The reason the local mall is failing (2018)
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
Boutique stores worked downtown because there was no better option, not because it was great. Who wants to drive downtown to get shoes or a tie? Going in and out of building after building, dealing with traffic, trying to keep your packages out of the rain, etc. sucks.
Malls took over because you could socialize, you were out of the elements, there was a mix of attractions and shopping, it was comfortable and safe to walk everywhere. You also didn't have to deal with driving in and out of downtown, they were almost always right off of some major highway.
But malls aren't great either. There’s been zero innovation in the business model since the beginning. Relative to the Internet, the selection sucks, prices suck and the logistics suck. Shopping is an event rather than an impulse. Back when you could download your entire Amazon order history, my chart of orders and spending nearly had an expoential curve in it from 2006 to 2018 as the superior (to me) experience gradually drained my business away from brick and mortar.
And guess what's back? Boutique shops. My daughter opened up an Etsy store when she was 14 and has sold custom sculptures and stickers to people all over the world. No way she could have done that downtown or in the local mall.
My Amazon orders have dropped precipitously and I’m trying to get my girlfriend to stop ordering from there as well. I’ve gotten too many obvious someone-else’s-returns and fake items. Amazon has always been mostly okay with returns. (Once they wanted to charge me for a low value item I had them reship when their system said it was delivered but it wasn’t, but otherwise refunds and returns have been no problem.)
I find myself going to brick-and-mortar stores more often lately, especially since they seem to have gotten curbside pickup down. Otherwise o tend to go straight to the manufacturer when possible.
This just recently happened to me. Ordered from a 3rd party on Newegg. It ended up getting delivered somewhere in Wichita, Kansas. I live in Florida.
You could do that?
And now you can't?
(otoh maybe I don't want to know)
Technically you can still get the data but it’s through a manual request process.
100 times this. People really romanticize "mom and dad shops", forgetting many of their issues - often limited/no selection of large/tall/petite clothes, worse/non-existing return policies and often lack of parking space/restrooms.
I had a hard time understanding the meaning of this sentence, and its context. The idea of "driving downtown to go shopping" is backwards to me. You live downtown, and walk a few meters to the shop.
Then I realized that you may be from the USA, where your cities seem to be turned inside out. You are indeed a funny country.
Both, really. From all the people I know, there's only one person who cannot walk from his place to a nearby bakery. And in that case it was a conscious decision to "become isolated" and buy a house in an unlikely place. Walking every morning to buy bread for breakfast is a deeply entrenched cultural thing. I cannot really imagine living somewhere where this is not possible. Most of urbanized places are indeed downtown.
Sadly, bakeries in America are rare. Your daily bread comes from the supermarket. Much of it isn't baked on site, and it's designed to keep for several days. We don't have a tradition of daily fresh bread, which is too bad for a lot of reasons.
But Americans have plenty of food options so don't weep too much for us. If you want decent bread, it's available in many places, including many of those supermarkets and chain bakeries like Panera. It's not magnificent bread, but it's good. Magnificent bread is also available; it's just not a priority.
Americans do have a pretty dysfunctional relationship with food, and we'd be a lot healthier if we fixed it. But the mall isn't really part of that. That's more about the supermarket than the mall, and those are separate niches.
US cities, at least the ones where downtown has turned around, have a donut-shaped wealth distribution; rich downtown, blighted inner-city and inner-ring, outer wealthy suburbs.
in the UK, town centre development has been hindered particularly by the effects of having caused a diverse small business and retail environment to grow around central developments, whose owners have fiercely opposed any disruption that could be created by heavy works, regardless of the importance to their ultimate survival.
consider where the central mall provides the only large scale car parking availability for the surrounding areas, like in my home town and the situation in Windsor afaict whenever I visit, which has a large town centre retail district without any suitable parking for the sprawl of retailers outward from the centre complexes.
edit splitting to avoid confusion after accidentally posting early :
concluding without the argument I originally intended, I suspect that the data is so poorly collected and used that we could very likely find many new ways to revitalise our town centers getting plenty of sensible fresh investment to pursue models we've been simply overlooking
That’s incredible! The mall near me that has all of that requires a few thousand meters of storefronts in 5-6 buildings just to pack all of that in.
Where is this place?
Exactly. Most small towns in the suburbs of Paris are just like that if you live within 1km of the center.
EDIT: It's nothing particular to France either. If you go to any city with more than, say, 20.000 or 30.000 inhabitants in western Europe (at least the countries that I know), it will be quite similar.
EDIT: no need to take a plane... if you need some proof, look at this google maps/street view link: https://goo.gl/maps/iDirDFH16d8xMvwx9 All the things that you mention on your "snarky" message can be indeed found on the couple of pedestrian streets that you see here. Except for the cinema, but there is a theatre (now closed due to covid). If you want a cinema you need to walk less than 2km to the one in the next town.
