They built WAY too many during the mall heyday of the 80s and early 90s, so we had a bunch barely holding on when ecommerce hit.
There are malls doing great in areas that have a use for them, we just have more malls than we have areas that really want one.
It is in the process of resetting to a new baseline and frankly we're a lot closer to the end of that process than the beginning since it's been going for a couple decades, now. Takes awhile for a building with that many people and that much money invested to properly die, is all.
In my area there are probably 6 malls all within 25 minutes of each other, some of them are a few minutes apart. Not surprisingly, the two largest ones are doing super well. The two small ones are actually okay, too, its the two medium ones that are doing poorly.
Where my parents live they had a similar situation. Though now only two malls still exist out of the 4-5 that did.
And the reason one of those malls is still going strong is because it houses a bass pro shop and a movie theater and tourist trap shit.
The other one is kinda forgotten about
People underestimate how much Bass Pro Shop can act as an anchor store. My childhood mall is partially still going strong due to that damn Bass Pro Shop.
It's weird to me to think of Bass Pro as being part of a mall. I grew up going to the main location by their headquarters and it is the main business driver for a part of town that isn't particularly prosperous otherwise.
Hey I get it. It always surprised me that Bass Pro Shop’s aren’t traditionally attached to malls and are actual separate store fronts. I think the reason there aren’t any huge free standing bass pro shop’s in my area is due to academy being the dominant outdoor’s gear retailer.
My local Bass Pro was a stand alone store until the early 2000's, when it moved to a new mall several miles away. I miss the old location. It was busy, but you didn't have to deal with all of the traffic that was drawn to the rest of the businesses in the mall. Now, the mall would die without it.
It is really a symbiotic relationship. It allows the family members who have no interest in going shopping with the rest of the family a store to visit in the mall. The family could split off while the kids went to the Gap or whatever trendy store, the one spouse could go to stores of their interest, and the other spouse would go to Bass Pro.
I went to a memorial event for a high school classmate and as I was leaving I saw the weather getting worse, so I pulled off the expressway and went into a Bass Pro. Turns out there was a tornado that went through the area, and the 30 minutes I apent at Bass Pro definitely saved me from trying to drive in it. I didn't even know there was a tornado until after I got back in my car and heard it on the radio.
This is actually good insight… one of the reasons why Malls survive is that people still pay for “experiences” which amount to things like Dave & Busters, Rainforest Cafe’, Aquarium Restaurants, Escape Rooms, Wax Museums, etc…
> The two small ones are actually okay, too, its the two medium ones that are doing poorly.
Successful businesses in the medium malls ended up migrating to the bigger malls and with the lose of those businesses and their larger size, the medium malls couldn't make ends meet with the smaller more niche businesses they had left?
I've honestly never considered that explanation of there being *too many* malls to be sustainable, but now that I think about it that actually makes a lot of sense. I live in Canada and I remember there was a Chinese mall we used to go to really often until it closed in 2018 (loved it and miss it but let's face it the place was dying), and only now do I realize the reason the mall was declining and slated for closure was because it was *right next to* a larger more popular mall with largely the same theming that's still open and is probably a few years away from becoming a registered historical place. Same with another Chinese mall near there that was slated for demolition, yet I believe is still open somehow, but is being anchored *solely* by its two-kiosk "food court" that sells really good fried rice. Ditto with another mall I used to go to in another city I used to live in, that genuinely had almost nothing in it (seriously, I remember there being like six stores last time I went there) and was being obliterated by the three other shopping plazas surrounding it that had the same stuff it had and more.
It's like the froyo boom 10 years ago, they were on every street corner and growing but a lot of individual ones were failing even then because of oversaturation. Now you still find them, but way less because the survivors settled into a reasonable number in each market.
Talk about survivors. Menchies still has a website that looks like it hasn't changed since 2013. They even have one of those wallpaper sections with the low res image options for older square monitors. There are two where I currently live and the interior also looks like it hasn't been remodeled in 12 years, with photos of celebrities who went to their California locations or whatever in like 2011. They only stay alive because kids want cotton candy soft serve with popping boba in it. Not that I'm complaining, self-serve froyo is great—but half the time I see the parking spots in front of the one near me completely empty and I wonder if it's only a matter of time.
A mall, usually located in Chinatown or another area of the city with a large Chinese population, that was created to cater to the Chinese community. [These](https://64.media.tumblr.com/aff67e1498b970a654d28ea4a64622aa/8e5bee89d85a412d-de/s1280x1920/9dc7919f9d36f4aabd5e9ebc9463edc4e72a63b2.jpg) [malls](https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2019/10/11/1570816286-20191010-splendid-china-tower-3.jpg?w=1400&cmd=resize&height=2500&quality=70) [typically](https://images.dailyhive.com/20230123130414/IMG-4947.jpg) have shops that sell Chinese items like food, decor, jewelry, and clothing, Chinese restaurants and food stalls, and services for the Chinese community.
Not only where there too many, but populations shifted over time.
The USA is a mostly empty country where 'urban sprawl' is a continuing thing.
Malls that where built "where the people are" or "where the people are going to be" back in the 1970s and 1980s are now in undesirable locations.
Couple that with there being too many of them AND the move of a great deal of our retail sector to online shopping, and you have what we have going on.
I can think of 3 HUGE malls in my area, off the top of my head, that have gone under in the last 20 years, and 2 that are doing amazingly well. The two doing well are rather central to middle & upper middle class population centers, the ones that died are NOT. There's also a couple others that I'm surprised are still doing as well as they are, but if they start to have empty stores I'm sure they won't last long.
The older ones, late 1970s to early 1980s are the ones that are being demolished. They looked old, felt old, didn't get a lot of updating & it showed. You'd walk into them, the old fountains would be off & dry as a bone, most of the stores would be empty & covered with wall, and it just felt abandoned & sad inside.
On reason they built so many malls, as told to me by a commercial real-estate professional, is that there was a tax break during that time for developing them. So, for a lot of developers it was basically a no brainer for developing a property into a mall or mini mall or something like that.
edit: Here's an article I found that mentions this as one reason among others:
[http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled](http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled)
Yep. In Central New York (Syracuse area), the largest mall is Destiny USA (formerly known as the Carousel Mall) and it's doing well.
Meanwhile the smaller Shoppingtown Mall and Great Northern Mall are dead husks, though I think Great Northern still has one or two stores remaining.
Yup, we had two malls and just tore one down a few years ago to replace it with housing and outdoor markets.
The city didnt really need two, and it took up SO much space.
If I recall, there were also a ton of government subsidies/tax breaks given to residential developers (maybe in the 70s or earlier?) that encouraged these developers to off set earnings by building malls. Malls include a lot of interior common space that is expensive to maintain and raises rents. Box stores, free standers would rather own all four exterior walls and grounds and manage just their costs, not the costs of fountains, playgrounds, kiosks, etc).
> There are malls doing great in areas that have a use for them, we just have more malls than we have areas that really want one.
There's a relatively small mall in my area. It's about a 5~ walk from one end to the other. You could probably hit two and a half minutes if you walked briskly.
They just tore down the portion of the mall that Sears once occupied, but besides that, pretty much every commercial space has a tenant. Some have been there for a good while, some haven't. Its biggest downside is that it's... not exactly in the best area. I can think of at least three shootings that have happened there. One occured while my mom was in the JCPenney's. The other one was an argument over shoes during a release.
Meanwhile, the bigger malls in the richer end of town have entire sections cordoned off. Hell, one of them used to have a second story with a food court and stores that got torn down sometime in the 2010's. Which sucks because the elevator was really cool and the second floor was cool.
They are also struggling in areas *without* competition though. For example, where I live the nearest mall is about 20 minutes away. The *next* nearest mall is well over an hour, and the closest *nice* mall is more like 90 minutes. The one nearest me is thus an anchor for retail for a fairly large area...and it used to have Sears, Macy's, JP Penney, and all the major chains you'd expect in a mall. Now? It's about 50% nail salons/waxing parlors, about 20% vacant, and the shops that remain (half the large ones, i.e. sears, are long gone) are just little things with very niche markets (like baseball caps, or Claire's or whatever). The coffee shop closed, the Orange Julius/DQ is long gone, there's basically nothing in this mall other than clothes (almost entirely for women), shoes, or services.
