Howard Davidowitz is a retail consultant and analyst who was quoted above (“What’s going on is the customers don’t have the fucking money.”). He's awesome at breaking down what's wrong with retail and telling it honestly and efficiently. Listen to his stuff sometime (link above is a recent interview about Amazon). When he's on fire...watch out. Jump to 15:00 for an example.
Its a standard trope to never discuss security theater and teens as a threat at the mall, but anyone here between the ages of maybe 30 and 50 has surely been harassed by security as a teen and made to feel VERY unwelcome at their local mall.
Oddly enough 20/30 years later I have fat stacks of cash and when I spend them I remember how I was treated at the mall, and never, ever return. And I was a relatively conformist non-minority appearing kid well spoken perfect English (edited: better than I write when I'm tired, LOL) and well groomed, god only knows what the minorities and punks had to go thru at malls in the 80s.
The hilariously blunt yet accurate quote in the article about not having money is also accurate. A good computer analogy is DEC digital equipment corporation was in a perfect position to own the microcomputer market in the 70s/80s but they couldn't understand the market price collapse. The same thing happening in retail with the demise of the middle class. You can sell plenty of $200 sweaters to $75K/yr machinists in 1984 at the mall, but you can't sell $200 sweaters to $8.25/hr temp workers in 2014.
In the 80s? Its gotten MUCH worse since. All the malls i went to growing up now have mall cops standing at the door IDing people who look younger than 50 and won't let people under 18 in without a parent or guardian. Kid you not! This all started about ten years ago. I just... its absurd.
Meh. Around here, at least, (Huntsville, Alabama) they're just making newer and different malls. They're still malls though.
When I first moved here in 2005, the bigger of the two malls in town (Madison Square Mall) had just received a major renovation and was bustling. A few years later (I think this was about 2007) they announced this new major construction project called Bridge Street[0]. It was just about two miles away from Madison Square.
It was essentially an outdoor mall, with all the same stores you would expect to find in any mall. Just outside. Within the last six years, pretty much all the stores that were at Madison Square Mall have relocated to Bridge Street. In fact, Bridge Street just underwent a big expansion so that one of the department stores at Madison Square could move in.
These days, everyone goes to Bridge Street, and Madison Square Mall is mostly empty except for check cashing places, blacklight golf places, and, strangely, a Sears that just hasn't moved yet - which is pretty much the only reason I even go to Madison Square any more at all. There may be one other department store there hanging on too. But other than that it's mostly empty. The escalators were even turned off when I went in there a few weeks ago.
Madison Square Mall was built in the mid 80s, and started going down hill after about 20 years. The other mall in town was built in the late 90s and is still doing "mostly okay" but you can tell Bridge Street hurt them some too. So I figure it's only a matter of time before Bridge Street starts to go down hill and all those same stores move on to whatever the next trend in shopping is.
And, just like Madison Square, leaving a blighted landscape of mostly or completely abandoned buildings in their wake.
They're still building malls. Just calling them different things - "lifestyle centers," "outdoor entertainment complexes," etc. But they're still malls.
What I don't get about these outdoor malls, is what happens during winter time compared to an indoor mall? A big appeal of indoor malls in rainy and cold places is that you don't have to deal with the cold and the rain in those malls.
There's one of those outdoor malls in Seattle, next to the University of Washington. Yes, Seattle, where there's nice summer weather for about 2 months a year. I genuinely don't understand it.
We have Bridgeport Village, the same situation in Tigard/Tualatin Oregon. Makes no sense to me either.
It's nearby, so I go there on occasion because they have a movie theater and an Apple store. But I'd much prefer an indoor mall for about 9 months of the year.
The next steps is to tear down the old mall, and replace it with an "inverted mall." Big box stores on the edges of the property, and parking in the middle.
So what I can't figure out is if the new outdoor malls are just a fad, or if they represent a different shift in retail planning that will stick around for a long time. I will admit that I like the outdoor ones that have multiple avenues built in for wandering around, and it feels like the shops are more substantial then mall stores.
The article mentions that when an anchor leaves a raditional mall, the disease spreads, are outdoor malls immune to this effect?
The industry will be moving from the lifestyle format to the outlet format almost exclusively over the next 20 years.
The C malls referred to in the article are just that, C malls. Malls that may have been B malls in the past but have depreciated to a point where scrape and rebuild or relo are the only options.
There are currently about 50 new malls/outlets on the books for this year and next with another 50 on the following 2 years nation wide.
Outdoor shopping centers and multiple seller under one roof centers have both been in use for millenia, neither is exactly a passing fad.
But I think large enclosed malls have greater construction, maintenance, and operating expenses, so if people aren't willing to pay a premium for the experience they provide, they won't thrive.
