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.
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.
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.
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?
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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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.
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.
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.
'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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Or you know they could try to promote more mixed use properties, which is what most people actually want.
It's very clear that city centers are growing everywhere because that's what young people are gravitating towards. It's a lifestyle thing and if they don't consider the lifestyle people aspire to in their future plans, they are going to go bankrupt again.
Take a look at SF for an example. Many people would love to live in the few blocks surrounding the commercial areas of the Mission, the Haight (upper and lower), North Beach, Union Street, Hayes Valley, etc. Those areas are desirable because they are supremely convenient. They are the "modern mall" because they are also the "timeless mall", i.e. the mall that naturally forms when people decide where they want to shop instead of corporate overseers. It's a pattern that exists everywhere in the world in big modern cities to small towns designed before the advent of the car.
Betting on mixed use buildings creates "captive demand", since your commercial store customers conveniently live right upstairs. And they are happy to live in such buildings because they provide the ultimate access by foot to food, bars, supermarkets and other businesses that enrich their lifestyle.
There are a few thing they need to do to make such mixed use properties desirable.
* Mixed use properties need authentic business with unique identity instead of franchises (e.g. a building with a starbucks and a moe's underneath it isn't as desirable as one with a neighborhood coffee shop and a local burrito joint).
* The deals struck by commercial owner's associations (COAs) need to consider the needs of the HOA which is often formed after the COA for any mixed use property. Any property (like the Beacon in SF) where the COA has unfair deals that prejudice the residents of a building often end up in litigation that suppresses the value of the the property in the building causing the building to move to having more renters than owners.
Unfortunately many of the new building projects in SF don't take this into account. There are a ton of new projects going up south of the ballpark. All those properties will be filled because of the extremely limited stock of housing, but they are not going to be desirable places to live because of how few of those properties are designed to be mixed use, which is what will make that area feel like a neighborhood instead of a vertical suburb that you need to leave in order to visit a commercial center.
Basically my feeling is that malls are "over" for people who are too poor to shop anywhere but the deep discount world of Walmart. If we get minimum wage raised to a high enough place that they can actually pay for anything more than the barest minimum to pay rent and eat and whatnot, then they'll have the funds to start shopping at places that actually have nice things and well-paid employees.
I live in Seattle. There's a lot of malls, shopping districts, and other kinds of collections of shops. There's also a lot of money in the town, to support all these stores of all sizes.
Malls are dying all over because money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. People who want their malls to thrive should be campaigning for a living wage for everyone (or eve better, a basic income) - because all those people will have enough money to happily buy all their pretty trinkets.
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.
This is really an important question as malls are usually massive holders of lots of valuable real estate in many towns.
Where I live, there are...maybe around a dozen proper stereotypical malls within an hour drive. Of those, the two malls I literally grew up in have had very different trajectories.
The one next to my highschool is a veritable empty shell. I think it sits at 40% occupancy, with entire wings boarded up, lights turned off and otherwise abandoned. When I was in High School it was the city center, so bustling and full of people it was often hard to walk in a straight line. I'd leave school and go to the mall instead of taking the bus home, mill around in the arcade for a bit, eat some cheap Chinese food in the food court, bum around in Radio Shack or the electronics section at JC Penny or just hang around with friends mallrats style. It seemed like it would stay this way forever.
But some key demographic shifts happened in the 2000s and the entire city changed, leaving the mall a grotesque enlarged gangrenous tumor hanging off of the attached Walmart. Strangely, the arcade that was there, then closed, is back open again and one of the few signs of life in the entire place.
I've thought a lot about what happened, and the basic conclusion is that it had to do with the housing boom and bust. In the 2000s as the housing market was exploding, people who had lived in this older city suddenly found out their houses had doubled in value. They sold them off and turned the equity into a down payment on a new house in new suburbs. Those new suburbs came complete with new malls (the two new malls near the new suburb I live in are pretty jam packed all the time) and everybody left.
So who bought those old houses? The people who were working on building the new suburbs. In this case largely immigrant workers from Hispanic countries. They needed the cheapest possible housing, and these older areas, though now much more expensive, were still lower cost than the new suburbs.
Because of the higher housing costs and the lower pay these new immigrants had, expensive mall shopping just wasn't on their regular agenda. Better bargains were the draw and Walmart boomed, outgrew their original store and struck an agreement with the mall for cheap property and rent if they could become the new anchor at the mall. If you drive a circle around the mall these days, the parking lot outside of the Walmart is packed to the gills, there are maybe 2 dozen cars in any other lot at the mall combined. A walk through the mall tells the same story, Walmart is buzzing with activity, but right outside the doors, nobody goes anywhere else.
