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Comment by gbear605 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about in Germany, but the huge malls are going the way of the dodo in the US.

I briefly worked for a retail company a couple years ago that was getting amazing sweetheart deals on short-term leases in malls because the mall owners almost literally could not give away the space. They are desperate to host just about anything in order to make their mall look less like a ghost town.

People say this, but both of the malls I've been to in the past few years (one in Bellevue, WA and one in Chandler, AZ) have been completely packed almost every time. Is it really still true that malls are going away?

I believe it’s actually the smaller malls and malls near smaller towns that are dying from oversupply. The giant warehouse style stripmalls have hurt the small malls in the exurbs. Big malls in big cities seem to still be expanding.

A-class malls are still doing well. The mall you're referring to in Bellevue, where I have also been, is a class-A mall.

Class-A malls tend to be in busier, higher wealth, sometimes more urban areas, have best in class furnishings, and have tier-1 national tenants, with many of those tenants catering to more of a premium/luxury consumer.

Most B-class or C-class malls, however, are dying.

Berlin just opened its 61st mall (all in the order of 20+ shops) a few month back, so at least in the centre they are going strong.

I read in the economist the US has nine times the square footage of shopping malls compared to the UK.

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