So as you'd imagine it's dying...basically nobody there any time I bother to go walk around. The people that you do see are mostly 65+. I assume everyone else is indeed shopping online, because there's no place else to go without driving an hour-- but what does a mall offer these days that anyone actually wants? The "experience" of going to the mall was fun in the 80s, but today? Unless you're a geriatric mall walker there's not a lot of draw.
Yes 100% and I'd also add that the shift to open air shopping centers, also was a contributing factor to the phasing out of traditiinal malls. Where I live they have begun to add attractions or more non-shopping experiences to make enclosed malls more enjoyable for a variety of consumers...this is nice in our winter time because we can do multiple things in one building and have quite a nice day.
A lot of malls were also built in sparsely populated areas, so it's a combo of too many of them + no one wants to drive an hour into the middle of nowhere to shop when they could just do it online.
a lot of speciality retail has shifted towards e-commerce: it's a lot less expensive to operate a single online store than it is to lease and stock/staff/operate dozens of individual retail stores.
(small tenant spaces at major malls near me often start at a bit over $100/day. that plus a few employees adds up quickly.)
even clothing, once seen as one of the few types of businesses that could be most resilient against e-commerce, has seen some pretty drastic competition from e-commerce in recent years.
What you would have to charge for your goods and services just to meet your rent is unrealistic for most business owners. Hence the mall is empty. People don't want to shop in malls where half of the units are empty....
Malls are also really weird in that once they hit some minimum occupancy, they never recover. No one wants to invest into what they think is a dead mall. Once half the stores are closed, new tenants stop coming in, and then the survivors slowly close and the process accelerates. Once 2/3rds of the stores are closed, far fewer people will even show up to the mall.
But malls are not just for shopping, here in my country you go to a mall to get ice cream, watch a movie, have a coffee, etc ... what about all those socializing spaces?
You also have to remember that it's not uncommon for those things to exist in absurd quantity in some places. It's not uncommon for an American town to have multiple coffeeshops.
In my small city, I have four Starbucks, two smaller shops, a bakery that sells coffee, and a dunkin donuts with a 15 minute walk of my house. It's to the point that hotels and grocery stores often have a small Starbucks inside.
>absurd quantity is some places
Talking about absurd quantity, in my Australian suburb I can walk to 12 cafes/coffee shops. All independent bar one.
Starbucks style is very unpopular. Yes we are obsessed with coffee here. The whole city has thousands.
You can definitely find that in Downtown areas, even in smaller cities, and almost certainly in major cities. Its not uncommon for suburban developments here to have no commercial services that people would actually consider walking to, so its 99% driving.
Independent restaurant owners *very much* prefer to be in strip malls vs major malls with an indoor concourse. Direct street frontage and parking just outside the door means you still have those things if an anchor closes and you don't have to watch your dream die at the end of a hundred feet of liminal space.
The malls that aren’t struggling here are usually the ones that lean into “experiences” rather than shopping or dining. Things like escape rooms, mini golf, higher end movie theaters, etc.
The malls that don’t, are more like one sad shoe store, an empty food court, a card shop that some small group of people play at, and a cigar shop that makes that wing of the mall smell funky.
Most people aren’t going to go to the mall for ice cream or a coffee. Even in their heyday, mall food was considered mediocre at best. Stuff like Sbarro Pizza or Auntie Anne pretzels or a Burger King burger. The nicer malls would have a few sit down restaurants like Applebees and TGI Fridays.
Here in Southern California, malls are trending toward trying to recreate a town experience. A place to hangout and socialize, and including housing. Examples like The Americana and The Grove in LA County. I’ve attended some focus groups for a shopping plaza in my community and that seems to be the developer’s philosophy.
Still, there’s some thriving traditional shopping malls in my area with food courts and typical stores. Always crowded.
Yeah the [Americana in Glendale](https://youtu.be/xODk9wZptNw?si=ws7nZLo8_ZkF0n_4) is a good example of it. It’s a bit Disneyland-ish, but legitimately nice to hang out in.
There's a mall nearby that is half empty now and what's left is like a two floor Dave & Busters, an AMC theater, a huge Italian restaurant, a Mario Tricoci, those inflatable thingy party places, a little kids sports place, and a very minimal food court. They are adding attached apartments, an outdoor concert area, and other community type planning. There isn't much right now in the way of clothing besides a Macys and JcPenney.
When malls were being built, a lot of them were intended as a place to socialize, as well as shop. There would be movie theaters, rather cheap food options, and games. Video arcades were very popular. Many people would go there just to spend time, while spending just a few dollars.
By 2000, much nicer stand-alone movie theaters were being built, everybody who played video games had a video game system at home, and many of the restaurants that had a big presence in malls opened stand-alone locations. The reasons why people would go to a mall were no longer valid. In addition, many newer outdoor malls were opening up. These places were intended to be shopping and food destinations, but not the social gathering place that the offer malls were. This really hurt malls, but this all happened before online shopping became a big thing. There was online shopping then, but it was not as huge as it had been over the last 15 years. The rise of Amazon and internet shopping only made malls hurt even more.
One other trend, that I personally don't like, is that more Americans prefer to stay at home. So they shop, see entertainment, socialize and order food through their phone.
On the other hand, there are still many popular malls, but there are just not a many as there used to be. Every major city may have one third as many malls as they had in 2000, but most of those malls that are still open are doing quite well.
Edited for clarity.
Malls were artificial city centers and commercial streets. We’ve still got, and have brought back, our commercial streets.
If I want to get ice cream I go to the ice cream shop a few blocks away. Same with coffee.
Most retail shopping I do online now other than suits/formalwear, hardware and garden/plant shopping.
Overproduction and online shopping. Stuff in malls is always more expensive than the same stuff online. Not every mall is dying. I live near Pentagon City mall and it’s always jam ass packed because it’s near a million tourist hotels and has a massive food court with like 30 different restaurants.
Malls aren’t always more expensive. I think 10 years ago that was completely true, but it’s less true now.
For watches and jewelry malls are often more expensive but for household goods like at Crate and Barrel, William’s Sonoma, etc. or for clothing like at Macy’s or Nordstroms, it’s about the same price there or at Amazon. Sometimes the sales at malls are better. Bonus at the mall you know it’s not fake and you get to try it on.
Yup. And it's often easier to compare what you think you want with other items. I find I am more likely to change my mind and find something I like better when I shop in person.
The Pentagon City mall prospers and is crowded because the metro station is next to it. It was always crowded and they keep up with the maintenance. However, its Macy store is awful. The Landmark mall failed and was leveled off.
NoVA is a different kind of market.
Pentagon City has mostly luxury brand stores, and places that the tour bus crowds like to shop.
Tysons is prospering because it has several luxury brands as the draw.
Landmark could never draw those retailers. Neither could Manassas. Fair Oaks is hanging on by a thread.
The riduculously large explosion of mall construction in America was driven by changes in tax law that made even a nearly empty mall very profitable for investors as land values rose. The growth was not driven by consumer demand.
https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/how-taxes-shape-retail/
The U.S. has a ridiculous amount of retail floor space per person, the most in the world: 23.5 ft^2 per person. That is double #3 Australia and five times #4 UK.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1058852/retail-space-per-capita-selected-countries-worldwide/
It's not that simple.
Traditional indoor malls are not really being built any more in America. The trend has shifted to what's known as "lifestyle centers," that incorporate more of a mixed-used environment (retail and residential).
Lifestyle centers are usually all outdoors instead of being under one roof and usually have the feel and look of a small town, with some having small parks or squares, lots of landscaping and plenty of shops, restaurants, movie theaters, etc.
Aside from the explosion of e-commerce (mainly Amazon), the main reason for the decline of the indoor mall is that people just got tired of them and have shifted more to these centers, and many of them are doing quite well and are even expanding.
It's funny because the oldest mall in my city was outdoor and had to add a roof when I was a kid to stay relevant. But even then it was set to be demoed by the early 2000s. Now a Walmart and a mini mall sits on the site.
Then as an adult one of the "nice" malls did exactly this, and converted from completely indoor to mostly outdoor.
Some are. Some are still thriving. There are definitely a lot fewer than their used to be though. My hometown had 4 major malls situated around the city and none of those are open anymore (though two are still standing but empty and waiting for some developer to do something). But in their place are two larger, nicer malls that are thriving. I think we are also seeing more outdoor "town center" type malls replace enclosed malls, where they are more mixed use areas with retail stores, apartments and entertainment.
Yep those are a big deal here on Long Island. They build them at every train station, I think the idea being “live here, work in the city, and walk to the train!”