In the Bay Area, there's such an outside mall in Emeryville (east bay, right next to Oakland). There's ikea, a movie theater, uniqlo, and an H&M, along with many other restaurants and stores I don't go to. It even has a Barnes and Noble! (I thought they had all disappeared)
Yeah, this place is a lot like that. Movie Theater (actually the nicest theater in town) with a sushi bar in it, H&M, Barnes and Noble, etc. We're too small for an IKEA (the closest one's in Atlanta).
Yeah same thing down in Bham. The indoor malls are becoming derelict, with the use of the word "mall" reverting to an original meaning, like an outdoor area that happens to include sidewalk stores.
You've got places like The Summit and The Pinnacle which are basically just scaled-up strip malls. Then there's places like The Shopes at Grand River (is that what it's called??? the place in Leeds)that really ought to just be enclosed as they're designed just like the malls of old.
It'll happen soon. Sears just announced the selling of 200 to 300 stores to a REIT, which will own the property and lease it back to the retail stores. This is pretty much how Sears will die.
Imagine an indoor mini-golf course, but under black lights. With everything glowing strange neon colors. One section of it is in a different room, with no lights except a flashing strobe.
The trend has certainly been toward more "outdoor" style malls, like Santana Row here in the SF Bay Area or the Shops at Wiregrass in my former home of Tampa. But I suspect there are a couple major factors in the Dead Mall phenomenon that this article doesn't really touch on.
First, whenever a region is seriously overbuilding residential space they're usually also seriously overbuilding retail space. In Florida, the overbuilding of retail seemed to come first in some instances. When the retail spaces are big shopping centers, there's an awfully good chance they're going to start cannibalizing one another. The worst case scenario -- which I saw happen in Florida more than once -- isn't that all the customers leave Mall A for Mall B, but that the customers are split between Mall A and Mall B and neither mall ends up successful.
Second, it doesn't seem to me that "anchor tenants" are as important now as they once were, and the malls that are most in trouble are the ones that were organized with the assumption you were really there to go Macy's or Nordstrom's and the other stores would survive on your impulse buys as you walked between the department stores and the parking lot. Santana Row here -- and to some degree Tampa's International Plaza, which is a mix of indoor and outdoor -- have fashioned themselves less as shopping destinations than entertainment destinations. The best way to avoid having a dead zone around a closed department store is to not have -- or need -- a department store.
Urban planners have been predicting the demise of malls for years. 10 years ago James Kunstler gave a hilarious, biting talk on "the ghastly tragedy of the suburbs" in which he suggests some great ways of repurposing them for urbanization. It's a fantastic video: http://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_subu...
Its interesting to see this cycle in the Mall of America. The upper fourth floor was non-stop through the late 90's and into 2001 or so. Then the whole floor died, suddenly.
Of the seven or so bars, they all went under within a few years of 2000 and the whole floor has been more or less completely dead for almost a decade now. Planet Hollywood pulling out in 2003 was the last death knell for the floor. Only Hooters survived the mass extinction.
These days, more bars are opening, but its not the same. There's a Corona Catina which took over the vacated Fat Tuesday's (which was shut down after repeated warnings from the city went unheeded) and Knuckleheads Comedy club. There's a smaller comedy club which took over the Gator's nightclub spot, but it's half the size of the original club. There's some new restaurant where Planet Hollywood used to be. Hooters is still kickin, but the rest of the bars (still 3-4 spots) are completely vacant.
It's an interesting dichotomy since the majority of the rest of the mall is still doing very well. Camp Snoopy has been renamed twice now, but is still super busy on the weekends. The rest of the floors during the holidays are flooded with eager shoppers. And yet, the fourth floor is like an attic nobody wants to go to anymore. I think its partly due to the newer, hipster bars opening in other parts of town which have drawn a lot of the suburbanites away. Also, a lot of the college kids who used to live in the area, are now moving to second and third ring suburbs now.
Ah the Collin Creek Mall, in which City of Plano was planning to sink a ton of money for renewing or rehabbing it. I live few miles away from Collin Creek, and the author is giving the most accurate picture possible. It is a dead mall, and there are many reasons for it including accessibility from the highway (US-75), shift of the center of wealth to mostly West and North of Plano, away from Collin Creek area. All in all DFW is over-saturated with malls but they are still building malls because of the North-ward expansion near Plano area. Trust me a movie theater is not going to save this mall.
For now the Mall is collecting some checks from the City and Management which claim to protect jobs and sales tax base. When they run out of that trick, it may very well close. At one point they were talking about sinking $75 million into some project around collin creek.
The only problem is that there are two other malls for residents of Plano to go to, Stonebriar and Willow Bend, and they are both doing just fine. The "outdoor malls" of Firecreek and the Shops at Legacy are also doing well. Insofar as Plano is concerned, it is only Collin Creek that is suffering.
So TFA is being slightly hyperbolic. There are many malls who have done poorly, and the mall at the heart of the article is one of them. But there are also many malls who have done quite well. It doesn't speak about those.
