Retail experts have long sounded the alarm on malls in the US.
But malls are not going extinct, they are merely adapting to a new environment. In fact, many have reported robust occupancy levels and bigger crowds than before the pandemic, according to a recent market analysis from Coresight Research.
Someone once told me that malls are appealing because they match what we want out of a walkable city, and I haven’t been able to get that out of my mind.
A walkable city, but with no housing and surrounded by acres and acres of parking.
Yeah, I understand that it isn’t a walkable city. But the inside shows why we should work towards walkable cities.
I’d also stipulate there is at least one way walkable cities should be more like malls. Everyone wants to get rid of cars , for good reason, but what about everyone else? Good walkable cities still need to provide better ways for someone to drive to the city and leave their car.
We’d all benefit from more park-n-rides surrounding a town center, more long term parking. Let’s welcome people not yet ready to give up their cars, the opportunity to give them up part time
Good walkable cities should have appropriate rural transport so you don’t need to drive into town and can take a five dollar train ride with no traffic instead that includes return fare and takes you right to main destination districts.
Seattles ferry network, for example.
That’s interesting! I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s a good point.
The mall closest to me has started to build a TON of apartments around, and attached, to the mall.
Its starting to look appealing, and that mall is always buzzing.
Its like they figured out people don’t want to drive, then walk. They just want to walk.
The mall here is doing really well because they let a bunch of local businesses in. There’s a local toy store, an antique mall and, best of all, a pinball arcade. And we’re a small city in Indiana.
Nice to get back to the roots. I remember malls with arcades and local businesses, instead of just indistinguishable women’s clothing chains, where every mall had some unique character instead of all being the same
Malls in my area are mostly doing great.
I think there were just a lot of middling malls, and malls in areas without the population to support them. What the article calls “top tier” malls in large cities are doing fine.
And there was several metro areas that have faced economic decline in the last 30 years that have contributed to some malls going out of business as well. This happened because people did not have the money to spend nor an increasing population to cater to a large mall.
Indoor malls are gonna have a resurgence as temperatures get higher and higher and it’s no longer feasible to spend time outdoors for prolonged periods.
I’ve been to the middle east (Oman). So many malls there for basically that exact reason. And a friend of mine grew up in Bahrain and said the same.
Same thing in Thailand as well. Malls will never go extinct because they’re air conditioned areas that anyone can enter.
If they can afford the power bill for all of that A/C maybe.
If you cover everything in asphalt, yes, that’s what’s going to happen.
The traditional mall is dying. Mixed use developments are thriving.
I just went to one of the big nearby malls. It is just off a major highway across the state line, where there is no sales tax. It used to have a guaranteed customer base from my city, just based on tax savings. Admittedly I haven’t been there in 15 years, as driving a pan hour for shopping is something we no longer did with kids. However this weekend I went up there and found boarded up stores and weeds growing in the parking lot.
However the interesting thing was there was tons of surrounding retail built up, so the area is still doing well for shopping, but not the mall. Before anyone asks, no, there were no sidewalks or paths connecting shopping centers.
Anyhow, I think it’s all much simpler than headlines seem to make it: we built out too many malls. Now we have other options from plazas to online, so don’t need so many. I expect the number of malls to stabilize at a point where everyone can still get to one, but that’s not the only place
If there’s retail growth around the mall but not inside it, then it means the mall is overcharging for rent. I’ve seen similar things, and the malls tend to have plenty of empty spaces.
I like going to the mall for pretzels
I live in Utah and all of the malls have a shitty knock-off Auntie Anne’s called Pretzelmaker that never fails to disappoint.
I was going to ask how you feel about Pretzel Ti🥨e, but then I saw that they turned into Pretzelmaker.
That’s not good.
My nearest mall has only survived because it pivoted away from retail and is now almost entirely restaurants.
I hadn’t been to a mall in a really long time until a friend of mine dragged me to one to kill some time before a thing we had going on later that night. I was surprised how busy it was, and how much it had expanded in terms of content. There were a couple of art galleries and even a little tabletop gaming store with a few people playing Catan. The only area that was kind of deserted was surprisingly the food court, which only had a bubble tea place and a sandwich place open.
I know the one mall in my hometown isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Sure it’s a far cry from what it probably was a long time ago, but it’s still a great place to go.
I hope it doesn’t close because it’s the most convenient place for me to go to get both bubble tea and copies of older manga.
The large ‘malls’ here are all seeing to do very well, and those that were previously struggling have seemed to have seen success pivoting away from being just a place to go and ‘buy’ things and into places to ‘do’ and ‘experience’ things.
We millennials have a fascination with mixing alcohol and activities we did growing up, with bowling, mini-golf and ticket arcades doing well by feeding off our nostalgia.
I watched some American Gladiators today. No alcohol was involved, just pure nostalgia
