What do malls offer that regular shops do not (besides lots of stores being located closely together, but thanks to Yelp and local transportation, that doesn't seem like too big of a benefit).
UPDATE:
So I am from NYC, and I have lived in urban areas my entire life. Finding the right stores so that I could make immediate purchases has never been an issue for me, but based on early comments, I clearly have a myopic view.
I can see how a mall could potentially offer an "urban" experience (meaning that food, stores, people are all conveniently located in a nearby area) in a non-urban area.
I think the direction to take would be to focus on the things that online stores can't provide. Clothes fitting, product repair, demo products to look at and play with, etc. Apple stores seem to do this quite well: they don't have hundreds of products on the shelves (online stores will always have you beat there), everything is nicely spaced out and you are free to walk around and play with the products. If you need advice or want to buy, you can talk to a sales rep. If you need something repaired, they do that too.
I was going to say something snarky about the 80s being the last time people did that, but there are occasional times I've had to go to a mall in the past few years, and I notice teenagers hanging out (usually in the summer).
Aside from the facts that not all malls are dying and that there are still new malls being built, they offer exactly the benefit you stated: "lots of stores being located closely together."
I don't believe the existence of services like Yelp offsets this much if at all. People who don't mind spending the extra time to use it and then to travel around to the places they find (or even wait for shipment) are not necessarily the shoppers a mall caters to, as they're obviously not so concerned with getting what they need quickly with minimal travel.
There's also the social and entertainment aspect to consider. Many malls have food courts and restaurants and/or include movie theaters (or even theme parks, which I find hilarious, but it's there).
Malls do often exist for and serves purposes other than just providing goods in a centralized location... but that purpose itself hasn't lost its utility.
I'd say a mall is a place to go when your intention is to shop as an activity not just as a means to an end. It allows you to constantly browse, with nothing requiring you to stop -- the next store is meters away, food is right there...
Yelp and local transport doesn't meet this niche. Or, it only meets it in a handful of big dense cities that have decent shopping districts. Malls replicate that sort of experience for a spread out suburban area.
I can't even remember the last time I set foot in a mall. I think it was to try on a suit, but even trying on clothes will be virtualized with augmented reality. Other than being a destination place to hang out, I don't see much utility in malls.
So the online retailer sends you five different suits to try on, and you send back the four you don't like. The extra $30 worth of shipping is nothing compared to paying employees and rent.
Augmented reality won't tell me that two pairs of pants, from the same store, that say they are 30 inches long at the waist, are really 29 and 31. Different colors mean different suppliers and different results.
The technology that will tell us if some pants are a good fit or not is still nowhere near where it need to be.
Actually technology will make sure that your pants fit just perfectly from the 1000s of measurement taken by the full body scanner in the retail store you ordered them from.
The future of retail will be where it is fully integrated into the manufacturing chain to enable just in time manufacturing and delivery of the perfect item with the cost savings from such automation passed onto the consumer due to competition.
I sure hope not. Some of my fondest memories when I was growing up in the States was visiting stores like JC Penny, the random Electronics store or Jack's Joke Shop with my parents, then swinging by the food court and eating some Sbarros pizza.
When I come back home, I would like to take my son to the mall as well and spend the morning just browsing around and buying trinkets. It's fun!
Amazon may be cheaper but come on, going to the mall is not all about shopping, it's about the experience!
4. Weather. Occasionally a concern for those who live outside the bay area. Sometimes, you need to get shopping done and don't want to be walking around outside all day.
I live in Southern California suburbia. The nearest true city center is an hour metro train ride away, while the nearest mall is a ten minute drive. For me (and millions of others here) the malls are more convenient.
there are more "open air" shopping plazas here in socal than I can count, which I think is the reason indoor malls are a dying breed here: our weather isn't bad enough to warrant indoor shopping + the population/foot traffic here in California is growing and highly congested compared to other states.
More relevant to HN: The comments so far suggest that many of us are pretty far removed from not only the demographics that use malls, but also the people who run them and the shop owners and managers that are their tenants. It's important to remember, though, that this doesn't mean they don't exist or that they're somehow wrong.
Many malls are still successful, and to suggest that because some are closing the model is dead is baseless.
No. Come on silly question. They are still alive and well in many cities. Even in SF, where you are suppose to order a single dental floss through google shopping express to be part of the cool crowd. Going to the mall allows you to quickly search many stores at once, which will be a need for some time.
Instead of "reinventing malls", how about "reinventing" what's left of the downtown shopping district in cities and towns?
I think the only way to compete with online shopping and with Wal-Mart, is with an experience that goes beyond efficient commerce. Some people, some of the time, will gravitate toward an authentic in-person social environment that is interesting overall, and which happens to include interesting shops.
This also tends to make the place more interesting for tourists, which at least up to a point can have a beneficial impact
You get it. We need to fix a lot of American mass transit infrastructure though to make this feasible. Getting into the city is not easy or cheap in many places in the United States. And we cannot just rely on the cheap trick of using parking garages and highways to get people into the city anymore - that's part of what killed cities in the first place.
I agree, and I'm definitely thinking of larger cities, in part.
I'm also thinking of smaller towns. People may drive there, park, then walk around and enjoy it -- and spend money. There are towns like this around New England, for example. They're destinations people want to visit or live in. If instead the town had a Wal-Mart, it wouldn't be the same economic benefit to the town. Who would visit for that?
Of course even better if there were rail service to the town. I'm not disagreeing with you, there. I'm just pointing out that this isn't only an urbanista issue. I think it matters as much, maybe even more so, for smaller cities and towns.
Mass transit is OK for commuters who can tolerate the homeless-shelter-on-wheels aspect of it, but not good for shoppers, since it limits your per-trip purchases to what you can carry.
I'm in the midwest and I agree. You need a certain critical mass of population density and enough common destinations for mass transit to work. From what I can tell, this is a lot higher than the population needed to sustain a mall.
Our town does have a bus system but most of them drive around empty or nearly so most of the time. We also have a decent indoor mall and several outdoor "big box store" shopping centers which all seem to be surviving if not thriving.
>Instead of "reinventing malls", how about "reinventing" what's left of the downtown shopping district in cities and towns?
This is happening, big time.
It is insane, when I was growing up the downtown was scary. Not only were there very few places to go, it was crime ridden and a blight. If you wanted to go shopping or to a restaurant you had to go to the suburbs, mostly the suburban mall. In the last several years, downtown has completely transformed. I live far away and ever time I come back there is TONS of new stuff there. About 6-7 years ago I now see the few things that were starting to come in was the beginnings of this revitalization.
Downtown shopping is dead; malls can do the shopping experience much better. They can control more of the experience (and keep out undesirables), and don't have to share street space with government buildings or random non-consumer businesses.
I don't go to them much anymore, but every time I do, I notice what a strange place it is. The stores are mostly bad, the food is of course terrible, very limited natural light, the list goes on. I can't imagine what "experience" we all thought we were enjoying in these grayboxes for so many years. True, there is a human need to congregate. But why do it in there?
--
There is a reluctance among posters here to consider a "yes" to the question in the title. Which seems strange and perhaps self-conscious. Consider:
"Mall traffic, for a number of years, has been slowing down. Whether it continues to decline somewhat over time, I think that’s realistic to assume."
People from companies as large as the Gap rarely get more explicit than that when talking about dying aspects of their business. The writing is on the wall, folks.
I can't imagine what "experience" we all thought we were enjoying in these grayboxes for so many years.
Did you actually attend malls in their heyday? Today's mall is a sad shadow of their former selves, and as a result a poor way to judge how or why we enjoyed them in decades past.
