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?
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.
I think you hit the nail on the head and this is really region specific.
There was a mall next to me when I was growing up and it was dingy, just poorly maintained. Then the area became hot, Whole Foods moved in. Then Target. Then a bevy of smaller upscale retailers. Now that dingy mall is unrecognizable and filled to the brim. Not a single vacancy. Not a single open parking spot either.
Malls aren't dying. Some malls are, but that has nothing to do with the mall paradigm and has more to do with the local population. A mall can't get up and move. It's like a tree. It is where it is and it either thrives or dies.
The article's example of the Apple store as a model of a retailer that "just plunks a glass cube on busy shopping streets" is pretty clueless. Most Apple stores are in malls!
I think the issue with Malls is that in 1980-something, your choices were dying downtowns, department stores or the Sears/LL Bean/whatever catalog. For food it was local places, McDonalds/Burger King/Wendy's. The mall offered more choice for food and retail.
Nowadays, the traditional mall retailers are all consolidated and offer similar stuff. Why hang out in a food court when you have a dozen fast casual restaurant choices outside the mall?
They definitely have many stores in large urban centers. Click around on the store list, the majority are mall based.
If your city has a freestanding, non-outlet Gap, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel or Williams Sonoma, you are probably worthy of a freestanding Apple store. Otherwise, it will be in an upscale mall near those stores.
In my experience, Apple stores are freestanding in dense urban centers, and located in shopping malls in suburban areas. I haven't seen any exceptions to this rule so far.
> Malls aren't dying. Some malls are, but that has nothing to do with the mall paradigm and has more to do with the local population. A mall can't get up and move. It's like a tree. It is where it is and it either thrives or dies.
I would argue this is exactly why malls are dying, that they can't keep up with more and more rapidly evolving socio-economic trends and shifting demographics across geographies. Another byproduct of globalization and technology-driven streamlining of commerce
Having worked for a major mall owner many years ago, this is the primary reason why malls 'fail' and was completely omitted by the article. Shifting demographics affect Malls in both ways: the design and build of a Mall serving a low socio-economic area is significantly different from 'A-Class' Malls as they are now known.
Where I worked, they had taken a multi year (decade actually) play to purchase two older malls in socio-economic areas that were trending down. They then acquired the land only a short distance (relatively) in a burgeoning new upmarket area and was able to build a new Class A mall (without objections from the other malls ... that they already owned). They then migrated the higher end stores to the new mall and began to close one of the old malls (and were actually able to sell them off!!!). This is evolution, not the death of Malls.
Ehhh... it really depends on where the mall is located. Back home (podunk Rockford IL) malls are indeed dying. They are dilapidated and/or ghost towns. Ten years ago this was not the case.
Where I currently live (La Jolla CA) the opposite is true. Of course, the malls are filled with stores like Saks, Nordstrom, a Tesla show floor, etc. These places are packed. I know I'm not going to buy a $1200+ jacket online any time soon, so I go to the mall for high end stuff.
Houston is a weird mix of both, perhaps as a result of its impressive sprawl. There are dozens of abandoned malls, and dozens of thriving ones. Perhaps land is so cheap that it's just easier to build a new one than to renovate an older one. Gives a weird feeling: by the numbers Houston's economy is booming, but experientially it feels sort of post-industrial, with abandoned properties dotting the landscape.
Houston still weirds me out this way. I stayed in a warehouse near Dynamo for a year or so, in one direction it was a dystopian hell hole and in the other a booming-soon-to-be-hip area. I think that our lack of zoning laws makes this cycle even stranger compared to the rest of the country.
Right, malls are dying in certain areas and flourishing in others. As demographic shifts continue to happen across geographies (and those shifts only seem to be increasing), the very concept of a stationary location of offline commerce ceases to be flexible enough. I don't discount the fact that many or all people would want to try on a $1200 jacket before buying it; simply that the retail model that will thrive in the coming decades involves much greater mobility than a static large shopping center can provide.
Not sure how long you've lived there but the mall I think you're referring to (utc) was remodeled not long ago. The clientele in the area has gotten more upscale and the re-design and new stores (upscale restaurants, tesla, etc) reflects on this. Fwiw based on trying to go there for lunch, foot traffic has never been better.
>Malls aren't dying.
Cities are. Certain "rustbelt" cities and towns to be more specific. The malls that die are invariably in areas of decline.
Caruso may be shifting the game with his paradigm of outdoor faux townscapes [sic] but he is making malls that do not look like malls with the same single ownership structure--and this is the real problem: single entities developing millions of square feet, risking lots of capital and building as cheaply as possible because of the risk. He's just using modern design methods to emmulate old downtowns, as anachronistic as that may seem. But the style is just that. Style.
He does not build in places like Matteson, IL, for example because Lincoln Mall in Matteson is dying due to demographic trends (mostly white flight) and the thriving of another ...mall of the same - style - and vintage but with a shinny Apple store. Places like Matteson are unlucky because other malls in and around the Chicagoland are doing quite fine despite their tired, mid-century-gray motifs.
In places like Chicago where the weather is miserable most of the time winter and summer (IMHO), indoor malls still make a lot of sense. The "Gold Coast" downtown does well because it's a tourist attraction in one a wealthy zip code. But when it's 34-below an indoor mall is a nice respite.
Perhaps I am just venting because my thesis was on these greyfield malls and how to save them without starting from scratch or following the next trend in retail development because many places do not have the luxury to start fresh. Mall typologies are like hairstyles: you may not like afros, comb-overs or mullets, but each one had its day and will have its wearer and they are all here to stay. It's just a matter of how you maintain them.