To give you an idea what a huge shift this is and that I'm not imagining it, when I graduated, my highschool was something like 85% White, and 3% Hispanic. In 2012 it was less than 30% white, and 42% Hispanic. For comparison, the demographics of the entire region are 55.41% White and 16.3% Hispanic.
The other mall, in another nearby town, is doing well. It's a larger mall, and the demographics of the area didn't really change all that much. It's not quite as busy as it used to be, the anchor stores seem to be the most empty, but it seems to be getting along fine.
Now in the 2000s, two new malls sprung up in the newly built suburbs. One, a traditional all under one roof enclosed 1.4 million sq ft mall. It's new and pleasant and does pretty well. It's not packed at all times, but business is obviously doing well enough there. The other is an open air discount outlet mall and it's packed, shoulder to shoulder, at all times. I bet if I were to go there right now I'd have trouble finding parking. It's booming, and there's talk of them expanding the property to a sister mall across the main town thoroughfare with a connecting pedestrian tunnel.
There's also a pair of high-end luxury malls in another nearby town that have been through all of this pretty much without hiccup. A time traveler from 1998 to today wouldn't notice much difference except for the fashion.
So yes, I think some malls are dead or dying. That much is clear. But I think the reasons for it are more than just Amazon. There's still lots of services I get from my local malls. I don't go every week, but the 3 or 4 times I do go I inevitably walk out with a few hundred dollars worth of clothes and other goods. And looking at the other people there, the demographics span from young to old, I don't think Amazon has quite replaced the kind of buying where you have to go see the product.
Some stores have caught on to this, and have a seamless exchange program from their online stores. They know that you'll end up buying something you don't like or can't fit into, so they let you bring it back to their physical store, because that's less hassle than shipping it back. They'll even time online sales to preceed in-store sales a bit, so when you come to the store to return the ill-fitting item, why don't you browse the 50% of sale they're offering right now?
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Thinking about this more, I think a similar effect can be seen in the midwest. As agriculture labor shifted to much cheaper migrant workers and automation, the people who used to live in these places year round either became less affluent, or moved away. Either way the local malls had a smaller pool of eligible customers and they die off.
Maybe it's because I live in Palo Alto, but it seems, at least here, that there is a hollowing out of the middle end of the spectrum. On the low end, there are still the Target's and the Walmart's, and on the high end you have things like Stanford Shopping Center, Union Square, Santa Row, etc. The middle has taken a real beating though, as has the low middle. I'm not sure who shops at JC Penny, Sears, or even K-Mart for that matter.
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 American model of malls may be over. The model where there are crazy numbers of huge malls everywhere, even in relatively small populations. But malls are still hugely popular.
In Canada, where we have a lot less malls, they seem to be growing more popular. With renovations and extensions being built to attract and accommodate more shoppers. But there aren't that many major malls here, and they stick to major population areas. I'm always surprised the size of malls in small towns when I visit the US. Northwood, Ohio has a population of 5,000. That doesn't seem like it could sustain a mall the size described, even if you include the surrounding area and assume there's no other malls in the area.
I think the model will change, but malls will stay around for a long time. You'll have larger malls servicing more population, rather than malls for every town.
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!
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.
Yes. They were a horrible substitute for public spaces anyway. Now the malls aren't the only alternative to teenagers wandering the streets engaging in aimless vandalism; they can stare into screens 12 hours a day, yet still shop and gossip (and engage in aimless vandalism.) Also, Amazon.com doesn't have to pay taxes, because Internet, so that's accelerating the decline of all physical retail. Malls weren't doing great before Amazon - deadmalls is nearly a dead site, it's been around so long.
The only good places for malls are cute little cities that attract a lot of small town tourists, and places with a lot of people too old to understand the internet but rich enough to not have to work.
If US malls want to survive they need to start copying international malls, which are a lot more upscale, better looking (new or significantly renovated) and above all offer a much better mix between entertainment (movie theaters etc) and food (actual restaurants you would WANT to go to instead of chain/fast-food places) as well as stores. The problem with many malls is that they are copy cats of each other. Uninspiring 'practical' architecture, inedible food, the exact same stores at every mall, not much to do besides shopping and having a fast-foody coffee.
U.S. malls do tend to have movie theaters. But they aren't going to pay high rent to get into a mall if there is open commercial land anywhere nearby.
It's a similar thing with decent restaurants, they don't necessarily gain much from the association.
I saw a thing in a local paper that the bankrupt mall should 'bring in' good stores. Of course this is backwards, the stores mentioned in the comment have no interest in running a store in a run down mall in a small market.