Pre-internet, if you wanted to peruse music, toys, books, movies, and/or video games and software, you essentially had to go to a mall. Or at least you wanted to because it was so convenient to access one or more of these sources of entertainment. Now it's pretty much only a good source for clothes.
> Pre-internet, if you wanted to peruse music, toys, books, movies, and/or video games and software, you essentially had to go to a mall. Or at least you wanted to because it was so convenient to access one or more of these sources of entertainment.
Well, actually, as I recall, malls were typically where you went for stores for those things that tended to be overpriced and had limited selection, but were conveniently located together along with restaurants and places for the kids to be entertained (like arcades and sometimes play areas, carousels, etc.)
- A sanctioned place to hang out with friends outside of school
- A predecessor to online shopping. If you buy it online today, and you can't get it from Target/Walmart/Etc, chances are you would have gone to a mall back then.
- Lots and lots of different clothes stores. The HN crowd probably doesn't care for this much, but other people liked that part a lot!
- Bustling and full of people. This has its downsides to be sure, but it can be nice to be around other people, and they didn't feel like the ghost towns they do today.
When malls were in their heyday when I was growing up, there was no Target or Walmart. At least not anywhere close to where I lived.
>A sanctioned place to hang out with friends outside of school
Malls now are starting to outright not let kids in unless they are accompanied by an adult. I am dead serious, I got carded entering a mall in 2008 and was told the policy is nobody under 18 unless accompanied by an adult. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/shopping-malls-increasingly-p...
Yeah, I couldn't remember exactly what was around, when. But I meant warehouse stores and the like. Home Depot, perhaps? Or in my case, Orchard Supply. Which really shows you the Valley's origins.
agreed. back in the 80s, the closest mall to me was pretty good - a decent mix of entertainment stores (music, games) and arcades, and water slide for a while, movie theater, and a decent mix of food (well, some of the better food was anchor restaurants in the parking lot). My recollection is there was a lot of natural light on sunny days - large glass sections in the ceiling structure let in quite a lot of light. I seem to remember one wing (of the 5?) being a bit drearier than the others, but might be bad memory (or... it was the 'lord and taylor' wing and I rarely ever went there!)
Biggest drawback I see to the older style 'mall' areas was lack of expandability - the structure was forever in place - you couldn't change the character with a new wing/section very easily. Outdoor shopping areas have a bit more flexibility in that respect.
Much like radio and tv have far more competition for our time, so too do malls have more competition for our time and money. But they had a good run :)
The indoor style exists because of extreme weather. I personally suspect California got indoor shopping malls back then because most everywhere else had indoor malls too- and they had indoor malls for the same reason they have indoor highschools.
Inland central and southern California need air-conditioned spaces to escape the summer heat. Coastal, not so much.
Or were you referring to the consumer productivity lost studying the grass or feeding squirrels and pigeons rather than paying attention to the fabulous product offerings in the mall curriculum? God forbid people obtain value without anyone profiting; think of the children!
You refer to outdoor schools. My middle schoool was sort of like that. Of course the classrooms were indoors, but the campus was several small building not one big one. So to go to art, or music, or gym, or lunch you would walk outside to another building. It was nice to get outside four or five times a day even if just for a few minutes. Of course it kind of sucked in a heavy rain....
I can't imagine what "experience" we all thought we were enjoying in these grayboxes for so many years.
The indoor shopping mall was, initially, a huge convenience. You could drive to one place, park once (usually for free), and visit a variety of shops in climate-controlled comfort (nice in rainy/winter seasons or hot summers). Most people found this preferable to driving all over town or even to a central downtown or shopping district, hunting and paying to park on the street or in a remote garage, and having to walk from shop to shop outdoors. As malls got bigger and bigger, though, the shops became more and more specialized and less interesting to most shoppers. Walking vast distances between the one or two shops you want to visit just recreated the original problem.
Young people used to like to hang out at malls because it was something to do. There was usually a video game arcade and movie theatres, offering entertainment you could not get at home. You could browse shops with friends, and catch up on gossip. Before mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. you actually had to stay in touch face-to-face and meeting at the mall was easy.
So malls are dying because a) most of them are too big and b) most of the social and entertainment opportunities have been replaced by technology.
This is the perfect characterization of the demise of malls that I can think of. They fill a niche that just isn't needed anymore.
Sad. I miss my local arcade and video stores... there's only one video store left and the arcade closed up shop back in 2008.
I wish people would get off their asses for once and experience life! Convenience isn't everything. You don't make memories by sitting in front of a black rectangular slab with buttons and menus to choose from, you make memories from experiences. Like going places.. walking. Biking. Breathing. Seeing.
If we're not using all 5 senses I think there's no point in doing something.
I thought the experience of malls were essentially like that of casinos, in that they were designed so you would lose track of time and buy/gamble more?
The allure was that you knew you could look at one store, and then another, without having to drive across town.
Now that we order online, comparison shop online, etc, why would I want to walk through Sears vs JC Penney? (for example) The internet ate the convenience aspect of the malls, and left only the social aspect or the Shopping Experience itself.
>So malls are dying because a) most of them are too big and b) most of the social and entertainment opportunities have been replaced by technology.
Also, they decided that a bunch of loitering teens were more trouble than they were worth, and made bunches of rules designed to make teenaged mall rats go elsewhere. Those rules went horribly right.
'60s architecture is terrible, and my response to a lot of it is "what were they thinking?". But modern malls can be beautiful; light, airy, with great shops and food.
I think one thing is seriously damaging malls: we're now allowing huge corporate-owned "public spaces" in a way we never used to, which give the retailers the advantages of a mall while being out in the open. But where I live new malls are still opening, and they're still great places to go (as is what claims to be the first ever mall, on Jermyn Street).
I don't care for shopping in general, but malls are far from dead. I had to pick my daughter up from a modeling gig at the mall yesterday - I literally could not find a parking space. There were people waiting in nearly every row for someone - anyone - to pull out. It's the middle of March and it was as bad as Christmas.
Some malls are thriving, but many are dead. In the city I grew up in I can name at least two that are dead or close to dead. On the other hand if you go just outside the city then there are two that are still going strong.
Forcing shopping activity and gathering into indoor brutalist buildings is dying, shopping centers are not. Look at union sq, 4th st, walnut creek, and many others in the sf bay. All are stronger than ever by offering very high end retail mixed with high quality independent offerings and unique chef-driven eateries.
What people have abandoned is indoor, stale, sunlight less, copycat malls with the same awful pizza and Chinese chains and the same terrible jewelry stores.
People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer.
However tacitly this article is pointing to a possible larger problem in the Midwest where cold weather, and permanently depressed economy and a talent drain is leaving them without the tools to build interesting gathering places. This is a far larger and sadder issue.
I've even noticed that Stonestown, a parking-lot surrounded anachronism in SF, has remained quite busy, despite being close to neighborhood commercial corridors. They've moved towards offering more community events: movie nights, Chinese New Year celebrations, etc. They also added Trader Joe's a few years ago, which has been a major draw.
The entire place used to be an outdoor mall, but a skylight was added to keep out the notorious SF fog while retaining natural light.
The next logical step in its transformation would be moving more of the parking into structures or underground, and building apartments on the land. But that would require the blessing of neighbors and activists in the area, not an easy task.
Yep, we have Easton Town Centre around here (Columbus). It was one of the first of its kind, I believe and is very nice and a great place just to hang out.
In Europe, malls are still constructed in many places and they have the advantage of being built a few decades after many of the US malls.