It would be interesting to see some numbers: total in-use square footage in out-of-town malls over time and so on. That would give a better idea as to whether there's an overall trend or not. It's hard to imagine that the Web hasn't caused an overall decline, though.
You just described Nashville, TN perfectly. I don't know where you are describing, but you just gave a fantastic breakdown of the fall of the Hickory Hollow Mall and the rise and plateauing of either Green Hills or Cool Springs. It was a little uncanny. If it isn't Nashville, TN then this is a spectacular repeating pattern and now I hope I can find some good data sets regarding mall occupancy somewhere that I can visualize.
Fair Oaks mall is closer than Tysons and isn't run-down. actually quite nice. but then again I've never been much of a mall person and dont go much. I prefer Fair Oaks to Tysons though, because those malls in Tysons are _too_ packed!
That was "our" mall in the 90's/very early 2000's. You're spot on the description. "The walmart's moving to the mall!?" was the death rattle of 'assas.
I used to work in that little business park across from where they put the UNO's up on the north end.
I hadn't been there in years, and went back recently and really found it depressing.
The city, Manassas, has a bigger population than ever, but can't sustain the mall. The mall is in a death spiral. Nobody goes there because it's a dump with no place to shop, and they can't get businesses there because nobody goes there and it's a dump. People from Manassas don't even go there, they just go to other nearby malls for their mall-style shopping when they need something.
At this point, the city would be better served to tear the mall down and replace it with a large outdoor style town center. Cost of living in Manassas is relatively cheap compared to other places in NoVA and with enough mixed-use zoning there, could turn it into an attractive place.
I didn't really dig into the city too much, but over the last 20-ish years, the entire city has death spiraled. Grocery stores closed and were reopened as barely maintained "global marts" that made me want to take a bath after I left, franchise restaurants have closed up. etc.
Manassas is an example of white flight (which is a big theme of the communities in NoVA period). Mike O'Meara refers to it as "deviltown" for a reason: it's pretty much been abandoned by its residents.
Though many communities in that region suffer from it, I think Manassas has had very very bad urban planning. Very little is walkable, there's no character to the town, and you see very little green space. It's a case of suburban decay.
The downtown of Manassas is nice enough, but almost nobody thinks of that as "Manassas". Locals almost all call that strip of old Sudly Rd. from 66 to 28 "Manassas" even though I don't think it's part of the municipality in any meaningful way and hence grew without plan or structure. I think probably the only groups with any say-so in the direction it grew were the Battlefield protectionist groups.
But all that was very much a product of the Western expansion of 66. Most of the older folks in the area remember when 66 didn't come out that far and Manassas was just the 234/28 intersection and 28 East to Manassas Park.
When something was done, we end up with bizarreness like two entirely different roads called "234", one that goes through the main strip of town, and the other that goes through countryside and bypasses the commercial center entirely...which no doubt hasn't helped the commercial interests of that area at all.
I know from growing up out there that the anti-battlefield people put a really bad taste in lots of big commercial company's mouths. For example, just a few miles away near Haymarket, the Walt Disney company was even going to open up a theme park and were basically driven out of town.
haven't been there in years, but I work near there and see some construction.. location-wise it's really a very good location. right off the highway, lots of businesses nearby and lots of residential too. i bet if they make a really good food court a lot of the local business folks would go there.. if getting in and out were easy. might be more of a civil engineering/architecture type issue...
Shopping malls are interesting because their entire appeal is predicated on a network effect. So when something reverses that effect, whether it's demographic shifts to the area, a large tenant going out of business, or a competing mall, the results can be devastating and you get a vicious circle death spiral.
As others have noted, malls in general aren't doing too poorly, but for the ones that are they're awfully conspicuous and downright depressing, so I think those tend to stick out in peoples' minds.
Great write up. What I can't tell is whether the change in behavior is class based or culturally based. Do Hispanics not visit the Mall because they're poorer (class) or do they not visit the mall because the Mall is more of a white person invention (cultural)
I think it's class based more than anything, but it's more complex than assigning a single cause.
Mexico City, for example, has plenty of malls, and a decent number of immigrants are from other countries in Central and South America, all places that have malls in the cities.
From the immigrant laborers I've talked to, they mostly seem to come from small towns and village in their home countries and remit as much money as they can back home. On top of that, they usually command lower pay than the domestic laborers in the same market, so this leaves them with very little in the way of spending money. They also work relentless hours, 7 days a week. So their life is basically wake, work, sleep with stops for meals 3 times a day.
There are more than just workers though, the women who come tend to end up in lower-end service jobs, house cleaners, cheap day care etc. And some of them have kids who are right now, very young and not in the job market (meaning no disposable income).
Both groups are well serviced by their local Mercado Latino and Walmart in terms of most needs and their children, if they've brought them here, are usually too young to want to shop at stylish mall shops.
If you look at the kinds of places that service the community, they aren't high-end restaurants and retail shops offering comforts from home. It's cheap fast food, pupusa shops, check cashing, cheap phone calls home etc. A visit to local pawn shops in and around Manassas will reveal shelf after shelf full of tools laborers have sold as they head back home after the housing bust, and are usually in shopping centers full of Spanish language shops. It's very much a temporary laborer blue collar demographic.
I suspect this will change. Folks I know who came here during the early parts of the Salvadoran Civil War now have kids old enough to care about such things and are generally well integrated, educated and affluent.
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.