This mall is right by my house. It is on life support and it's been known about for years. The article is right that Dallas suburbs have a lot of options for shoppers with new multi-use development sites popping up on every major intersection. Curious the article writer made no mention of online sales and their effect of department stores.
They just let many of these malls die, mainly because it wasn't a destination anymore.
They could have made them into co-working spaces, training centers, anchor stores that close into mini convention halls, arcades, learning centers, places to meet clients, part of it into a skate park, pools, community sports, basketball courts, awesome indoor gardens, concert areas, bar row, just something. They did not try to change enough.
It seems like they tried to get people out of the malls when that was their magic, they were yes pre-internet but you could still bring the business side in. That alone would have kept food courts alive longer, maybe changed the game in part or half of a mall. But it is a depressing thing to go into a mall with even one anchor store gone because it is just a matter of time. Part of the problem is they were a unit, when there was only a few closed stores the mall felt depressing. They rode that dead model to the end.
I've seen a lot of those types of things move into dying malls. Seen office spaces, gyms, a radio station, a brewpub, and a for profit college move into dying malls. Doesn't seem to help too much, i don't know why.
Yes, precisely. But this is what we're building these days. It's not gated, it's open to the street, but it's not a public plaza either. There is even something in their agreement with the city that they can't filter people out.
They were tried in many US cities in the 1970s. And very very few of them succeeded. Most of them ended up looking like the abandoned sets for some bad sci-fi film.
The one I'm most familiar with is Raleigh's Fayetteville St. area. It was renovated a few years ago to go back to a street + sidewalk configuration, and has really had a renaissance, with nightlife and people living downtown.
Compare to the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall on the SF peninsula. Parking is difficult when the weather is nice, and sometimes even when it's not.
It's a nice place to walk around outdoors and designed to be pedestrian-friendly (once you park, of course).
By comparison, I went to the Hillsdale Shopping Center a few months ago on a weekday around noon, and the Sears lot was near-deserted: I saw about six cars in it. The food court was also empty and depressing. I don't think the difference is primarily the neighborhoods: both are on El Camino and in upscale areas (Palo Alto is expensive, sure, but Hillsdale serves San Mateo, San Carlos, Burlingame, and Hillsborough, which aren't cheap).
I think the difference is the mall itself: Hillsdale is a traditional massive indoor mall of the sort that this article describes, and Stanford is a better-designed outdoor mall, with segments split up, that's just nicer to walk around.
My town just built a "Premium Outlet Mall." I was dubious of the wisdom of that plan, but I just visited it last weekend, and it seems to be pretty popular, even with the Mall of America just minutes away, and with Internet shopping available at the swipe of a smartphone or the click of a mouse. It's not an indoor mall, which I also find curious, here in the Land of 10,000 Snows, but it does have a free indoor parking garage just across the street. The projections are that the outlet mall is going to siphon off about 4% of the take this holiday season. (The article I read was pretty vague as to what size pie that was 4% of, to my chagrin.)
Interesting thing about the Eagan outlets is that there are non-outlet stores mixed in. I also found the outlet prices to be above that of other outlets (north of the cities). With that location I guess they don't need to be that cheap.
I didn't realize there were non-outlets there. The prices are strange--I've bought a handful of items, and they were all stickered at or below nearby retail, but when they rang them up, the actual price was even lower. While I love to get a deal, I prefer to know what the deal is before I hit the register. Anyway, that should be a good location, easy access from three interstates and a couple major trunk highways, but then, that's where Cedarvale was, and that died a slow painful death too.
It certainly is the trend here in New England, where winters are reasonably harsh. And the new outdoor malls aren't very walkable, either. They're separate stores, or sometimes chunks of stores, that you almost have to drive between. With an Olive Garden or an Applebee's in the middle of the parking lot.
I see those in California too. I really don't understand the phenomenon; my best guess is that there is some sort of incentive from the developers or city zoning for shops to open there, but nothing as cohesive as an actual mall.
I've been to the mall in the article. It once was the destination, and short of specific stores (like Apple), people aren't interested. In Houston, there's quite a few dying malls, but there's also some that are still thriving. For instance, The Woodlands Mall, which is in the midst of an area with an outdoor ampitheatre and upscale outdoors shopping.
> As these old malls die off, they’re being replaced more and more by upscale, outdoor shopping centers...
Well, and the internet.
I wonder if it'd be viable to turn these giant chunks of real estate into some kind of entertainment venue for a while. I'd play paintball in a dead mall, or race go karts around in one.
There's got to be something worth doing in that giant space.
http://deadmalls.com/
Dead Malls has been cataloging dead malls for a long time now. Lots of great descriptions and pictures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba1s3VG8yFU
Howard Davidowitz is a retail consultant and analyst who was quoted above (“What’s going on is the customers don’t have the fucking money.”). He's awesome at breaking down what's wrong with retail and telling it honestly and efficiently. Listen to his stuff sometime (link above is a recent interview about Amazon). When he's on fire...watch out. Jump to 15:00 for an example.