Where I live summers are a bit too warm and winters a bit too cold to make outdoor shopping joyful. Also, streets are noisy and full of aggressive drivers and the sidewalks are full of holes and broken tiles. So in the last few years this 1.5M population city has seen the construction of 10 shopping malls, most of which are actually really nice "gathering places" as you put it and most of which seem to thrive.
One advantage from most of the US malls that I have been to is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them, that most of the malls are built near subway or tram stops and that they somehow fit nicely into the surrounding architecture.
Often the malls are built in the city center and usually in a very nice quality. Usually the malls have one major supermarket chain in the basement that acts as an anchor store and usually they have a cinema and a food court in the top floor that offers not just the usual fast food but often also some decent food.
I really enjoy shopping in a mall and until someone fixes the problem of waiting and paying for delivery I don't see online shopping making malls obsolete.
On a brief but pleasant trip to Switzerland, I got around using their wonderful transit system. Every transit station was also a commercial hub. Big stations had big shops like supermarkets and department stores. Little stations had little shops like bakeries and banks.
Any restructuring of retail shopping in the US would have to include thinking about how entire districts are laid out. It takes one person -- the owner -- to restructure a mall, but considerably more cooperation and time to restructure neighborhoods.
In some cases this is already happening. The best known example I can think of is Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia. Already a shopping and commercial area, they're building the a new metro line out to it. This is coinciding with a restructuring of the entire area to be pedestrian friendly instead of car focused and it's absolutely transforming the entire city. It's probably the largest restructuring program in the U.S. at present. Each metro stop is either a shopping paradise or near a bunch of professional offices. All new residential complexes are being planned and the area is absolutely exploding with activity.
Tysons is the suck. They're not restructuring it so much as trying to work around the piss-poor depressingly suburban "urban planning" of the place. Yes, it's got a metro line now, but it's a big concrete monstrosity along the middle of a huge multi-lane road, instead of the sleek, organic, integrated transit you see in places like Chicago or New York.[1] Most of the stops drop you off in a giant parking lot along side Route 7. The attempts to make Tyson's "pedestrian friendly" involve basically giving up on the existing street-level and building an elevated walking level connecting the mall and a few office buildings and apartment buildings.
A much better example is Atlantic Station in Atlanta: http://atlanticstation.com. They nuked the existing streets and put in a human-scale street grid: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Atlantic_.... All the parking is underground or at the periphery of the development. The only thing missing is a subway stop (the Arts Center stop is across that awful oppressive highway).
Yeah Tysons is still a warzone right now. But they're on something like year 5 of a 35 year restructuring plan. I still have high hopes. There's lots of weirdness left over from the previous "design", like stations letting off into low density areas like next to a bunch of car dealerships. But the overall plan I think is still promising. If they can convert those low density areas into high density housing, offices and mixed-zone shopping.
I do wish it was more revolutionary like your examples, but there's not much reason to think that Tyson's won't look a bit more like Chicago's loop in 20 years.
I'm actually on the side of wishing our local politicians had gotten their heads out of their asses and buried the lines, but we get what we get and I'm of the ilk that still thinks elevated lines look retro futuristic and cool.
TBH, it doesn't affect me at all, except that Tyson's, being so overly car centric, is a place I don't go because it's such a grind to get around right now. That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.
> That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.
IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.
Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.
>One advantage from most of the US malls...is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them...
Thanks for bringing this up. Dealing with parking is a much more complex problem than was assumed for the last 50 years or so. Better modeling should improve the situation going forward though, and could help effectively redevelop some of these megamall wastelands too.
I imagine that big part of that is the large percentage of the US population that leaves on or near a coast. Major underground excavation isn't really possible when ground level is only 10m or so above sea level/the water table.
A few years ago I went to a mall in Stuttgart. The interesting thing was I could have been in any mall in America. The layout, architecture, parking garage, etc., was right out of the US, and even the advertising was all in English. It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?
To quote Pulp fiction "It's the little differences". I love going to malls and supermarkets when I'm in a new country or city. Sure they're 95% the same, but those other 5% are often unique for the area and quite telling.
I lived in Germany around 1970 when there were no malls or McDonald's there. What was fun was even department stores were palpably different than in the US. Everything was different, and that made it much more fun. Even the grocery stores were way, way different (I sure loved the German cheese selection!).
The Villagio in Doha is a good example of little differences, like an ice skating rink located in the middle of the food court and a knock-off of the Venetian's canal running through it.
This actually isn't true. Europe is a real place, unlike Middle Earth or Narnia or Canada. It's just west of Asia and north of Africa, if you can believe it!
>> indoor, stale, sunlight less, copycat malls with the same awful pizza and Chinese chains and the same terrible jewelry stores.
What a depressing yet accurate description. Growing up in California suburbia, spending time with friends or family at the (Brea, Santa Ana) malls was always mind numbing. Those places had no life or character. Others didn't seem as bothered, and I've chalked that up to my mood being more influenced by my surroundings than most. Even today I find my mood and productivity drastically affected by the age, quality, design, openness, brightness, etc of my work environment.
My biggest problem with malls is the pervasive aroma of human flatulence that seems to be everywhere. Maybe that's why so many of the shops spray perfume/cologne into the air.
Ontario mills, Montclair mall, Brea mall, all mind numbing indeed. The only malls I enjoy in socal are the ultra high end ones like southcoast plaza, simply because they sell nice things that I can tangibly handle. All the other dingy, musty malls (ie. Ontario mills) are the absolute last choice for me, opting for open air alternatives such as Victoria Gardens.
What happened is more of a change in cultural expectations that malls and their stale corporate overlords did not and were not able to adapt to. There is no reason that malls could not have been revamped and renovated to adjust, but I think that ship has sailed. People have given up on those areas where malls are located, which makes the extensive capital investments necessary to make any such changes even more impossible now than when they should have been made.
Brutalist? Don't you think that's a little hyperbolic? Every mall I've witnessed has had interior and exterior design far from brutalist. Pretty nice-looking, really.
A popular one around here actually has a large skylight spanning most of the middle of the roof.
There are a lot of good reasons to prefer an indoor place. The weather's often not comfortable outside. It's only really perfectly comfortable for a time throughout the year that sums to maybe a few months over here. Maybe you're used to some place where it's the perfect weather all year?
"People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer."
Do they really want all that, or do they just want some place with a bunch of stores and maybe a movie theater and food court, in a nice indoor climate-controlled environment and some light music in the background?
You just admitted in your last paragraph that the weather in that place makes an outdoor gathering less desirable.
Brutalism is a style, not a term of abuse. It does often refer to high modernist 1960s and 1970s buildings which are expensive to operate, having been constructed before environmental friendliness was on the agenda. Some people don't like the rectilinear boxes and raw concrete, but that's not why the term brutalism is applied to a particular subset of the buildings of that period: it was the popular name of an aesthetic movement, for better or worse. The architects in question were influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, as well as the notorious (but admittedly brilliant) Le Corbusier.
And the UK, and much of the rest of the world. In the UK, college usually refers to either sixth form or Further Education college, between secondary school and university.
Even in America, there was a distinction, or at least there used to be. If it was a "college" then that meant there was limited to no opportunity for graduate studies. On the other hand, a "university" offered full undergraduate as well as graduate programs for most subjects. In highschool, I remember noting that some colleges where quite prestigious, such as Dartmouth and Harvey Mudd College.
Oh god, the fire-escape-as-a-useless-tower-over-an-inaccessible-bridge trope... again. It's a stupid enormous waste of concrete and steel, and would actually be kind of OK if there were a way to get in there and survey the area without setting off alarms.