I love those little towns and have dreamed of retiring to one. (One thing I need to figure out how to say in French is "How is the Internet there?"... though I suppose these days I could even get one of those nearly-dead little villages they sell so cheaply and bring a Starlink.)
I think the distance between rural towns is generally more like 5-10km each direction in the parts of the US I am familiar with. 2km through a densely populated urban area is very different from 10km through the countryside too.
So for most people in the area, going anywhere besides a recreational walk, requires getting in a car.
I don't believe this situation is unique to United States with regards to similar towns.
It’s a really sad story that’s helped make the poor even poorer.
You can learn more about it here:
- https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-f...
- https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2018/03/white-fligh...
- https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/redlining-what-is-history-mike-...
You're already failing with this logic.
The funny thing is, the city government is talking about expanding the zones and make the whole town centre pedestrian only and the businesses are protesting with the same arguments as 20 years ago.
Really, south of Central Park, the parking rates alone are so expensive I wouldn’t bother driving in. Monthly rates in a garage are easily $300-500.
Perhaps there are reasons it wouldn't work, or is a bad idea. Perhaps I was enamored with the idea of rolling out of bed and getting Chick Fil A or Cinnabon in my pajamas.
The problem with doing this with malls is you have minimum quality requirements for residences. Daylight requirements are a particular concern -- you can sell corners and edges, but you're left with a big space in the middle you can't use, unless you're willing to make the corner apartments expand that far. Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM). The real wins here would be in splitting apart the stores and putting housing above each one, and replacing "destination" shopping with neighborhood shopping.
If I could have a condo that was as quiet and accessible as a house (buying groceries, whether in person or by delivery, was a huge hassle in my SF apartment), with a "backyard" I could reserve for an hour or two of total quiet and privacy, I'd take that over a detached house. But my experience so far in two separate tower buildings was noise, a lack of mutual respect in amenity spaces, frequently breaking elevators, and overcrowding.
Or, since you're talking about the top floor, use skylights. You could even make it the top two floors, but each center unit is on both floors and has a "basement" without natural light.
> Once you start doing that, the condo costs comparable to detached houses, and there you lose out to The American Dream(TM).
Prices are set by supply and demand. If people like something else better then the price is lower. It's hardly going to be lower than the construction cost.
The real thing preventing things like this is that it's all too often prohibited by zoning for no good reason.
However retrofitting onto many of the 80s-90s era malls with huge floorplans is unlikely to be economically feasible.
Suppose you have a giant square floor plan, and housing units like this:
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Another zoning concern is that there is generally a rule like “every area of apartment must be within 30 feet of door/window to outside”. So if you create these deep cavernous apartments you won’t be able to meet this rule either.
For example in NYC, every room needs two forms of egress. Bedrooms this is the windows + door back to rest of your apartment. Living areas this is windows + door out to common hallway. It is illegal to create a room that has only 1 exit/entrance.
The concept here is that in the event of a fire if your 1 & only exit is blocked you are dead.
Similar rules apply to why in most jurisdictions you cannot legally finish off your basement unless it has sufficient exits directly to outside / windows big enough for a firefighter in full gear to fit through. This limits many existing basements for conversion depending on their depth as its hard to retrofit these into existing foundations..
It’s probably a model that will be replicated across the US if the urbanization trends continue.
I found this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/americas-first-shopping-mall...
Here, it appears people were grasping at straws to save a historically important building situated in a fairly convenient spot of a decent size city. So somebody invested $10 million to do this renovation, creating a whopping 48 apartments, many of which are 225 square feet!
Change the configuration file to location=outskirts and mall=half_abandoned_piece_of_shit and I shudder thinking of the business model that would support this at scale.
Whatever that would be, Cinnabon seems about the right smell for it.
An interesting innovation, by my uncle who runs a healthcare group, was converting disused malls into hospitals. The unused central atria works well since hospitals need that airy feel, and apparently it's cheaper to refurbish a mall into a hospital than build one from scratch (mostly because malls tend to be distressed properties today, which you can pick up for pennies on the dollar). He's currently focusing on expanding in ex-London cities in the UK.
You are a few steps away to rediscovering the European city (if by an extremely convoluted way).
But mixed use development is becoming more common in the US. I know of 2 or 3 mixed use developments that have opened up around my city.
> What was new about it was that it was an entirely enclosed system of shops with no exterior windows and a climate-controlled interior. This was a particularly good fit for Minnesota with its cold winters. Until then, shops in malls and arcades were connected by outside walkways. This new design was on two levels, had a department store at each end, and escalators to bring shoppers up to the second level and down again when they’d completed walking the mall. And it had a central court with skylights, fountains, plants and seating.
