The Twilight of the Indoor Mall
theawl.com
theawl.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.
*Turns out it wasn't as abandoned as we thought. Someone was doing something there, and someone or something called the police in.
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.
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.
Now i'm imagining some kind of blacklight triathlon event featuring laserquest, golf, and breakdancing.
The article mentions that when an anchor leaves a raditional mall, the disease spreads, are outdoor malls immune to this effect?
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.
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.
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.
I believe Sears owns most of its real estate, so maybe moving isn't so easy.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/07/investing/sears-selling-stor...
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.
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.
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.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/collin-county/...
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.
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.
*A pedestrian only square with surrounded by shops, restaurants, etc
Before, it looked like this:
http://goodnightraleigh.com/uploaded_images/fayetteville-st-...
http://www.thegrovela.com/directory.php
http://www.americanaatbrand.com/directory.php
http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/articl...
The security at the latter has hats and green uniforms like park rangers. You can almost forget that it's all private land.
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.
In warm climates, malls become outdoor is the trend, but that certainly isn't the case for cities with harsher winters.
With a working hell, a geek And a sweltering com dot
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone They emptied the mall and put up an Amazon Slot
They took all the middle class Put 'em in a middle class museum
And they directed their chauffeur a mile and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone
They emptied the mall and put up an Amazon Slot
Late last night I heard my phone alert scream
and a big yellow Uber Took away my all my old dreams
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone
They emptied the mall and put up an Amazon Slot
This isn't so much "death of the mall" per se, as death (and replacement) of 80s-era malls.
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.
The evolution of the "mall"