Just to emphasize this, the term "brutalist" derives from the French "brut", not English "brutal". "Brut" means "raw", and is used to describe the exposed concrete central to this style. Although both words derive from the same Latin word brutus, that word means both "heavy" and "stupid", with the French word deriving from the former and the English word deriving from the latter. (Or so Wiktionary tells me.)
The way I'd heard it in school was that it was a style made to purposely be as unlikably soulless as possible as some kind of statement. That's apparently not true?
Of course, the host's main concern is about peak oil, so he would have some other things to say about the gradual decline of malls.
I'm not as extreme, but mail order is definitely more economical than frequent commutes to a far away shopping center. I'm glad I live within easy biking distance from an outdoor shopping center, which has many little restaurants (chain & local) to hit for lunch when working from home, as well as a theatre, Target & a "Whole Foods"-like grocery store. I can carry a fair amount of stuff home on bike rack "pannier" bags, and sometimes only get in the car one or two days a week to make an appearance at work. Only the Target has decent bike racks, though. Otherwise, trees and trash cans get pressed into service :-)
Exactly. Union Square has better places to eat and drink near by that are way better than a standard, factory mall box. You can also just walk around or hang out in the small park. Stanford Mall has this in a different style as well as Milbrae, Burlingame, and Santana Row. They all have 'character'.
At the same time, outdoor car-centric outlet-malls are still plentiful if not gaining steam, and they have all the hideous disadvantages of the traditional mall plus the problem that people drive from store to store and you're not even protected from the elements if you choose to walk from one store to the next.
I was going to come here to say this. I've lived in a couple of college towns in California (Davis and Santa Cruz), and they both have a Gap in the downtown area. Strolling downtown, especially in Santa Cruz, is just a Thing To Do, like going to the mall used to be. It's where you see the Santa Cruz character, grab a cookie from the cookie store, and mooch around looking in shop windows. Essentially the exact same mall activity.
That said, as the article focuses on Gap, I think their problems are far more pronounced than just malls or online. The Gap and Baby Gap store in Santa Cruz are almost always completely empty, and that seems to be the case for most places. I get the feeling Target is just dominating them, selling the same clothes cheaper.
Forcing shopping activity and gathering into indoor brutalist buildings is dying, shopping centers are not. Look at union sq, 4th st, walnut creek, and many others in the sf bay. All are stronger than ever by offering very high end retail mixed with high quality independent offerings and unique chef-driven eateries.
Exactly.
Take for example the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan[1]. It's in the city center, it's visually spectacular, it's unique, and it's a fun place to visit, eat lunch, window shop, or spend (too much) money. It's been around for 150 years which indicates that this is a sustainable model for a shopping mall in a dense & vibrant city.
In Ireland it rains a lot. The one big mall built recently in the city I live in is always busy. Why? Because you won't get wet going from shop to shop. Not a single vacant space. You get a bit of daylight from a strip of glass in the roof. Typical food court, multiplex, big name grocery store, car valeting, farmer's market once a week, clothing retailers, there are very few things you can not get there - the only annoyance is that the DIY, home improvement, outdoorsy stuff, car stuff, electrical and electronics, is across the road and over a bit in this weird appendage space :( Also chock-a-block.
If you have kids this is doubly important, you don't get wet! (Or cold I suppose). If traditional retail could solve this then well done them, but how? I'm not keen on the sterile everything-is-a-chainstore atmosphere of indoors malls but you can't argue with the convenience and the not getting wetness. I would prefer multi-storey car parking though, I hate the sprawl of these enormous car parks, so ugly! why not build a tall multi-storey car park and lots of nice green spaces with trees and ponds and fountains?
Boston has it nailed, though Boston also used to have one of the most prestigious high streets on the planet.
Although they've gotten increasingly commercially commoditized, Quincy Market/Faneuil Hall, Newbury Street and the Prudential Center are mostly done right. The Prudential Center is the most "gray box" of them all, but the skylight that cuts through nearly the entire structure opens it up quite a bit.
How does the profit hierarchy work in a mall? Do the owners of the real estate see a larger margin than they would if owning an aggregate of locations outside of the mall?
NYTimes had an article a few days ago[1] about Sbarro's bankruptcy that touched on this topic - basically, Sbarro bet big on shopping mall food courts, and that bet has not paid off.
But the more interesting part is at the end - as shopping malls become less desirable, rents will go down. This could lead to a radical reinvention of what a mall looks and feels like. So malls as we know them might be dead, but "the mall" isn't done yet.
If no one is willing to spend the money to seriously build a new mall then the mall is dead. It will still be part of the landscape for a while, just as you can see the remains of failed fast food chains, nuclear weapon launch sites, and pre-bussing decentralized high schools, but that is just reuse.
Lots of places in the world malls are still being built at a rapid pace. London, for example, is seeing an ongoing stream of enlargment, redevelopment and new mall developments. For an example local to me, the Australian developer/mall operator Westfields has formed a joint venture with another developer to combine two local malls and redevelop them into one huge mall, which make Westfields 3rd huge mall in London:
Maybe large parts of the US just has too many/too large ones, given how many of them were developed pre-online shopping. And a problem with malls is of course that population shifts are far harder to accommodate when such a large area is operated as one unit. If the mall owner does not actively manage changes due to changes in the surrounding area, it can easily become obsolete as a whole.
I want to say that maybe Sbarro charging $5-8 for a single slice of pizza might also be partial killer, especially in mall food courts where there are generic other selections for far far less.
And bare in mind that the average mall was only able to be financed by the big tentpole retailers such as JC Penny, Sears, Best Buy, etc. So if Sbarro can't pay their rent... how much longer can the big boys?
Except the larger stores that anchor a mall actually pay less per square foot than the smaller stores. In order to get financing for a large mall, backers want to see big names signed on. So a mall developer goes out and lands a big fish and promises them a sweetheart deal. So right now you have the little guys paying full price not being able to pay. So it's only a matter of time before the discounted big boys can't. One of the big exceptions being sporting good stores such as Dick's.
Source: Worked on a very sad customer loyalty program for Simon Property Group, Inc.
Not in Australia. We've probably had over $2 billion in re-development and upgrades integer biggest six shopping centres around the city I live in over the last three years... The one a ten minute drive from my house is wrapping up a two year, $450 million upgrade this half of the year. Pretty crazy, but they are doing pretty well making them places where you might actually want to be, which is important now online shopping has meant they are no longer places you need to go.
In Vancouver two malls (Oakridge and Brentwood) are being redeveloped, pivoting away from their car oriented, suburban roots and becoming the anchor of transit oriented complete communities. In 2010 Oakridge got a transit connection for the Olympics which has helped it stay relevant. Now the city is taking advantage of the connection to build a transit oriented community around the site, doing away with outside parking, adding several towers, planning for surrounding mid rises, and turning the roof of the mall into a park. Nearby Burnaby is doing this same with their mall, which has had a rapid transit connection since 2001.
There's also a lot of office office space going in at Brentwood and Oakridge. In short, they're shifting from "shopping area to which people drive" to "miniature downtowns connected by rapid transit". (Arguably Metrotown was the first of these, although it was a bit too early to benefit from the condoization shift.)
I think we're going to see a lot more developments like Burnaby's "SOLO District" -- underground parking, 10 acres of ground floor retail, ~7 acres of park space on the roof of the retail space, 1-2 acres of 6-storey office space, and 2-3 acres of 30-50 storey residential space. If you're lucky, you could live, work, and shop without leaving the building -- and if you do need to go somewhere, the skytrain is right across the street, so you probably won't need to drive.
This again? I remember reading malls were over 15 years ago and yet all of the malls in my corner of Los Angeles are still open and thriving. All have been renovated at least once since the first batch of "malls are over" articles many years back. Some have converted a bit of their indoor space to outdoor (such as Del Amo in Torrance, which was one of the largest in the United States). Some have converted from outdoor then back to partially indoor when they realized that shoppers don't like being cold.