> Gruen was inspired by centrally planned urban re-development in his hometown of Vienna, Austria, that took place there after the democratic uprisings in 1848.
https://msourceideas.com/the-origin-story-of-the-enclosed-sh...
This is fascinating. Do you have a source? It is a prominent example of cargo culting in a "civilized" country.
Problem is, retail space demand is in a death spiral as shopping moves to the online giants. People shift to using local retailers primarily for looking, trying on, or stealing from.
I don't think there is enough population to support a profitable REI in an age where you can order everything it sells for cheaper elsewhere.
Also the mall space is including parking lots and the 9 blocks have parking somewhere but not in those 9 blocks.
Well, downtown have something going for it if it's valuable. Land that are of low value aren't exactly prime estate.
Also the mall space is including parking lots and the 9 blocks have parking somewhere but not in those 9 blocks.
Why would that in itself be valuable use of lands? Remember, even the roads are a land use choice.
I think it would be an accurate comparison if those 9 blocks were replaced by a mall, but this seems like apples to oranges if the goal is to see which brings in more tax revenue to the community.
I suppose sales tax would be really important too.
??? It depends entirely on the location of the parking lot.
The land value of a downtown parking lot which is the same size as a high-rise building lot next door is going to be similar. Obviously the high-rise is worth more money since there’s a building with leasable space, but the land value of both lots will be very close. A parking lot doesn’t need to remain a parking lot forever, you could borrow money and build a building on it.
It doesn’t factor in the parking lots needed to support the 9 blocks of downtown.
So the level of spatial resolution seems off to make an accurate comparison.
It seems to me the point was “downtown shopping is better for tax base than malls” and shows the tax for those two areas. But my not including the parking needed for downtown those aren’t really comparable areas in that there is additional space needed to support the downtown area.
But the bigger area is comparing downtown to whatever land was turned into a mall since I’m not aware of any malls that were literally used to replace town squares. In the small to middle towns I’m familiar with the mall was built away from the center of town frequently on farmland or similar empty space.
There was an interesting scene in the movie where a small town was getting a new walmart, and they drove around downtown.
They pointed at each of the stores and assigned values like "6 months" or "3 months" as an estimate of survival after they lost all their business to walmart.
Another wave of change has been moving in slow motion for years with online purchases and local stores, but the pandemic has been a tsunami in comparison.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart:_The_High_Cost_of_Low...
In a world with a livable minimum wage, I imagine Wal-Mart would have less of a captive consumer base.
It's not like they're doing this in a snidely whiplash scheme-y sort of way but they are still doing it, and they're not unaware of or innocent in the effect they have.
https://www.reuters.com/article/mexico-walmex-idUSN054659132...
But I think people get into a cognitive dissonance trap when they try to think of the people who are selling them cheap chicken legs as literally evil, when they can only imagine people doing things like engaging in slavery or wage suppression or whatever as things only people who wake up every morning going "How can I be evil today, I'm bored of tying people to train tracks!"
But nope. That's that guy you met at the last Startup Weekend event doing that. He seemed nice and you had a drink with him. He's a real person with a family and he made his money off diamond mining or selling the work of 8 year olds, and now he's a VC.
Just because I have money to burn doesn't mean I want to burn it overpaying for basic things.
Not that you're obligated to spend your money differently than you do. But this speaks to the country's yawning divide between red/blue that some of us choose to spend supporting local economies, buying ethically sourced goods, and generally trying to reduce the negative externalities of our lives. Meanwhile, other people don't want to worry about that, which is fair, but I don't know how culturally sustainable it is for groups to be polarizing at each end of that continuum.
Worth a listen if you want a counter point to the “wal mart is evil” trope.
They will burn a small town's economy to the ground so they can turn a profit selling goods produced in sweatshops and labor camps. If that's not evil, I'm not sure what would qualify.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-45.pdf
[2] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Walmart#Walmart_is_a_D...
[3] https://qz.com/1701404/walmart-allegedly-created-fictitious-...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-ove...
I know walmart is bigger, but I wonder if (when?) amazon's market cap will surpass it.
I don't know if walmart can transition if that's the endgame. Will they transition to online like netflix, or blockbuster?
The mall was a social center for teens. A lot of money got pumped into the malls from that age group.
Teen boys would go for the arcade. Teen girls would follow, checking out the guys. Many stores catered to that demographic (Spencers, HotTopic, makeup and cheap jewelry stores, etc.)
In short, it was a place to go on casual dates, find dates, hook up, and the like.
My peer group quit going as frequently as we could play SuperMario Brothers for free at home. And, once the internet emerged, that was it... teens rarely leave their houses now, don’t date, and shun all face-to-face contact.
So, in short, Nintendo destroyed the Malls.