pattern shown here. Men would want a separate men’s store and are also likely to find furniture and appliances interesting. In a super-large mall like South Coast that attracts 24,000,000 visitors a year, Macy’s can afford to split those off from the main store.
And it’s Bloomingdale’s. One word.
My first guesses are:
Cabela’s - isn’t there a Bass Pro Shop not that far away?
IKEA - I believe Chicago and Minneapolis are the closest IKEA’s to Coral Ridge.
Isn’t 200,000 square feet too small for an IKEA store? And do they build stores in existing buildings? I would think their system needs custom buildings.
I’d agree that something like Macy’s or Cabelas are the right market. Target and even Walmart might have a handful of two story stores, but how many of those were existing buildings ? I mean, in a really urban area or moving into an existing building at a price you can’t refuse, sure, but either to build or expand an existing one story building to two stories in an area like that ? Highly doubtful, IMO.
There is not even one Cabela’s in Iowa yet and they like to have a minimum of 100,000 sq ft.
I think their system needs translation out of Swedish.
Is Cabela’s common in malls? The only two I am familiar with (in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin and Owatonna, Minnnesota) are free-standing buildings.
Could be a Dick’s. Along with the two-story WalMart, the mall across the road has a two-story Dick’s. Not sure what the actual square footage is.
Both the anchor stays at the local 2-story mall have mens’ & womens’ clothing on the first floor (along with accesories & makeup) and stick everything else upstairs.
Malls of this type and vintage, facing declining sales and short one anchor, sometimes try a Hail Mary pass with an outward facing megastore, such as Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shop, or Dick’s. That’s my bet.
I’m only aware of one IKEA attached to a mall in the US. Beautiful downtown Burbank made them a deal they couldn’t refuse.
Mall design is an art that caters to its particular situation. For this thread the overriding factor is that men don’t like to hunt through stores for their stuff.
Therefore, in a one-level mall with anchor stores having a second story, both the men’s and women’s fashions will normally be on the first floor, with special destination items like appliances and furniture on the second level. The menswear section will be adjacent (or very close to) either a mall entrance or a parking entrance or, ideally, both.
Malls designed around two full levels (except for a few early ones) will pitch their parking so that entrance into the mall is on level two on one side and on level one on the other side. Why? Because they found out that the second level in a single access mall inevitably gets a much lower traffic volume. You might think that people would automatically go up, but they just don’t. Enough will stay on the level they came in on to affect sales greatly. Anyway, two-level stores in this situation can split off their menswear and place it where they think it’s the most convenient and direct access, so it might be on a different level.
A number of malls, especially in the east where land prices are high and space limited, will have three-level anchor stores. These tend to be a mixture of the types, since parking is still normally at only two levels. But menswear will have its own level, so it will be accessible from both the mall and parking.
Then you have the anomalies. The Standford Town Center is in downtown Stamford, so it has no surrounding parking, only a parking garage. But the mall is ten levels high. (It was the setting for Scenes from a Mall.) You can take the elevators directly to almost any level, so access is less of an issue. (Almost because the top levels are partial and reached by escalators.)
There are a million other tricks that mall designers play to get people going past the highest profit areas or to their destinations or to a group of stores selling similar items or to a similar demographic. Men are the easiest ones to capture, assuming you can get them to the mall in the first place.
First sentence, in spades. Malls are simply the biggest Skinner boxes in existence.
The Macy’s I was referring to was divided basically into a Women’s store - all clothing, shoes, makeup, accessories - and Men’s - Children - Home, with all the men’s clothing on the first floor.
I found it hilarious that in the last year or so we were there they moved Children’s back to the Women’s store, and the brass letters outside the other one simply read Men’s Home.
At an ICSC conference, IKEA reps told elected officials from Buffalo that they would never open a store anywhere in upstate New York, ever; Buffalo, Rochester, or Syracuse. IKEA has no plans for new stores in the Cleveland, St. Louis, San Antonio, or Kansas City areas. Why would they consider a location in Cedar Rapids, of all places?
IKEA has much higher population thresholds for new stores in the US than for Canada or Europe. In Canada, IKEA has a store in Winnipeg. In the US, they’d never consider a location in a metro with a population of only 800K, much less someplace with a million and a half residents.
In the States, IKEA isn’t into adaptive reuse. They want a site where they can build a freestanding building, next to an Interstate highway exit, in a community with lenient or no architectural standards in their zoning regulations. It’s one reason why it took so long for an IKEA to land in the Denver area; its suburbs have some of th strictest architectural standards in the country, and many were’t willing to budge.
It took awhile for Orlando to get one as well, although perhaps for a different reason from Denver: the population is so dispersed that you need a pretty wide radius to hit the million and a half threshold, although most of them are close to an grade separated highway but with still a lot of building space next to them.
Not too big. I’ve seen Dick’s stores with as little as 50,000’[sup]2[/sup] GFA. Same thing with Gander Mountain.
Bass Pro and Cabela’s will want room for RV parking, dog runs, and some outdoor storage. Their stores usually have a much larger footprint on the ground (200,000’[sup]2[/sup] or more) than a typical department store anchor in a mid-sized market ( 50,000’[sup]2[/sup]-75,000’[sup]2[/sup] footprint, 100,000’[sup]2[/sup]-150,000’[sup]2[/sup] GFA).
Bass Pro and Cabela’s also try to extract tax breaks from their host communities. They won’t simply open a store without months or years of drama.