Yes, retailers face heated competition from the likes of Amazon, and yes I am not the typical mall demographic. But the malls I know—assuming they have a spectrum of trendy retailers—tend to be just as busy as ever when I have reason to visit. I hate the crowded parking lots as much as I ever did.
If they're stuck in the 1990s with Sbarro, Foot Locker, and JC Penney, yeah, they're probably suffering. But that's just not keeping current with consumer demand and isn't really an indictment of the model in general.
I think the malls in LA and Southern California in general have done a good job in reinventing themselves as destinations rather than merely shopping centers. Especially for teens. Downtown Disney is a good example.
A lot of those outdoor destinations even seem centered around a movie theater now, which one might predict is also on the decline - though every time I've visited these places, they seem pretty packed. (At least, on weekends.)
Our local movie theatre (suburb of London) does much more than just show the latest blockbusters these days. They have special, low priced, early morning showings for families with kids, late night 18+ showings for movies with lower ratings, autism friendly showings, showings with subtitles, a lot of movies that previously wouldn't be shown much here (Bollywood movies in particular), and of course the 3D movies are helping them, as well as showing live transmissions of operas and plays from various locations around the world and a variety of other events. They've also put in two rows of larger, comfier seats in all their screens, that goes for a higher price, and I expect to see more of that... The theatres too are reinventing themselves.
The thing that surprised me about Los Angeles is how little malls matter. They're here, but they aren't as central to shopping as they are in suburban areas. I literally can't remember the last time I was in a mall (other than to go to the Sherman Oaks Arclight theater, and the Galleria is a very strange "mall" these days).
I find everything I need/want in stores that are either standalone or in small (10 storefronts or less) shopping centers.
Los Angeles is an odd city, one that operates in a much more urban way than it looks on the surface.
A new approach: Anchor stores, entertainment, utility, accessiblity, asthetics, a spectrum of economic appeal, grocery stores. Owners can be demanding of rents to some extent, but when they drive out (or never had) a movie theatre or grocery store, they are losing the "single destination for lots of what you need" and "nice place to go" value.
Of some LA malls, I think the Fallbrook Center [1] has rebuilt itself well, regarding:
* Entertainmnet-wise, AMC Theatres rebuilt the old shoebox-y 7-screen multiplex with way fewer seats. Moreso, every movie theatre seat is a wide-width, electrically-powered recliner including footrests! What used to be 20 rows of seats is now 7 or 8 for one screen, so prices are a bit higher. One can /reserve a seat/ via Fandango over the Internet (fee refunded by AMC) so one doesn't have to come early and wait in line for "a good seat"; they're all good and one can book them in advance. The theatre feels much more full, and seems more popular.
* By "spectrum of economic appeal", specifically, Fallbrook has /three/ full grocery stores (a "Ralphs" (Kroger) supermarket, "Sprouts Farmers Market" luxury grocery, and a "Trader Joes", plus two more department stores that include grocery sections: A Target and a Walmart.
* Utility-wise, it's got a Home Depot, a 24-Hour-Fitness gym, a Chuck-E-Cheese (hat tip to Nolan Bushnell)
* Accessability-wise, there are street lights at mid-block entrances for auto traffic, and bike lanes on the streets for bicycle traffic, and bike racks (though I'd like to see more of those).
* For asthetics, there are planters and small stand-alone buildings facing the street (urban-style). This broke the ugly old impression the prior desert-of-asphalt a hot summer's day brought.
* Instead of a food court, the small buildings facing the street are a mix of stand-alone and multi-tenant places to eat, both sit-down (indoor) and walk-up bar with outdoor seating. Market diversity here too: Starbucks, Jamba Juice, IHOP, a lobster specialty franchise, and a non-franchised grill (Tikka grill) and non-franchised Vietnamese restaurant.
They're doing fine, there is such a diversity of things to do as well as things to get there.
Come to Singapore. There's places where there are 7 or more malls all right next to each other and more being built. Kuala Lumpur seems to have lots of shopping centers being built and many of them get full as in the there's no parking left.
The point isn't that Clarke Quay itself is a mall (even though the owners, CapitaMall Trust themselves call it a mall...) but that the weather doesn't have to be an obstacle for outdoor shopping.
Undoubtfully the climate. This leads to Singaporean malls being 100x more interesting, convenient, high-end and better looking than any US mall. Pretty much all large malls have direct or adjacent to public train transport (MRT at Vivo, Ion, 313, nex...), have high-end restaurants, mid-range and fast-food offerings (local and international) and a wider variety of stores. They also have air conditioning, which is pretty much the only reason why all life happens in malls and you can barely walk around on weekends ;)
I was just in Guangzhou recently. Same thing there. In TienHe all of their multiple 6+ storey malls are connected by a sprawling series of underground malls. The shopping there is crazy.
How are shopping malls paragons of bureaucracy? Paragons of shallow consumerism, if anything... and while the DMV et all are surely dehumanizing and Kafkaesque, the mall is a special and unique sort of revolting to me. But different strokes...
If only there was some way to organically grow outdoor shopping areas, in central, easy to reach locations, with a distributed ownership structure ensuring that no single entity can ruin the whole area. Maybe some historically significant structures (town halls, parks, etc.) could even add a sense of civitas to the whole thing.
We could call these things something catchy... like "downtowns".
It would be if they also invested in the residential real estate around it. If you only focus on commercial properties, you're ignoring the value you are adding to other real estate investments in the area.
Crappy malls are dying. Decent malls in more affluent areas are diversifying their experiences and thriving. In some places, indoor malls make a lot of sense. I live in Minnesota (home of the original indoor mall, Southdale). It's cold here a good chunk of the year, and an indoor mall isn't a half bad idea.
Our local mall has 3 anchor stores: Macys, JC Penny, and Sears. Two of those three have reported sales increases in the last quarter but it's a mystery on how Sears stays in business.
The other popular stores are all gone - American Eagle, The Gap, etc. Instead, new tenants have replaced them which make the place look like an indoor flea market.
Also enhancing the flea market look are the kiosks of people reselling things from cell phone cases to cheap sunglasses and worse jewelry than the mall jewelry stores, which are half gone as well. There's even a store that's almost like a 7-11, they sell candy bars and bottles of soda and chips.
Those anchor stores are on life support. New channel anchors: American Girl, Apple Stores, etc, etc. What is dead is price-based stores the internet has replaced.
I think Betteridge's law of headlines applies to this article. I live in Indy where the (billionaire) Simon's live, who own Simon Property Group. Their stock is currently @ 161, up 100 points over 5 years ago. Their stock has just been upgraded: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140312006497/en/Fitc...
I used to live between two of their major malls for years. I could barely leave my apartment for 2 months before xmas due to traffic. They just spent millions remodeling their high end mall adding capacity and additional room for high end stores like Sacks and Restoration Hardware.
Non generic crap malls are fine. Junk stores that have generic brand cheapish clothes and the like (JCPenny) are being replaced by Amazon, but overall malls are doing fine.
Our local mall has realized that, I think. Most of the new stores are designer stuff - think Coach bags - and a new anchor called Von Maur which is an old-style department store - attentive staff, live piano in the lobby, etc. They seem to be doing much better than the JC Pennys of the area.
It's easy when you have 3,200 employees that you need under one roof, but malls would work great for for 20-500 employee businesses as well. The larger companies would take the spots used by anchor stores and of course the smaller companies could subdivide or take the smaller stores.