One of the big things about most malls outside the US is that they aren't usually built in the middle of nowhere. You don't need to drive for an hour then struggle to find a place to park just to buy some jeans. In some cases this is a because the transport links were built afterwards, but in most cases this is because they are built in areas that are already connected. Obviously space is restricted so they are smaller (250,000 sq ft is a pretty average size), this means you often end up with the same well known brands in each mall which can be a bit boring. Due to space and as malls are usually in the 'town centre' you don't always have cinemas in the mall, but they can usually be found nearby.
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.
I have fond memories of hanging out in malls when I was a kid, but my fondest memories are about things that I don't find in malls anymore. Arcades, toy stores, book stores, hobby shops, electronics, music shops, etc. Those things still exist but it seems like there's a lot less of them now.
When I go to malls now it seems like nothing but designer clothing stores. I swear there used to be a lot more diversity in the the types of stores you'd find. I'm not sure if this is a real trend or just the haze of childhood memories.
[+] [-] tsunamifury|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flexie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimmaswell|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] igravious|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] edj|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gress|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahsd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lewisham|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] blackjack48|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MrFoof|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] meddlepal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylz|12 years ago|reply
If it was the standard mcdonalds-unrecognisable foodcourt chicken with different sauce-etc, I would hate it.
[+] [-] xcrunner529|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carsongross|12 years ago|reply
We could call these things something catchy... like "downtowns".
[+] [-] jessedhillon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
--
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.
[+] [-] ams6110|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Touche|12 years ago|reply
Are you being serious? There are many stores all next to each other. Don't overthink it, it's as simple as that.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lmm|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] meddlepal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aestra|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lmm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhauer|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] untog|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] yasth|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dylz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erdle2|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] malandrew|12 years ago|reply
It's very clear that city centers are growing everywhere because that's what young people are gravitating towards. It's a lifestyle thing and if they don't consider the lifestyle people aspire to in their future plans, they are going to go bankrupt again.
Take a look at SF for an example. Many people would love to live in the few blocks surrounding the commercial areas of the Mission, the Haight (upper and lower), North Beach, Union Street, Hayes Valley, etc. Those areas are desirable because they are supremely convenient. They are the "modern mall" because they are also the "timeless mall", i.e. the mall that naturally forms when people decide where they want to shop instead of corporate overseers. It's a pattern that exists everywhere in the world in big modern cities to small towns designed before the advent of the car.
Betting on mixed use buildings creates "captive demand", since your commercial store customers conveniently live right upstairs. And they are happy to live in such buildings because they provide the ultimate access by foot to food, bars, supermarkets and other businesses that enrich their lifestyle.
There are a few thing they need to do to make such mixed use properties desirable.
* Mixed use properties need authentic business with unique identity instead of franchises (e.g. a building with a starbucks and a moe's underneath it isn't as desirable as one with a neighborhood coffee shop and a local burrito joint). * The deals struck by commercial owner's associations (COAs) need to consider the needs of the HOA which is often formed after the COA for any mixed use property. Any property (like the Beacon in SF) where the COA has unfair deals that prejudice the residents of a building often end up in litigation that suppresses the value of the the property in the building causing the building to move to having more renters than owners.
Unfortunately many of the new building projects in SF don't take this into account. There are a ton of new projects going up south of the ballpark. All those properties will be filled because of the extremely limited stock of housing, but they are not going to be desirable places to live because of how few of those properties are designed to be mixed use, which is what will make that area feel like a neighborhood instead of a vertical suburb that you need to leave in order to visit a commercial center.
[+] [-] egypturnash|12 years ago|reply
I live in Seattle. There's a lot of malls, shopping districts, and other kinds of collections of shops. There's also a lot of money in the town, to support all these stores of all sizes.
Malls are dying all over because money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. People who want their malls to thrive should be campaigning for a living wage for everyone (or eve better, a basic income) - because all those people will have enough money to happily buy all their pretty trinkets.
[+] [-] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
Where I live, there are...maybe around a dozen proper stereotypical malls within an hour drive. Of those, the two malls I literally grew up in have had very different trajectories.
The one next to my highschool is a veritable empty shell. I think it sits at 40% occupancy, with entire wings boarded up, lights turned off and otherwise abandoned. When I was in High School it was the city center, so bustling and full of people it was often hard to walk in a straight line. I'd leave school and go to the mall instead of taking the bus home, mill around in the arcade for a bit, eat some cheap Chinese food in the food court, bum around in Radio Shack or the electronics section at JC Penny or just hang around with friends mallrats style. It seemed like it would stay this way forever.
But some key demographic shifts happened in the 2000s and the entire city changed, leaving the mall a grotesque enlarged gangrenous tumor hanging off of the attached Walmart. Strangely, the arcade that was there, then closed, is back open again and one of the few signs of life in the entire place.