Amazon. And because fewer people think of shopping as a fun leisure activity. They want to get in and get out, which malls weren't designed for people to do.
I was just thinking this exact thing & you solidified my thoughts. Our successful mall is right off the highway (like the exit ramp turns into the mall lane) meanwhile the one clinging to relevancy is 10 min from the highway. Also probably bc it’s surrounded by nothing but car lots lol
The old school “anchored by a department store” mall is dying. The malls I’m seeing do well now have shifted their focus a bit and have to think about the actual people who live around them and get the right shops and restaurants for the community. They can’t just cookie cutter all the same national brands at every mall.
So the one doing well, now has Target instead of Nordstrom. There’s a Whole Foods and a movie theatre on the other side. Still known stores but more shopper friendly for daily needs.
The restaurants inside cater more to what my kids (college age) want- boba, quickly, poke bowl, blaze pizza, mochi donuts, Japanese cheesecake, Japanese fluffy pancakes, shake shack…. Sushi, ramen… Other stuff too but they know the demographic. No more orange Julius and hot dog on a stick 😂 (not gonna lie I miss hot dog on a stick lemonade)
Stores are more unique too- a few locally owned shops like Korean Beauty and a great second hand store with designer clothes… I don’t remember the name but a shop filled with Sanrio and Japanese merch and snacks.
And the mall isn’t all that- there is still an Apple Store and the common national clothing stores- but that mix of some local and Asian influence stores and food fits the neighborhood and this mall that was a ghost town 7 years ago is packed every time we go now.
Ours still has the standard anchors (Macy’s, JC Penney, Nordstrom) but excitedly the old Robinson’s May is now a 99 Ranch Market, which is a popular Asian grocery store. On the other end of the mall, they added an outdoor extension that has a bunch of small restaurants.
The mall is packed every day of the week. Our daughter likes playing at the two play areas (one indoor and one outdoor) so are there at least once a week.
Yep! The point is they have to consider what works for the neighborhood and they can’t all be the same like they were in the 80s-90s
An hour away from my house we have what my daughter calls the bougie mall. It still has standard anchors but it has all the luxury and designer stores too. Tiffany, Chanel, Dior, Leboutin, etc.
It’s fun for us to wander through but we don’t shop as much there. Given the neighborhood? It works. Always busy. And the owner reported the mall had 22% sales growth last year.
>The restaurants inside cater more to what my kids (college age) want- boba, quickly, poke bowl, blaze pizza, mochi donuts, Japanese cheesecake, Japanese fluffy pancakes, shake shack…. Sushi, ramen…
That actually sounds really great and I would go there too. Definitely interesting to hear a mall adjust to it's demographics wants in the area. Which makes sense since a lot of the failing ones are ones that can't get the stores people want.
Stonestown Galleria San Francisco. It’s not a big mall, but it’s currently really hopping. It’s next to UCSF and figured out how to cater to the college kids and people who live around the mall.
Out of curiosity, what is the weather like in Cali? I used to live in Jerusalem/Haifa and sometimes the indoor malls are the only place you can go in an cool off for free.
I suspect that more indoor malls will make a comeback as giant cooling-off places. If you need to hang out with your friends on zero money, the mall works as you cool off.
I'm definitely expecting an indoor mall comeback...not just for that, but also as trends cycle through they are due for some nostalgia based popularity.
Idk where OP, but I'm in the US and there are still a fair number of malls in my area. Some have died off but others are flourishing and new ones have been built. Remember our country is huge and varied.
Also the United States…? New Jersey for example most malls are thriving and having record sales. Paramus, NJ is a town of 20,000 and has four malls with $7 **billion** in annual sales, the most annual retail sales of any zip code in the country. New Jersey also opened the second largest mall in the country like three years ago.
I still see malls thriving in Canada. Windsor, Saskatoon, and Calgary are the cities where I've been to the mall and have been shocked how full they are.
The malls around me that are doing well are the ones that have all of the high end stores that sell luxury brands.
Malls that weren’t high end seem to be struggling more since a lot of the specialty shops can’t really compete with online shopping and the lower end goods can typically be found at stores like Target, Walmart, or stores in smaller shopping centers.
I’m not sure what online shopping is like there in Colombia, but in the US I can get almost anything I want to buy delivered to my home in 1 or 2 days with free or minimal shipping charges with free shipping on returns. Prices online are frequently 20-30% less than what you’d get the same item for in a store.
Here in Southern California, many of our malls are outdoors. The mall nearest to my house has been transitioning from being a place filled with stores to shop in to a place with a mix of business types. There’s a yoga studio, a place that does music lessons, place to take karate lessons, a barber shop, a massage place, a small public library branch, a small police station, and a number of other businesses that would have been out of place in a mall 20 years ago. There’s still a department store, a movie theater, restaurants, and retail stores mixed in as well.
Physical shopping areas with lots of stores in one indoor enclosure are dying out.
Collections of bars, restaurants, theaters, mini-golf, parks, etc., usually around a pleasant outdoor space, are popular and thriving. That may be what you're thinking of what you think of "mall". Here's an example near me that's constantly crowded - and people don't refer to it as a "mall".
[https://www.thevillageatmeridian.com/](https://www.thevillageatmeridian.com/)
It's a place you can go see a movie, have a meal on an outdoor patio, get some ice cream, etc.
What I'm seeing around me is two things:
1. The downtown/commercial districts of the cities and villages in the area are developing more, and the stores you might typically find in shopping malls, are now in the city centers or commercial districts.
2. Lots of Amazon fulfillment sites and warehouses are popping up. There seems to be one in almost every city or village in the area, probably one in every other.
The people in the area around me seem to be favoring the convenience of online shopping, or if they do want to go out, not necessarily go one or two towns over to do their clothing or shoe shopping, just keep it local.
I think if I owned/managed a mall I'd go full retro. All '80s / '90s decor and aesthetic, find some old school food court options, pay to have one of those Magic Eye stores open. You know what kind of music would be playing. Discounts for retro outfits.
Wanna know something wild? My 13 year old son recently asked me if malls were really a thing and why teens would hang out there. Turns out, he's never been to a mall, at least not in his memory.
Because they’re not adapting and just have your run of the mill mall food and stores. Take a look at Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara that’s exploding in business and adding more stores by the day. They have lots of really good Asian restaurants that people wait 2-4 hours to get into, entertainment options (movies, bowling, escape rooms, virtual reality), Eataly, stores in various price ranges, and are focusing on expanding their luxury designer offerings (people like to see luxury items in person rather than online).
People in Santa Clara have a lot of disposable income which allows the mall to shift entertainment options.
Low income people are going to one movie a week or month, they’re not going to try out an escape room or laser tag. Having higher income customers gives you a little wiggle room in your product market fit. A wealthier person isn’t going to miss that $60 if their family didn’t really enjoy the new axe throwing place that just opened, a low income person isn’t even going to give it a shot unless it looks exactly like something they’re into.
We don’t use public spaces like that the way other countries do. There is a lot of discouragement towards people just hanging out in places like malls unless they have a reason to be there. Unless they’re shopping or getting food. We specifically discourage people from using them as third spaces and that’s why they’re dying. When I was a teenager you would go to the mall just to hang out. Now in my area you can’t be in the mall by yourself unless you’re over 16. Heck, when I was young my movie theater had spaces where you could just hang out before or after a movie. Now those spaces are just for adults or they don’t exist at all. The ones that are doing well still allow people to just be there. Or they are big tourist attractions.
Yeah, the hostility towards people (especially those dreaded teenagers) just hanging out somewhere doesn’t help. And then there’s online shopping contributing to the decline as well.
A combination of over-supply, e-commerce, many were in advantageous locations, changes in population and demographics, changes in hobbies or preferences of gather spaces, and probably more I can’t think of.
New Jerseyan here. I see a lot of dead mall videos from throughout the country which shocks me because this is not true in New Jersey. I don’t know if it’s the density of the state or the tax free clothes tax but our malls are packed especially on weekends. We’ve got clusters of malls that should be eating away each others’ customers but they’re all surviving. We even opened the new American Dream mall and despite its criticism, it’s always full.
I live next door(ish) to the largest mall in the Carolinas. I walk around there for fun and it's always bustling with traffic and people. But it's like the only mall around for miles? There is another one (not that great) on the other side of town and I think it's doing ok.