There's plenty of parking, they're located in the suburbs where many people live - and the food courts can even stay open, those employees have to eat lunch somewhere.
The city I live in now only has 2 traditional style malls left. When I moved here numerous years ago it had 7 malls, all of which were accessible by bus. That is a major change and there has been no new malls built. The buildings just stand there like relics of a time gone past. Retail and restaurants have moved into existing strip malls that had space available due to businesses folding. Back where I grew up it is the same story.
I miss the tradition malls because some had unique and good food places. As well as arcades, movie theaters, and places to hang out. Malls that are thriving do so because there is enough population around to support the businesses and they have new stores coming in to fill out the empty spaces.
When I was a wee lad, my Grandmother used to spend days with me while my parents were working, and after say, a morning in the park, we'd go to the mall and get lunch at the restaurant in JC Penney's.
It was run by a gentleman of Greek descent, whom my Grandmother knew, as she seemed to know everyone, and served brunch, lunch, dinner, like any other small cafe. I would routinely get a hot dog, served on toasted white bread. It was tremendous.
I miss those days, and the subsequent teen years of the nineties spent mall-ratting with my friends, hitting the record store, book store, the arcade (don't get me started on the demise of the video game arcade) people-watching...
Times change, and I assume, so will these structures, whether it be to fade into irrelevance or transform into something vibrant and communal again.
The malls around me are doing just fine. My friends and I find them to be a fine place to go occasionally. I've always found them to be a nice place to be around. I don't really get the complaints about them in this thread.
That law of headlines thing applies here.
241 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 501 ms ] threadUPDATE:
So I am from NYC, and I have lived in urban areas my entire life. Finding the right stores so that I could make immediate purchases has never been an issue for me, but based on early comments, I clearly have a myopic view.
I can see how a mall could potentially offer an "urban" experience (meaning that food, stores, people are all conveniently located in a nearby area) in a non-urban area.
I don't believe the existence of services like Yelp offsets this much if at all. People who don't mind spending the extra time to use it and then to travel around to the places they find (or even wait for shipment) are not necessarily the shoppers a mall caters to, as they're obviously not so concerned with getting what they need quickly with minimal travel.
There's also the social and entertainment aspect to consider. Many malls have food courts and restaurants and/or include movie theaters (or even theme parks, which I find hilarious, but it's there).
Malls do often exist for and serves purposes other than just providing goods in a centralized location... but that purpose itself hasn't lost its utility.
Yelp and local transport doesn't meet this niche. Or, it only meets it in a handful of big dense cities that have decent shopping districts. Malls replicate that sort of experience for a spread out suburban area.
Is all that sustainable? Apparently not.
The technology that will tell us if some pants are a good fit or not is still nowhere near where it need to be.
Many other stores will die quickly though.
The future of retail will be where it is fully integrated into the manufacturing chain to enable just in time manufacturing and delivery of the perfect item with the cost savings from such automation passed onto the consumer due to competition.
It won't tell you if the fabric is too itchy/uncomfortable, just one example.
When I come back home, I would like to take my son to the mall as well and spend the morning just browsing around and buying trinkets. It's fun!
Amazon may be cheaper but come on, going to the mall is not all about shopping, it's about the experience!
2. Parking
3. Convenience. It's much easier to walk around a mall in winter than it is a city centre.
I think parking can be dealt with in a city center.
I like winter :-p I know not everyone does, though.
More relevant to HN: The comments so far suggest that many of us are pretty far removed from not only the demographics that use malls, but also the people who run them and the shop owners and managers that are their tenants. It's important to remember, though, that this doesn't mean they don't exist or that they're somehow wrong.
Many malls are still successful, and to suggest that because some are closing the model is dead is baseless.
I think the only way to compete with online shopping and with Wal-Mart, is with an experience that goes beyond efficient commerce. Some people, some of the time, will gravitate toward an authentic in-person social environment that is interesting overall, and which happens to include interesting shops.
This also tends to make the place more interesting for tourists, which at least up to a point can have a beneficial impact
I'm also thinking of smaller towns. People may drive there, park, then walk around and enjoy it -- and spend money. There are towns like this around New England, for example. They're destinations people want to visit or live in. If instead the town had a Wal-Mart, it wouldn't be the same economic benefit to the town. Who would visit for that?
Of course even better if there were rail service to the town. I'm not disagreeing with you, there. I'm just pointing out that this isn't only an urbanista issue. I think it matters as much, maybe even more so, for smaller cities and towns.
Our town does have a bus system but most of them drive around empty or nearly so most of the time. We also have a decent indoor mall and several outdoor "big box store" shopping centers which all seem to be surviving if not thriving.
This is happening, big time.
It is insane, when I was growing up the downtown was scary. Not only were there very few places to go, it was crime ridden and a blight. If you wanted to go shopping or to a restaurant you had to go to the suburbs, mostly the suburban mall. In the last several years, downtown has completely transformed. I live far away and ever time I come back there is TONS of new stuff there. About 6-7 years ago I now see the few things that were starting to come in was the beginnings of this revitalization.
--
There is a reluctance among posters here to consider a "yes" to the question in the title. Which seems strange and perhaps self-conscious. Consider:
"Mall traffic, for a number of years, has been slowing down. Whether it continues to decline somewhat over time, I think that’s realistic to assume."
People from companies as large as the Gap rarely get more explicit than that when talking about dying aspects of their business. The writing is on the wall, folks.
Did you actually attend malls in their heyday? Today's mall is a sad shadow of their former selves, and as a result a poor way to judge how or why we enjoyed them in decades past.
Well, actually, as I recall, malls were typically where you went for stores for those things that tended to be overpriced and had limited selection, but were conveniently located together along with restaurants and places for the kids to be entertained (like arcades and sometimes play areas, carousels, etc.)
- A sanctioned place to hang out with friends outside of school
- A predecessor to online shopping. If you buy it online today, and you can't get it from Target/Walmart/Etc, chances are you would have gone to a mall back then.
- Lots and lots of different clothes stores. The HN crowd probably doesn't care for this much, but other people liked that part a lot!
- Bustling and full of people. This has its downsides to be sure, but it can be nice to be around other people, and they didn't feel like the ghost towns they do today.
When malls were in their heyday when I was growing up, there was no Target or Walmart. At least not anywhere close to where I lived.
>A sanctioned place to hang out with friends outside of school
Malls now are starting to outright not let kids in unless they are accompanied by an adult. I am dead serious, I got carded entering a mall in 2008 and was told the policy is nobody under 18 unless accompanied by an adult. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/shopping-malls-increasingly-p...
Biggest drawback I see to the older style 'mall' areas was lack of expandability - the structure was forever in place - you couldn't change the character with a new wing/section very easily. Outdoor shopping areas have a bit more flexibility in that respect.
Much like radio and tv have far more competition for our time, so too do malls have more competition for our time and money. But they had a good run :)
Or were you referring to the consumer productivity lost studying the grass or feeding squirrels and pigeons rather than paying attention to the fabulous product offerings in the mall curriculum? God forbid people obtain value without anyone profiting; think of the children!
I personally suspect coastal California got indoor shopping malls...
Are you being serious? There are many stores all next to each other. Don't overthink it, it's as simple as that.
The indoor shopping mall was, initially, a huge convenience. You could drive to one place, park once (usually for free), and visit a variety of shops in climate-controlled comfort (nice in rainy/winter seasons or hot summers). Most people found this preferable to driving all over town or even to a central downtown or shopping district, hunting and paying to park on the street or in a remote garage, and having to walk from shop to shop outdoors. As malls got bigger and bigger, though, the shops became more and more specialized and less interesting to most shoppers. Walking vast distances between the one or two shops you want to visit just recreated the original problem.