I've thought a lot about what happened, and the basic conclusion is that it had to do with the housing boom and bust. In the 2000s as the housing market was exploding, people who had lived in this older city suddenly found out their houses had doubled in value. They sold them off and turned the equity into a down payment on a new house in new suburbs. Those new suburbs came complete with new malls (the two new malls near the new suburb I live in are pretty jam packed all the time) and everybody left.
So who bought those old houses? The people who were working on building the new suburbs. In this case largely immigrant workers from Hispanic countries. They needed the cheapest possible housing, and these older areas, though now much more expensive, were still lower cost than the new suburbs.
Because of the higher housing costs and the lower pay these new immigrants had, expensive mall shopping just wasn't on their regular agenda. Better bargains were the draw and Walmart boomed, outgrew their original store and struck an agreement with the mall for cheap property and rent if they could become the new anchor at the mall. If you drive a circle around the mall these days, the parking lot outside of the Walmart is packed to the gills, there are maybe 2 dozen cars in any other lot at the mall combined. A walk through the mall tells the same story, Walmart is buzzing with activity, but right outside the doors, nobody goes anywhere else.
To give you an idea what a huge shift this is and that I'm not imagining it, when I graduated, my highschool was something like 85% White, and 3% Hispanic. In 2012 it was less than 30% white, and 42% Hispanic. For comparison, the demographics of the entire region are 55.41% White and 16.3% Hispanic.
The other mall, in another nearby town, is doing well. It's a larger mall, and the demographics of the area didn't really change all that much. It's not quite as busy as it used to be, the anchor stores seem to be the most empty, but it seems to be getting along fine.
Now in the 2000s, two new malls sprung up in the newly built suburbs. One, a traditional all under one roof enclosed 1.4 million sq ft mall. It's new and pleasant and does pretty well. It's not packed at all times, but business is obviously doing well enough there. The other is an open air discount outlet mall and it's packed, shoulder to shoulder, at all times. I bet if I were to go there right now I'd have trouble finding parking. It's booming, and there's talk of them expanding the property to a sister mall across the main town thoroughfare with a connecting pedestrian tunnel.
There's also a pair of high-end luxury malls in another nearby town that have been through all of this pretty much without hiccup. A time traveler from 1998 to today wouldn't notice much difference except for the fashion.
So yes, I think some malls are dead or dying. That much is clear. But I think the reasons for it are more than just Amazon. There's still lots of services I get from my local malls. I don't go every week, but the 3 or 4 times I do go I inevitably walk out with a few hundred dollars worth of clothes and other goods. And looking at the other people there, the demographics span from young to old, I don't think Amazon has quite replaced the kind of buying where you have to go see the product.
Some stores have caught on to this, and have a seamless exchange program from their online stores. They know that you'll end up buying something you don't like or can't fit into, so they let you bring it back to their physical store, because that's less hassle than shipping it back. They'll even time online sales to preceed in-store sales a bit, so when you come to the store to return the ill-fitting item, why don't you browse the 50% of sale they're offering right now?
edit
Thinking about this more, I think a similar effect can be seen in the midwest. As agriculture labor shifted to much cheaper migrant workers and automation, the people who used to live in these places year round either became less affluent, or moved away. Either way the local malls had a smaller pool of eligible customers and they die off.
[+] [-] z92|12 years ago|reply
"...how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...
[+] [-] Patrick_Devine|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mildtrepidation|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trekky1700|12 years ago|reply
In Canada, where we have a lot less malls, they seem to be growing more popular. With renovations and extensions being built to attract and accommodate more shoppers. But there aren't that many major malls here, and they stick to major population areas. I'm always surprised the size of malls in small towns when I visit the US. Northwood, Ohio has a population of 5,000. That doesn't seem like it could sustain a mall the size described, even if you include the surrounding area and assume there's no other malls in the area.
I think the model will change, but malls will stay around for a long time. You'll have larger malls servicing more population, rather than malls for every town.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|12 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] jimktrains2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|12 years ago|reply
http://www.straight.com/news/608306/vancouver-approves-oakri...
[+] [-] cperciva|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
The only good places for malls are cute little cities that attract a lot of small town tourists, and places with a lot of people too old to understand the internet but rich enough to not have to work.
[+] [-] ulfw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
It's a similar thing with decent restaurants, they don't necessarily gain much from the association.
I saw a thing in a local paper that the bankrupt mall should 'bring in' good stores. Of course this is backwards, the stores mentioned in the comment have no interest in running a store in a run down mall in a small market.
[+] [-] lucaspiller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinph|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mwfunk|12 years ago|reply
When I go to malls now it seems like nothing but designer clothing stores. I swear there used to be a lot more diversity in the the types of stores you'd find. I'm not sure if this is a real trend or just the haze of childhood memories.