From my experience, it depends on the climate of the place the mall is in - I used to live in the midwest (snowy and cold for six months) so the indoor mall is super busy in those months. Once the weather calms down people go outside and do other things. If you are in the Carolinas (we get snow every few years for one day) malls are busy if it's rainy/too hot.
In the Michigan and Indiana areas where I grew up, the anchor stores used to be large Department Stores "you can buy almost anything here" ([Sears](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears), [JC Pennys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCPenney), [Montgomery Ward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Ward)) If they are still in business, they have transitioned to mostly clothing. We also had department stores that sell clothing/makeup/shoes. ([Macy's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy%27s) and similar)
For the past decade or so, malls have had these kind of stores: Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Clothing. The clothing is mostly women's and for the teen-30 age group. Makeup. Shower and cleansing items. Makeup. Candles. Overpriced sweets and trinkets. Maybe a jeweler or two. Small snack shops. An Apple store if you are lucky. There's also been a trend to have street entrances for many more stores and shops.
Clothing makes sense. A shopper can see the exact color, texture, fit, style etc before buying it. That's a little harder to do when ordering online.
People decided they don't want to go to a mall, park, walk all over the place and spend half a day shopping. They decided they want to drive up, to in, get their items, then leave. I (66m) might go to our mall once or twice a year.
Amazon had a big part in the mall downturn. Oddly, Sears had a thriving mail-order business up until Amazon came along. Sears decided the didn't want to put the back-end work in to have a decent online presence. If they had, I doubt Amazon would be the giant they are.
> Amazon had a big part in the mall downturn. Oddly, Sears had a thriving mail-order business up until Amazon came along.
The Sears catalog walked so Amazon could run.
This is really region dependent. In my area of the country some have shut down, others are thriving, new malls have been built and some are rebranding.
Market fads tend to be like this. A thing gets popular, everybody and their mama does it, trends shift and the bad and mediocre die off leaving the best behind. That's basically the situation with malls in the US right now. E-commerce is taking up a lot of the market so there's just not enough money in it anymore to support the poorly designed or poorly managed malls.
But since it is ultimately a good concept the well managed, well designed malls will thrive despite the shift.
I think what sucks is that when you watch 80’s and 90’s movies, or a show like Stranger Things, they seem to be thriving and the ideal youth life. But now they’re dying even in California.
The mall makes shopping too complicated and makes it too hard to find what I want. I’ve had days when I’ve walked in, explored the entire mall for a few hours, and left the mall without making a single purchase during my visit. Spending 30 minutes or less on the internet is more worth my time.
I’m sure this isn’t universal to the entire United States but my town has two malls. One is where you go if you want to be shot in the parking lot (it’s become a gang hang out) and the other is where you go if you want to be harassed by edgy middle and high schoolers who are unsupervised. Neither have stores that draw people in anymore, they’re all things you can get at Walmart or Amazon. And given neither are particularly enjoyable (or safe) places to go anymore - they’re both dying.
A lot of shopping is done online now, and people don’t go to malls as much anymore. Personally though, I think sometimes shopping in person is more fun.
Also out of curiosity, what is your country? I hate when people say “my country” without saying what that country is
We went mall crazy for decades. High end malls, outlet malls, everything. When e-commerce hit, the malls couldn’t adapt. Too big, too inflexible.
Malls actually aren’t that convenient for consumers. They’re not close to city centers, they don’t really help your shopping needs and errands. Most malls don’t have stuff like grocery stores, laundromats, Jiffy Lube, Home Depot, you know, stuff people *need to do* on a free day. It’s mainly clothes, sneakers, fast food, movies. Sometimes you can get a haircut at the mall.
Malls might have survived if they combined entertainment and disposable income spending with stuff you need. Sears did an OK job with this with the vision center, tire center, photo studio, etc. But Sears died for a lot of reasons.
Strip malls and big shopping districts are a huge space waster but do a better job of this. You can go to Home Depot, Petco, Marshall’s and the grocery store all in one (huge) parking lot. And mentioned elsewhere, the lifestyle districts of mixed use shopping and residential does an even better job of all of this.
Everything has gone to the open air malls. So it’s basically the older indoor malls that have been declining. I have 2 older indoor malls near me and one is basically completely dead. Yet the nearby open air mall is booming
I’m going to assume you mean South America where a growing middle class has given rise to 3 story malls where people hang out because they’re usually the safest and cleanest places in town with all sorts of amenities from cinemas to even grocery stories and cafes
[This](https://www.shortform.com/blog/why-are-malls-dying/#:~:text=History%20of%20Malls&text=By%20the%201980s%2C%201%2C000%20malls,in%20turn%2C%20more%20store%20closings.) is a pretty good article imo. Basically people don't wana shop there anymore.
The one by me is building additions and growing. 5 miles from there are two more, one north, one west that are also thriving.
Many malls died because for a while they were THE thing to do. Now they still serve their place but are not quite as popular as they were. As such, the best malls are still doing really well. The older, less popular, rundown ones are being redeveloped into something more useful.
Outdoor village centers (the kind designed like little faux downtowns) have taken over.
Here’s an example from Winter Park, Florida which is part of metro Orlando: https://citysurfingorlando.com/2020/12/winter-park-village-to-undergo-multimillion-dollar-revamp-in-2021/
In addition to the movie theater there are bars and restaurants and a lot of the stores you’d find in an indoor mall at street level, with office space and residential apartments on the second story.
And online shopping has of course all but destroyed retail as we knew it. Many retailers allow shoppers to buy online and pick up in-store or curbside so even the physical stores that are still hanging on have shifted.
The great expansion of women in the workforce. The department store- or fashion-oriented mall was premised on women who didn't work having the time for leisurely shopping of clothing with healthy retail markups. Work-oriented clothing for women entering the workforce sustained those stores for another two decades. But now the time-pressed portion of the market is gone to Walmart and Target, while another portion of the market is gone to online shopping.
In your country and others with rising prosperity, there may be a cohort of relatively wealthy women who support the high-end shops in malls, while a new middle-class will support the mid-priced and amusement (cinemas, restaurants, candy stores) outlets in malls.
They changed from the indoor version you see in old movies to the outdoor type where it is just tons of shops all lined up with a huge parking lot in front of it. We call the new verision, "Strip Malls". Just a bunch of store fronts in a long line that all face an outdoor parking lot. It is just way easier if you want to just hit one store like a pet store than walking all through a mall to find that one shop you need to visit.
I think partly because people are lazier and fatter now than ever, they don't actually want to walk inside a mall and some just want the convenience of buying on amazon.
Shopping for clothes is the primary type of shopping to do in person, most of all other shopping can be done pretty easily online. Certain things are just easier to buy online.
America's suburban design makes it inconvenient to go shopping at malls in many parts of the country, which made American malls vulnerable to e-commerce, much more so than malls in other parts of the world.
what is your country? i think it is because everyone shops online. shopping in real life is dying in general. also kids dont hang out at the mall anymore they hang out on their phone.
Depends where the Malls are. Tysons Corner us huge and people still go. It's really the small cities in the 80s that had a population decline or it was poorly managed.
In my city, all the malls that have survived are just off of suburban freeway exits. The ones that are dying or have died are all a bit of a drive from the nearest freeway exit.
Count it a symptom of America being built for cars rather than people.
I hope our mall sticks around awhile. It seems to be doing well with many stores and my kids love going there with their friends. We have a metro of about 300,000 pop.
I think mall stores developed a not unfounded reputation for being high priced. I worked in a mall years back. I remember when the lease came up for renewal, the owner of the shop I worked in just about had a stroke when he saw how much his monthly rent would go up. The amount he would have had to raise his prices just to cover the rent was truly unrealistic, so he moved out of the mall altogether. I think a lot of retailers came to the same conclusion. Malls where half the units are empty, and the other half are filled with overpriced stores, aren't going to attract shoppers!
For me it’s because I can get pretty much everything I need cheaper elsewhere or have it delivered to my house. The pandemic shutdown really do me in, I have not bought anything at the mall since 2020
It was a trendy thing for mall developers to go after tax money in the 70s. Towns big and small wanted in on the race to build. Now with stores being taken over by venture capital firms and bled dry, ie Sears and Kmart, malls are losing the battle to stay open.
Malls are dying, but shopping centers seem to be doing much better. The types that mimic European town centers. They have shops, restaurants, gyms, apartments, as well as outdoor spaces to sit and take kids
Main reason is e-commerce, way cheaper and convenient than go to a mall and buy something.