Young people used to like to hang out at malls because it was something to do. There was usually a video game arcade and movie theatres, offering entertainment you could not get at home. You could browse shops with friends, and catch up on gossip. Before mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc. you actually had to stay in touch face-to-face and meeting at the mall was easy.
So malls are dying because a) most of them are too big and b) most of the social and entertainment opportunities have been replaced by technology.
Sad. I miss my local arcade and video stores... there's only one video store left and the arcade closed up shop back in 2008.
I wish people would get off their asses for once and experience life! Convenience isn't everything. You don't make memories by sitting in front of a black rectangular slab with buttons and menus to choose from, you make memories from experiences. Like going places.. walking. Biking. Breathing. Seeing.
If we're not using all 5 senses I think there's no point in doing something.
Now that we order online, comparison shop online, etc, why would I want to walk through Sears vs JC Penney? (for example) The internet ate the convenience aspect of the malls, and left only the social aspect or the Shopping Experience itself.
Also, they decided that a bunch of loitering teens were more trouble than they were worth, and made bunches of rules designed to make teenaged mall rats go elsewhere. Those rules went horribly right.
I think one thing is seriously damaging malls: we're now allowing huge corporate-owned "public spaces" in a way we never used to, which give the retailers the advantages of a mall while being out in the open. But where I live new malls are still opening, and they're still great places to go (as is what claims to be the first ever mall, on Jermyn Street).
What people have abandoned is indoor, stale, sunlight less, copycat malls with the same awful pizza and Chinese chains and the same terrible jewelry stores.
People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer.
However tacitly this article is pointing to a possible larger problem in the Midwest where cold weather, and permanently depressed economy and a talent drain is leaving them without the tools to build interesting gathering places. This is a far larger and sadder issue.
The entire place used to be an outdoor mall, but a skylight was added to keep out the notorious SF fog while retaining natural light.
The next logical step in its transformation would be moving more of the parking into structures or underground, and building apartments on the land. But that would require the blessing of neighbors and activists in the area, not an easy task.
Where I live summers are a bit too warm and winters a bit too cold to make outdoor shopping joyful. Also, streets are noisy and full of aggressive drivers and the sidewalks are full of holes and broken tiles. So in the last few years this 1.5M population city has seen the construction of 10 shopping malls, most of which are actually really nice "gathering places" as you put it and most of which seem to thrive.
One advantage from most of the US malls that I have been to is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them, that most of the malls are built near subway or tram stops and that they somehow fit nicely into the surrounding architecture.
Often the malls are built in the city center and usually in a very nice quality. Usually the malls have one major supermarket chain in the basement that acts as an anchor store and usually they have a cinema and a food court in the top floor that offers not just the usual fast food but often also some decent food.
I really enjoy shopping in a mall and until someone fixes the problem of waiting and paying for delivery I don't see online shopping making malls obsolete.
Any restructuring of retail shopping in the US would have to include thinking about how entire districts are laid out. It takes one person -- the owner -- to restructure a mall, but considerably more cooperation and time to restructure neighborhoods.
http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/tysons/
A much better example is Atlantic Station in Atlanta: http://atlanticstation.com. They nuked the existing streets and put in a human-scale street grid: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Atlantic_.... All the parking is underground or at the periphery of the development. The only thing missing is a subway stop (the Arts Center stop is across that awful oppressive highway).
[1] Contrast http://wamu.org/sites/wamu.org/files/styles/headline_landsca... with http://mlmerillat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/chicago-el1.jp....
I do wish it was more revolutionary like your examples, but there's not much reason to think that Tyson's won't look a bit more like Chicago's loop in 20 years.
I'm actually on the side of wishing our local politicians had gotten their heads out of their asses and buried the lines, but we get what we get and I'm of the ilk that still thinks elevated lines look retro futuristic and cool.
http://cooldcre.com/image_store/uploads/8/6/5/6/4/ar13436975...
http://dcmud.blogspot.com/2011/02/tysons-developers-plan-40-...
http://thetysonscorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Tysons...
TBH, it doesn't affect me at all, except that Tyson's, being so overly car centric, is a place I don't go because it's such a grind to get around right now. That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.
IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.
Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.
Thanks for bringing this up. Dealing with parking is a much more complex problem than was assumed for the last 50 years or so. Better modeling should improve the situation going forward though, and could help effectively redevelop some of these megamall wastelands too.
Shaka Shaka Chicken, of course.
To quote Pulp fiction "It's the little differences". I love going to malls and supermarkets when I'm in a new country or city. Sure they're 95% the same, but those other 5% are often unique for the area and quite telling.
I don't know of any malls being constructed in the Netherlands.
In de Bogaard, includes 3 malls according to http://www.denhaag.nl/en/residents/to/In-de-Bogaard.htm
What a depressing yet accurate description. Growing up in California suburbia, spending time with friends or family at the (Brea, Santa Ana) malls was always mind numbing. Those places had no life or character. Others didn't seem as bothered, and I've chalked that up to my mood being more influenced by my surroundings than most. Even today I find my mood and productivity drastically affected by the age, quality, design, openness, brightness, etc of my work environment.
A popular one around here actually has a large skylight spanning most of the middle of the roof.
There are a lot of good reasons to prefer an indoor place. The weather's often not comfortable outside. It's only really perfectly comfortable for a time throughout the year that sums to maybe a few months over here. Maybe you're used to some place where it's the perfect weather all year?
"People want shopping centers to reflect regional and local character, be in town centers, and offer high quality unique options with a few staples. Get rid of the huge parking lots and add a grocer."
Do they really want all that, or do they just want some place with a bunch of stores and maybe a movie theater and food court, in a nice indoor climate-controlled environment and some light music in the background?
You just admitted in your last paragraph that the weather in that place makes an outdoor gathering less desirable.
You can think of it as Caprica from Battlestar Galactica, or the FBI HQ in the X Files. Brutalism in its full glory. Even crazier is the library: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Library-SFU-Burnaby-Britis...
U of T did you one better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robarts_Library.JPG
And.. holy crap, that library is freaking awesome. Although, I think the Geisel Library at UCSD takes the cake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geisel-Library.jpg
http://kunstlercast.com/shows/kunstlercast_111_brutalism.htm...
"Darth Vader" windows :-)
Of course, the host's main concern is about peak oil, so he would have some other things to say about the gradual decline of malls.
I'm not as extreme, but mail order is definitely more economical than frequent commutes to a far away shopping center. I'm glad I live within easy biking distance from an outdoor shopping center, which has many little restaurants (chain & local) to hit for lunch when working from home, as well as a theatre, Target & a "Whole Foods"-like grocery store. I can carry a fair amount of stuff home on bike rack "pannier" bags, and sometimes only get in the car one or two days a week to make an appearance at work. Only the Target has decent bike racks, though. Otherwise, trees and trash cans get pressed into service :-)
That said, as the article focuses on Gap, I think their problems are far more pronounced than just malls or online. The Gap and Baby Gap store in Santa Cruz are almost always completely empty, and that seems to be the case for most places. I get the feeling Target is just dominating them, selling the same clothes cheaper.
If it was the standard mcdonalds-unrecognisable foodcourt chicken with different sauce-etc, I would hate it.
Exactly.