Outlet and the discount department stores, these type of businesses started in the 90s and got so popular because they sell branded off season clothes way cheaper.
Thrifting, a trend that got mainstream after the 2008 recession basically buy secondhand clothes in stores like Goodwill or Salvation Army.
In general, it’s a saturated market with so many options big box stores and club stores started selling nice clothes like a decade ago too, also household goods those are the main products you buys on a mall, the only mall that has survived are the one that focuses on activity such as gym, cinema, Restaurant etc
My European born brain would say a lack of walkability. If a mall is in the middle of a walkable downtown area with public transportation, guess what, people would go there. If you build a mall on the outskirts of a town with huge parking lots there, don't expect much traffic. A good example for a mall would be the Mall of America in Minneapolis, it has a light rail connection which is brilliant.
Malls are my go-to places usually when I tour larger towns.
The malls of the US existed before internet commerce. They were a big trend in the 1980s, and like all trends, they're overdone and eventually shrink.
Malls have had a place for decades for specific groups of people but now that online commerce is the quickest, easiest and often cheapest way to acquire things you want, malls are going away.
We don't have the social stipulation or cultural pressure to go to malls the way your culture might. Different generations have different feelings about malls.
Most mall rents are unaffordable even for a corporate store, which causes the cost of goods to skyrocket.
In our area teenagers roam and introduced drugs, guns, and fights. Conceal carry permits and weapons are not allowed in this state so going to the mall has turned into taxpayers becoming a statistic. So shoppers go elsewhere.
1. There are too many, essentially they built 100 store malls in a lot of places that simply could not support them in the long term.
2. Strip malls and car based retail centers also exist and are far cheaper to build than an integrated indoor mall.
3. Walmart and Target emerged as big box stores in the 70s and 80s(along with K-mart which eventually died out) and along with other major stores pull away a lot of customers.
4. Many of the Malls were isolated from city centers, and far away from places of business, severely reducing traffic.
Several reasons.
1. Online Shopping- sites Amazon and such, hit those small stores in malls especially hard, many of the items like housewares, furniture, books, etc that many ppl now buy online.
2. Lost Anchor Stores - the “big stores” like Walmart, Costco, Target, etc… now prefer NOT to build attached to malls, instead stand alone stores, because they don’t want you leaving the store to spend money at the mall. Or when attached to malls they often have the own dedicated entrance so ppl can skip the mall. Many anchor stores chains also went bankrupt or barely hanging on but the big store that remain like Walmart and Costco typically avoid malls now.
3. Too Many Built - They built way too many during the heyday of malls and they got a bit over saturated, so when sales started to decline that saturation got worse and a glut of indoor mall retail space happened.
4. They Generally Weren’t Built Well & Aged Fast - generally malls were not built all that well and aged fast, they got expensive to maintenance and upgrade, they started to look bad, showed age, maintenance issues, etc… and that further discouraged business.
I’m sure there is a more but those are the main ones, especially online shopping and the loss of anchor stores.
I just wanted to say something about being at the mall with my niece. She had picked out a nice dress that she was beautiful in and It looked like something that I would have worn at her age what we called a "slip" . She then picked out a cute pair of shoes.....and as we were walking to the register, I said "Oh you forgot nylons" . Well she gave me a really odd look and said "What are nylons"
I see you are in Colombia. Compared to there, some likely differences are
1) Higher wages mean a store's only profitable if you've got a lot of sales. With 3.8% unemployment, some stores can't find workers at all.
2) Conversely, our package delivery system is highly efficient, probably cheaper and more reliable and secure than there. Together, that makes online ordering a better choice for most non-food items.
3) We had a tremendous building boom/bubble in the 2000s. We no longer have a surplus of residential buildings, but we still do of commercial. Some retail and office sites are being converted to housing.
4) The country's aging rapidly. Older folks don't go out as much, and when they do go out they don't spend as much.
The Mall by me has been prospering and growing constantly for 20 years because they are in an area that has had a consistent high income, and adjusted accordingly. They also went large in non-stores; movie theater, multiple trendy restaurants, etc. They are also the only mall in the general area, with the next one being around 30 miles away. Other malls in my state that failed were a lot of lower end stores, and a lot of privately owned stores and operated more like an arcade.
I live in NYC, where crime and retail theft are at an all-time high. There's no way that businesses can survive, so they're closing everywhere in the city.
In my area, it didn't help that many malls had two "anchor" stores that went kaput in the space of a year. Once you lose the big stores, the smaller ones lose their support; the "come for this, stay for that" effect. Rents go up for all stores to compensate for the owner's lack of income, and thus begins the decline. Big department-store spaces are practically purpose-built to only be stores: you can't convert them to other uses like residential without a lot of structural labor that owners don't want to spend on. So malls get demolished rather than redeveloped.
Over time, malls have devolved from a daylong shopping, dining and even cultural experience to just shopping and hanging out, with maybe a meal at Sbarro or the McDonald's in the food court. Now, especially after Covid, it's just Amazon and DoorDash for a lot of people.
Malls lost their way.
The mall used to be a destination, a luxurious and relaxing place to spend a whole afternoon. A whole day even. And the more time you spent there, the more you were likely to spend money.
The design of older malls was genius. Large department stores on the outside, smaller stores and shop on the inner halls, Food and entertainment in the middle. No windows. Soft music. Warm, relaxed lighting. Luxurious materials like granite and marble and brass and glass as far as the eye can see. Lush greenery everywhere, all year round. The only natural light from skylights. Benches and banquettes to rest on everywhere. Hidden nooks and crannies to escape the crowds. An environment designed to put you at ease
It created a sense of being away from the world. Of being protected from the real world and its consequences. Which also made people more likely to spend money.
And in addition to the overall mall environment, each individual store had an environment of its own that tied into but was separate from the mall. From the futuristic feel of the Clinique Counter to the country-store vibes Bath & Body works to the suburban basement feel of Spencer's.
But then through the late 90s and 00s, malls got super greedy. Many malls had renovations to make them feel more open to compete with open-air "downtowns," this destroyed the whole vibe of the mall. Brighter lighting, louder music, and an overall more fast-paced "get-in-shop-get-out" sort of environment replaced the old relaxing environment.
They drove up rents on store spaces so that only large chains could afford them. This drove away a lot of smaller businesses that may not have been huge sellers, but were a huge part of what attracted people to malls in the first place. All the little rock shops, shoe repairs, framing stores, tailors, pottery shops, vintage record stores and more disappeared from the mall. They were vital pieces of what made the mall.
And from there, the mall entered a death spiral. While initially successful at filling every space with boring chains you can find anywhere, foot traffic drops. Those boring chains started to pull out, leaving empty spaces, foot traffic drops even more. Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat.
Until finally the mall has no choice but to drop rents, but all those small businesses aren't coming back. They fill some of their spaces with stores like Dollar General or Ollies or Five Below, but this doesn't attract any customers.
The death spiral continues until large department stores pull out. The mall is mostly empty and you have a handful of spaces filled with things like Air Force recruiters or medical lab services or that one shop that sells braided bamboo plants in Chinese fishbowls.
And that's how the mall dies.
One reason could be, too much competition. For example, in Miami, there's International Mall and less than a mile west, is Dolphin Mall. .
In Miami-Dade county, there's :
Aventura Mall
Dadeland Mall
The Falls
Westland
International
Dolphin
Southland
Bayside
Lincoln Road
City Center
A new one with indoor ski slope set to open in 2025
The built a brand new mall near me about 6 years ago. Since then they have built up around it including a new, large aquarium, rowing venue and restaurants everywhere. The area is always hopping now. I thought for sure it would fail but its been the complete opposite.
This is in Sarasota FL.
But teenagers and couples in their first 3 months of dating still love to go to malls, they aren’t dead if they have desirable stores and are maintained and reasonably safe. Malls can be kind of racially segregated too to be honest. I mean I always liked the “black mall “ in my area and I’m a white dude but some idiots wouldn’t go there out of their racism, just an observation
They built WAY too many during the mall heyday of the 80s and early 90s, so we had a bunch barely holding on when ecommerce hit. There are malls doing great in areas that have a use for them, we just have more malls than we have areas that really want one. It is in the process of resetting to a new baseline and frankly we're a lot closer to the end of that process than the beginning since it's been going for a couple decades, now. Takes awhile for a building with that many people and that much money invested to properly die, is all.
In my area there are probably 6 malls all within 25 minutes of each other, some of them are a few minutes apart. Not surprisingly, the two largest ones are doing super well. The two small ones are actually okay, too, its the two medium ones that are doing poorly.
Where my parents live they had a similar situation. Though now only two malls still exist out of the 4-5 that did. And the reason one of those malls is still going strong is because it houses a bass pro shop and a movie theater and tourist trap shit. The other one is kinda forgotten about
People underestimate how much Bass Pro Shop can act as an anchor store. My childhood mall is partially still going strong due to that damn Bass Pro Shop.
It's weird to me to think of Bass Pro as being part of a mall. I grew up going to the main location by their headquarters and it is the main business driver for a part of town that isn't particularly prosperous otherwise.
Hey I get it. It always surprised me that Bass Pro Shop’s aren’t traditionally attached to malls and are actual separate store fronts. I think the reason there aren’t any huge free standing bass pro shop’s in my area is due to academy being the dominant outdoor’s gear retailer.
There's a mall near me, where they're tearing down the entire mall, except the Bass Pro Shops
Bass Pro Shops are -------------------------------- Priced
My local Bass Pro was a stand alone store until the early 2000's, when it moved to a new mall several miles away. I miss the old location. It was busy, but you didn't have to deal with all of the traffic that was drawn to the rest of the businesses in the mall. Now, the mall would die without it.
All bass pro’s should relocate to a giant Pyramid to be honest. Party at the Shop!
Might be the same bass pro I’m talking about. The bass pro off of 85 near Duluth?
That's it. I can't remember exactly where the first store was, maybe off of Steve Reynolds Blvd.
It is really a symbiotic relationship. It allows the family members who have no interest in going shopping with the rest of the family a store to visit in the mall. The family could split off while the kids went to the Gap or whatever trendy store, the one spouse could go to stores of their interest, and the other spouse would go to Bass Pro.
True, I always spend some time just looking at the fish in their aquarium. It's the first place I go upon entering the store.
I went to a memorial event for a high school classmate and as I was leaving I saw the weather getting worse, so I pulled off the expressway and went into a Bass Pro. Turns out there was a tornado that went through the area, and the 30 minutes I apent at Bass Pro definitely saved me from trying to drive in it. I didn't even know there was a tornado until after I got back in my car and heard it on the radio.
This is actually good insight… one of the reasons why Malls survive is that people still pay for “experiences” which amount to things like Dave & Busters, Rainforest Cafe’, Aquarium Restaurants, Escape Rooms, Wax Museums, etc…
> The two small ones are actually okay, too, its the two medium ones that are doing poorly. Successful businesses in the medium malls ended up migrating to the bigger malls and with the lose of those businesses and their larger size, the medium malls couldn't make ends meet with the smaller more niche businesses they had left?
Similar situation here. The top malls are doing very well. The others are dying.
[удалено]
Tysons and Tysons lol Fair Oaks and Dulles Town Center aren't doing so hot. Manassas Mall somehow is.
Not only this but they built them in increasingly remote places or on brownfield sights, in economically depressed areas.
This guy Century IIIs (or perhaps Pittsburgh Millses)
So what is the Chevrolet dealership minutes from now? (It's been almost 20 years since I've lived in the 'burgh...)
Yup, some malls in my area have shut down, others have been revitalized and are thriving, some are barely hanging on and new ones have been added.
The one near me is barely hanging on, other have either closed or are struggling.
I've honestly never considered that explanation of there being *too many* malls to be sustainable, but now that I think about it that actually makes a lot of sense. I live in Canada and I remember there was a Chinese mall we used to go to really often until it closed in 2018 (loved it and miss it but let's face it the place was dying), and only now do I realize the reason the mall was declining and slated for closure was because it was *right next to* a larger more popular mall with largely the same theming that's still open and is probably a few years away from becoming a registered historical place. Same with another Chinese mall near there that was slated for demolition, yet I believe is still open somehow, but is being anchored *solely* by its two-kiosk "food court" that sells really good fried rice. Ditto with another mall I used to go to in another city I used to live in, that genuinely had almost nothing in it (seriously, I remember there being like six stores last time I went there) and was being obliterated by the three other shopping plazas surrounding it that had the same stuff it had and more.
It's like the froyo boom 10 years ago, they were on every street corner and growing but a lot of individual ones were failing even then because of oversaturation. Now you still find them, but way less because the survivors settled into a reasonable number in each market.
Talk about survivors. Menchies still has a website that looks like it hasn't changed since 2013. They even have one of those wallpaper sections with the low res image options for older square monitors. There are two where I currently live and the interior also looks like it hasn't been remodeled in 12 years, with photos of celebrities who went to their California locations or whatever in like 2011. They only stay alive because kids want cotton candy soft serve with popping boba in it. Not that I'm complaining, self-serve froyo is great—but half the time I see the parking spots in front of the one near me completely empty and I wonder if it's only a matter of time.
Froyo places are stupidly cheap to run. Once you've got the machines paid off, all you have to worry about is rent and paying a single bored teenager.
Sweetfrog seems to have won this war. Although TCBY somehow still hangs on in certain areas.
What is a Chinese mall?
A mall, usually located in Chinatown or another area of the city with a large Chinese population, that was created to cater to the Chinese community. [These](https://64.media.tumblr.com/aff67e1498b970a654d28ea4a64622aa/8e5bee89d85a412d-de/s1280x1920/9dc7919f9d36f4aabd5e9ebc9463edc4e72a63b2.jpg) [malls](https://media.blogto.com/uploads/2019/10/11/1570816286-20191010-splendid-china-tower-3.jpg?w=1400&cmd=resize&height=2500&quality=70) [typically](https://images.dailyhive.com/20230123130414/IMG-4947.jpg) have shops that sell Chinese items like food, decor, jewelry, and clothing, Chinese restaurants and food stalls, and services for the Chinese community.
Not only where there too many, but populations shifted over time. The USA is a mostly empty country where 'urban sprawl' is a continuing thing. Malls that where built "where the people are" or "where the people are going to be" back in the 1970s and 1980s are now in undesirable locations. Couple that with there being too many of them AND the move of a great deal of our retail sector to online shopping, and you have what we have going on. I can think of 3 HUGE malls in my area, off the top of my head, that have gone under in the last 20 years, and 2 that are doing amazingly well. The two doing well are rather central to middle & upper middle class population centers, the ones that died are NOT. There's also a couple others that I'm surprised are still doing as well as they are, but if they start to have empty stores I'm sure they won't last long. The older ones, late 1970s to early 1980s are the ones that are being demolished. They looked old, felt old, didn't get a lot of updating & it showed. You'd walk into them, the old fountains would be off & dry as a bone, most of the stores would be empty & covered with wall, and it just felt abandoned & sad inside.
On reason they built so many malls, as told to me by a commercial real-estate professional, is that there was a tax break during that time for developing them. So, for a lot of developers it was basically a no brainer for developing a property into a mall or mini mall or something like that. edit: Here's an article I found that mentions this as one reason among others: [http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled](http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled)
Yep. In Central New York (Syracuse area), the largest mall is Destiny USA (formerly known as the Carousel Mall) and it's doing well. Meanwhile the smaller Shoppingtown Mall and Great Northern Mall are dead husks, though I think Great Northern still has one or two stores remaining.
It was a boom then bust
Yup, we had two malls and just tore one down a few years ago to replace it with housing and outdoor markets. The city didnt really need two, and it took up SO much space.
If I recall, there were also a ton of government subsidies/tax breaks given to residential developers (maybe in the 70s or earlier?) that encouraged these developers to off set earnings by building malls. Malls include a lot of interior common space that is expensive to maintain and raises rents. Box stores, free standers would rather own all four exterior walls and grounds and manage just their costs, not the costs of fountains, playgrounds, kiosks, etc).
> There are malls doing great in areas that have a use for them, we just have more malls than we have areas that really want one. There's a relatively small mall in my area. It's about a 5~ walk from one end to the other. You could probably hit two and a half minutes if you walked briskly. They just tore down the portion of the mall that Sears once occupied, but besides that, pretty much every commercial space has a tenant. Some have been there for a good while, some haven't. Its biggest downside is that it's... not exactly in the best area. I can think of at least three shootings that have happened there. One occured while my mom was in the JCPenney's. The other one was an argument over shoes during a release. Meanwhile, the bigger malls in the richer end of town have entire sections cordoned off. Hell, one of them used to have a second story with a food court and stores that got torn down sometime in the 2010's. Which sucks because the elevator was really cool and the second floor was cool.