Take for example the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan[1]. It's in the city center, it's visually spectacular, it's unique, and it's a fun place to visit, eat lunch, window shop, or spend (too much) money. It's been around for 150 years which indicates that this is a sustainable model for a shopping mall in a dense & vibrant city.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Vittorio_Emanuele_II
If you have kids this is doubly important, you don't get wet! (Or cold I suppose). If traditional retail could solve this then well done them, but how? I'm not keen on the sterile everything-is-a-chainstore atmosphere of indoors malls but you can't argue with the convenience and the not getting wetness. I would prefer multi-storey car parking though, I hate the sprawl of these enormous car parks, so ugly! why not build a tall multi-storey car park and lots of nice green spaces with trees and ponds and fountains?
Although they've gotten increasingly commercially commoditized, Quincy Market/Faneuil Hall, Newbury Street and the Prudential Center are mostly done right. The Prudential Center is the most "gray box" of them all, but the skylight that cuts through nearly the entire structure opens it up quite a bit.
But the more interesting part is at the end - as shopping malls become less desirable, rents will go down. This could lead to a radical reinvention of what a mall looks and feels like. So malls as we know them might be dead, but "the mall" isn't done yet.
[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/this-is-the-rea...
If no one is willing to spend the money to seriously build a new mall then the mall is dead. It will still be part of the landscape for a while, just as you can see the remains of failed fast food chains, nuclear weapon launch sites, and pre-bussing decentralized high schools, but that is just reuse.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/croydon-westfield-set-...
Maybe large parts of the US just has too many/too large ones, given how many of them were developed pre-online shopping. And a problem with malls is of course that population shifts are far harder to accommodate when such a large area is operated as one unit. If the mall owner does not actively manage changes due to changes in the surrounding area, it can easily become obsolete as a whole.
There was an interesting recent episode of 99% Invisible about re-using old Pizza Huts: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/u-t-b-a-p-h/
Except the larger stores that anchor a mall actually pay less per square foot than the smaller stores. In order to get financing for a large mall, backers want to see big names signed on. So a mall developer goes out and lands a big fish and promises them a sweetheart deal. So right now you have the little guys paying full price not being able to pay. So it's only a matter of time before the discounted big boys can't. One of the big exceptions being sporting good stores such as Dick's.
Source: Worked on a very sad customer loyalty program for Simon Property Group, Inc.
http://www.straight.com/news/608306/vancouver-approves-oakri...
I think we're going to see a lot more developments like Burnaby's "SOLO District" -- underground parking, 10 acres of ground floor retail, ~7 acres of park space on the roof of the retail space, 1-2 acres of 6-storey office space, and 2-3 acres of 30-50 storey residential space. If you're lucky, you could live, work, and shop without leaving the building -- and if you do need to go somewhere, the skytrain is right across the street, so you probably won't need to drive.
Yes, retailers face heated competition from the likes of Amazon, and yes I am not the typical mall demographic. But the malls I know—assuming they have a spectrum of trendy retailers—tend to be just as busy as ever when I have reason to visit. I hate the crowded parking lots as much as I ever did.
If they're stuck in the 1990s with Sbarro, Foot Locker, and JC Penney, yeah, they're probably suffering. But that's just not keeping current with consumer demand and isn't really an indictment of the model in general.
A lot of those outdoor destinations even seem centered around a movie theater now, which one might predict is also on the decline - though every time I've visited these places, they seem pretty packed. (At least, on weekends.)
I find everything I need/want in stores that are either standalone or in small (10 storefronts or less) shopping centers.
Los Angeles is an odd city, one that operates in a much more urban way than it looks on the surface.
A new approach: Anchor stores, entertainment, utility, accessiblity, asthetics, a spectrum of economic appeal, grocery stores. Owners can be demanding of rents to some extent, but when they drive out (or never had) a movie theatre or grocery store, they are losing the "single destination for lots of what you need" and "nice place to go" value.
Of some LA malls, I think the Fallbrook Center [1] has rebuilt itself well, regarding:
* Entertainmnet-wise, AMC Theatres rebuilt the old shoebox-y 7-screen multiplex with way fewer seats. Moreso, every movie theatre seat is a wide-width, electrically-powered recliner including footrests! What used to be 20 rows of seats is now 7 or 8 for one screen, so prices are a bit higher. One can /reserve a seat/ via Fandango over the Internet (fee refunded by AMC) so one doesn't have to come early and wait in line for "a good seat"; they're all good and one can book them in advance. The theatre feels much more full, and seems more popular.
* By "spectrum of economic appeal", specifically, Fallbrook has /three/ full grocery stores (a "Ralphs" (Kroger) supermarket, "Sprouts Farmers Market" luxury grocery, and a "Trader Joes", plus two more department stores that include grocery sections: A Target and a Walmart.
* Utility-wise, it's got a Home Depot, a 24-Hour-Fitness gym, a Chuck-E-Cheese (hat tip to Nolan Bushnell)
* Accessability-wise, there are street lights at mid-block entrances for auto traffic, and bike lanes on the streets for bicycle traffic, and bike racks (though I'd like to see more of those).
* For asthetics, there are planters and small stand-alone buildings facing the street (urban-style). This broke the ugly old impression the prior desert-of-asphalt a hot summer's day brought.
* Instead of a food court, the small buildings facing the street are a mix of stand-alone and multi-tenant places to eat, both sit-down (indoor) and walk-up bar with outdoor seating. Market diversity here too: Starbucks, Jamba Juice, IHOP, a lobster specialty franchise, and a non-franchised grill (Tikka grill) and non-franchised Vietnamese restaurant.
They're doing fine, there is such a diversity of things to do as well as things to get there.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallbrook_Center
Edit: grammar, clarity
We could call these things something catchy... like "downtowns".
Crappy malls are dying. Decent malls in more affluent areas are diversifying their experiences and thriving. In some places, indoor malls make a lot of sense. I live in Minnesota (home of the original indoor mall, Southdale). It's cold here a good chunk of the year, and an indoor mall isn't a half bad idea.
Our local mall has 3 anchor stores: Macys, JC Penny, and Sears. Two of those three have reported sales increases in the last quarter but it's a mystery on how Sears stays in business.
The other popular stores are all gone - American Eagle, The Gap, etc. Instead, new tenants have replaced them which make the place look like an indoor flea market.
Also enhancing the flea market look are the kiosks of people reselling things from cell phone cases to cheap sunglasses and worse jewelry than the mall jewelry stores, which are half gone as well. There's even a store that's almost like a 7-11, they sell candy bars and bottles of soda and chips.
I used to live between two of their major malls for years. I could barely leave my apartment for 2 months before xmas due to traffic. They just spent millions remodeling their high end mall adding capacity and additional room for high end stores like Sacks and Restoration Hardware.
Non generic crap malls are fine. Junk stores that have generic brand cheapish clothes and the like (JCPenny) are being replaced by Amazon, but overall malls are doing fine.
It's easy when you have 3,200 employees that you need under one roof, but malls would work great for for 20-500 employee businesses as well. The larger companies would take the spots used by anchor stores and of course the smaller companies could subdivide or take the smaller stores.
There's plenty of parking, they're located in the suburbs where many people live - and the food courts can even stay open, those employees have to eat lunch somewhere.
I miss the tradition malls because some had unique and good food places. As well as arcades, movie theaters, and places to hang out. Malls that are thriving do so because there is enough population around to support the businesses and they have new stores coming in to fill out the empty spaces.
It was run by a gentleman of Greek descent, whom my Grandmother knew, as she seemed to know everyone, and served brunch, lunch, dinner, like any other small cafe. I would routinely get a hot dog, served on toasted white bread. It was tremendous.
I miss those days, and the subsequent teen years of the nineties spent mall-ratting with my friends, hitting the record store, book store, the arcade (don't get me started on the demise of the video game arcade) people-watching...
Times change, and I assume, so will these structures, whether it be to fade into irrelevance or transform into something vibrant and communal again.