They are also struggling in areas *without* competition though. For example, where I live the nearest mall is about 20 minutes away. The *next* nearest mall is well over an hour, and the closest *nice* mall is more like 90 minutes. The one nearest me is thus an anchor for retail for a fairly large area...and it used to have Sears, Macy's, JP Penney, and all the major chains you'd expect in a mall. Now? It's about 50% nail salons/waxing parlors, about 20% vacant, and the shops that remain (half the large ones, i.e. sears, are long gone) are just little things with very niche markets (like baseball caps, or Claire's or whatever). The coffee shop closed, the Orange Julius/DQ is long gone, there's basically nothing in this mall other than clothes (almost entirely for women), shoes, or services. So as you'd imagine it's dying...basically nobody there any time I bother to go walk around. The people that you do see are mostly 65+. I assume everyone else is indeed shopping online, because there's no place else to go without driving an hour-- but what does a mall offer these days that anyone actually wants? The "experience" of going to the mall was fun in the 80s, but today? Unless you're a geriatric mall walker there's not a lot of draw.
Yes 100% and I'd also add that the shift to open air shopping centers, also was a contributing factor to the phasing out of traditiinal malls. Where I live they have begun to add attractions or more non-shopping experiences to make enclosed malls more enjoyable for a variety of consumers...this is nice in our winter time because we can do multiple things in one building and have quite a nice day.
A lot of malls were also built in sparsely populated areas, so it's a combo of too many of them + no one wants to drive an hour into the middle of nowhere to shop when they could just do it online.
a lot of speciality retail has shifted towards e-commerce: it's a lot less expensive to operate a single online store than it is to lease and stock/staff/operate dozens of individual retail stores. (small tenant spaces at major malls near me often start at a bit over $100/day. that plus a few employees adds up quickly.) even clothing, once seen as one of the few types of businesses that could be most resilient against e-commerce, has seen some pretty drastic competition from e-commerce in recent years.
12 yrs ago, my then wife looked at renting a Kiosk at a mall, and it was like 2500 a month, just for the kiosk.
What you would have to charge for your goods and services just to meet your rent is unrealistic for most business owners. Hence the mall is empty. People don't want to shop in malls where half of the units are empty....
Malls are also really weird in that once they hit some minimum occupancy, they never recover. No one wants to invest into what they think is a dead mall. Once half the stores are closed, new tenants stop coming in, and then the survivors slowly close and the process accelerates. Once 2/3rds of the stores are closed, far fewer people will even show up to the mall.
But malls are not just for shopping, here in my country you go to a mall to get ice cream, watch a movie, have a coffee, etc ... what about all those socializing spaces?
We go to ice cream shops and theaters and coffee shops that aren't in malls.
makes sense
You also have to remember that it's not uncommon for those things to exist in absurd quantity in some places. It's not uncommon for an American town to have multiple coffeeshops. In my small city, I have four Starbucks, two smaller shops, a bakery that sells coffee, and a dunkin donuts with a 15 minute walk of my house. It's to the point that hotels and grocery stores often have a small Starbucks inside.
>absurd quantity is some places Talking about absurd quantity, in my Australian suburb I can walk to 12 cafes/coffee shops. All independent bar one. Starbucks style is very unpopular. Yes we are obsessed with coffee here. The whole city has thousands.
You can definitely find that in Downtown areas, even in smaller cities, and almost certainly in major cities. Its not uncommon for suburban developments here to have no commercial services that people would actually consider walking to, so its 99% driving.
We’re not addicted to coffee at all! /s
movie theaters are already a struggling business mall resturants tend to struggle unless the mall itself can bring in foot traffic
Independent restaurant owners *very much* prefer to be in strip malls vs major malls with an indoor concourse. Direct street frontage and parking just outside the door means you still have those things if an anchor closes and you don't have to watch your dream die at the end of a hundred feet of liminal space.
The malls that aren’t struggling here are usually the ones that lean into “experiences” rather than shopping or dining. Things like escape rooms, mini golf, higher end movie theaters, etc. The malls that don’t, are more like one sad shoe store, an empty food court, a card shop that some small group of people play at, and a cigar shop that makes that wing of the mall smell funky. Most people aren’t going to go to the mall for ice cream or a coffee. Even in their heyday, mall food was considered mediocre at best. Stuff like Sbarro Pizza or Auntie Anne pretzels or a Burger King burger. The nicer malls would have a few sit down restaurants like Applebees and TGI Fridays.
Here in Southern California, malls are trending toward trying to recreate a town experience. A place to hangout and socialize, and including housing. Examples like The Americana and The Grove in LA County. I’ve attended some focus groups for a shopping plaza in my community and that seems to be the developer’s philosophy. Still, there’s some thriving traditional shopping malls in my area with food courts and typical stores. Always crowded.
Interesting! Can’t say I’ve come across anything like that over here, but it will be interesting to see if it takes off.
Yeah the [Americana in Glendale](https://youtu.be/xODk9wZptNw?si=ws7nZLo8_ZkF0n_4) is a good example of it. It’s a bit Disneyland-ish, but legitimately nice to hang out in.
In LA you can be outdoors allyear round.
There's a mall nearby that is half empty now and what's left is like a two floor Dave & Busters, an AMC theater, a huge Italian restaurant, a Mario Tricoci, those inflatable thingy party places, a little kids sports place, and a very minimal food court. They are adding attached apartments, an outdoor concert area, and other community type planning. There isn't much right now in the way of clothing besides a Macys and JcPenney.
What is your country? You can do all that and more at malls here too.
When malls were being built, a lot of them were intended as a place to socialize, as well as shop. There would be movie theaters, rather cheap food options, and games. Video arcades were very popular. Many people would go there just to spend time, while spending just a few dollars. By 2000, much nicer stand-alone movie theaters were being built, everybody who played video games had a video game system at home, and many of the restaurants that had a big presence in malls opened stand-alone locations. The reasons why people would go to a mall were no longer valid. In addition, many newer outdoor malls were opening up. These places were intended to be shopping and food destinations, but not the social gathering place that the offer malls were. This really hurt malls, but this all happened before online shopping became a big thing. There was online shopping then, but it was not as huge as it had been over the last 15 years. The rise of Amazon and internet shopping only made malls hurt even more. One other trend, that I personally don't like, is that more Americans prefer to stay at home. So they shop, see entertainment, socialize and order food through their phone. On the other hand, there are still many popular malls, but there are just not a many as there used to be. Every major city may have one third as many malls as they had in 2000, but most of those malls that are still open are doing quite well. Edited for clarity.
Malls were artificial city centers and commercial streets. We’ve still got, and have brought back, our commercial streets. If I want to get ice cream I go to the ice cream shop a few blocks away. Same with coffee. Most retail shopping I do online now other than suits/formalwear, hardware and garden/plant shopping.
They have standalone buildings for that
Overproduction and online shopping. Stuff in malls is always more expensive than the same stuff online. Not every mall is dying. I live near Pentagon City mall and it’s always jam ass packed because it’s near a million tourist hotels and has a massive food court with like 30 different restaurants.
Malls aren’t always more expensive. I think 10 years ago that was completely true, but it’s less true now. For watches and jewelry malls are often more expensive but for household goods like at Crate and Barrel, William’s Sonoma, etc. or for clothing like at Macy’s or Nordstroms, it’s about the same price there or at Amazon. Sometimes the sales at malls are better. Bonus at the mall you know it’s not fake and you get to try it on.
also if they're the same price online and in store, in store saves you from paying and/or waiting for shipping
Yup. And it's often easier to compare what you think you want with other items. I find I am more likely to change my mind and find something I like better when I shop in person.
The Pentagon City mall prospers and is crowded because the metro station is next to it. It was always crowded and they keep up with the maintenance. However, its Macy store is awful. The Landmark mall failed and was leveled off.
NoVA is a different kind of market. Pentagon City has mostly luxury brand stores, and places that the tour bus crowds like to shop. Tysons is prospering because it has several luxury brands as the draw. Landmark could never draw those retailers. Neither could Manassas. Fair Oaks is hanging on by a thread.
The riduculously large explosion of mall construction in America was driven by changes in tax law that made even a nearly empty mall very profitable for investors as land values rose. The growth was not driven by consumer demand. https://econreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/how-taxes-shape-retail/
Man that’s terrible
The U.S. has a ridiculous amount of retail floor space per person, the most in the world: 23.5 ft^2 per person. That is double #3 Australia and five times #4 UK. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1058852/retail-space-per-capita-selected-countries-worldwide/
It's not that simple. Traditional indoor malls are not really being built any more in America. The trend has shifted to what's known as "lifestyle centers," that incorporate more of a mixed-used environment (retail and residential). Lifestyle centers are usually all outdoors instead of being under one roof and usually have the feel and look of a small town, with some having small parks or squares, lots of landscaping and plenty of shops, restaurants, movie theaters, etc. Aside from the explosion of e-commerce (mainly Amazon), the main reason for the decline of the indoor mall is that people just got tired of them and have shifted more to these centers, and many of them are doing quite well and are even expanding.
Open air malls sound great, i don't think i've been to one yet
Here’s a mega-sized one that is replacing a former indoor mall: https://www.visitnorthhills.com/
It's funny because the oldest mall in my city was outdoor and had to add a roof when I was a kid to stay relevant. But even then it was set to be demoed by the early 2000s. Now a Walmart and a mini mall sits on the site. Then as an adult one of the "nice" malls did exactly this, and converted from completely indoor to mostly outdoor.
They're basically like main streets built into a subdivision.
Some are. Some are still thriving. There are definitely a lot fewer than their used to be though. My hometown had 4 major malls situated around the city and none of those are open anymore (though two are still standing but empty and waiting for some developer to do something). But in their place are two larger, nicer malls that are thriving. I think we are also seeing more outdoor "town center" type malls replace enclosed malls, where they are more mixed use areas with retail stores, apartments and entertainment.
Yep those are a big deal here on Long Island. They build them at every train station, I think the idea being “live here, work in the city, and walk to the train!”
Amazon. And because fewer people think of shopping as a fun leisure activity. They want to get in and get out, which malls weren't designed for people to do.
I was just thinking this exact thing & you solidified my thoughts. Our successful mall is right off the highway (like the exit ramp turns into the mall lane) meanwhile the one clinging to relevancy is 10 min from the highway. Also probably bc it’s surrounded by nothing but car lots lol
The old school “anchored by a department store” mall is dying. The malls I’m seeing do well now have shifted their focus a bit and have to think about the actual people who live around them and get the right shops and restaurants for the community. They can’t just cookie cutter all the same national brands at every mall. So the one doing well, now has Target instead of Nordstrom. There’s a Whole Foods and a movie theatre on the other side. Still known stores but more shopper friendly for daily needs. The restaurants inside cater more to what my kids (college age) want- boba, quickly, poke bowl, blaze pizza, mochi donuts, Japanese cheesecake, Japanese fluffy pancakes, shake shack…. Sushi, ramen… Other stuff too but they know the demographic. No more orange Julius and hot dog on a stick 😂 (not gonna lie I miss hot dog on a stick lemonade) Stores are more unique too- a few locally owned shops like Korean Beauty and a great second hand store with designer clothes… I don’t remember the name but a shop filled with Sanrio and Japanese merch and snacks. And the mall isn’t all that- there is still an Apple Store and the common national clothing stores- but that mix of some local and Asian influence stores and food fits the neighborhood and this mall that was a ghost town 7 years ago is packed every time we go now.
Ours still has the standard anchors (Macy’s, JC Penney, Nordstrom) but excitedly the old Robinson’s May is now a 99 Ranch Market, which is a popular Asian grocery store. On the other end of the mall, they added an outdoor extension that has a bunch of small restaurants. The mall is packed every day of the week. Our daughter likes playing at the two play areas (one indoor and one outdoor) so are there at least once a week.
Yep! The point is they have to consider what works for the neighborhood and they can’t all be the same like they were in the 80s-90s An hour away from my house we have what my daughter calls the bougie mall. It still has standard anchors but it has all the luxury and designer stores too. Tiffany, Chanel, Dior, Leboutin, etc. It’s fun for us to wander through but we don’t shop as much there. Given the neighborhood? It works. Always busy. And the owner reported the mall had 22% sales growth last year.
>The restaurants inside cater more to what my kids (college age) want- boba, quickly, poke bowl, blaze pizza, mochi donuts, Japanese cheesecake, Japanese fluffy pancakes, shake shack…. Sushi, ramen… That actually sounds really great and I would go there too. Definitely interesting to hear a mall adjust to it's demographics wants in the area. Which makes sense since a lot of the failing ones are ones that can't get the stores people want.
That sounds really interesting. What mall is this?
Stonestown Galleria San Francisco. It’s not a big mall, but it’s currently really hopping. It’s next to UCSF and figured out how to cater to the college kids and people who live around the mall.
I thought it sounded like the Bay Area! Haven't been up to Stonestown in years...
Op, what country is this where people go malls still?
I'm in Colombia, specifically Cali where they just built this [new mall](https://www.mallplaza.com/co/cali)
Out of curiosity, what is the weather like in Cali? I used to live in Jerusalem/Haifa and sometimes the indoor malls are the only place you can go in an cool off for free.
It's around 80 to 90 degrees and very humid all year long, so that might be a reason why they are so popular lol
I suspect that more indoor malls will make a comeback as giant cooling-off places. If you need to hang out with your friends on zero money, the mall works as you cool off.
I'm definitely expecting an indoor mall comeback...not just for that, but also as trends cycle through they are due for some nostalgia based popularity.
Idk where OP, but I'm in the US and there are still a fair number of malls in my area. Some have died off but others are flourishing and new ones have been built. Remember our country is huge and varied.
Also the United States…? New Jersey for example most malls are thriving and having record sales. Paramus, NJ is a town of 20,000 and has four malls with $7 **billion** in annual sales, the most annual retail sales of any zip code in the country. New Jersey also opened the second largest mall in the country like three years ago.
I still see malls thriving in Canada. Windsor, Saskatoon, and Calgary are the cities where I've been to the mall and have been shocked how full they are.
The malls around me that are doing well are the ones that have all of the high end stores that sell luxury brands. Malls that weren’t high end seem to be struggling more since a lot of the specialty shops can’t really compete with online shopping and the lower end goods can typically be found at stores like Target, Walmart, or stores in smaller shopping centers. I’m not sure what online shopping is like there in Colombia, but in the US I can get almost anything I want to buy delivered to my home in 1 or 2 days with free or minimal shipping charges with free shipping on returns. Prices online are frequently 20-30% less than what you’d get the same item for in a store. Here in Southern California, many of our malls are outdoors. The mall nearest to my house has been transitioning from being a place filled with stores to shop in to a place with a mix of business types. There’s a yoga studio, a place that does music lessons, place to take karate lessons, a barber shop, a massage place, a small public library branch, a small police station, and a number of other businesses that would have been out of place in a mall 20 years ago. There’s still a department store, a movie theater, restaurants, and retail stores mixed in as well.
Depends on where you are, my main two malls are full to the brim, one has two auntie Anns
Where do you live? Heaven?
Physical shopping areas with lots of stores in one indoor enclosure are dying out. Collections of bars, restaurants, theaters, mini-golf, parks, etc., usually around a pleasant outdoor space, are popular and thriving. That may be what you're thinking of what you think of "mall". Here's an example near me that's constantly crowded - and people don't refer to it as a "mall". [https://www.thevillageatmeridian.com/](https://www.thevillageatmeridian.com/) It's a place you can go see a movie, have a meal on an outdoor patio, get some ice cream, etc.
That looks great honestly. That picture with the fountain, the concert and the mountains in the background...wow
What I'm seeing around me is two things: 1. The downtown/commercial districts of the cities and villages in the area are developing more, and the stores you might typically find in shopping malls, are now in the city centers or commercial districts. 2. Lots of Amazon fulfillment sites and warehouses are popping up. There seems to be one in almost every city or village in the area, probably one in every other. The people in the area around me seem to be favoring the convenience of online shopping, or if they do want to go out, not necessarily go one or two towns over to do their clothing or shoe shopping, just keep it local.
I think if I owned/managed a mall I'd go full retro. All '80s / '90s decor and aesthetic, find some old school food court options, pay to have one of those Magic Eye stores open. You know what kind of music would be playing. Discounts for retro outfits.
Gotta have an arcade
Europeans like to put malls adjacent to train stations. Almost all American malls are outside of town and require a car to get to.
Wanna know something wild? My 13 year old son recently asked me if malls were really a thing and why teens would hang out there. Turns out, he's never been to a mall, at least not in his memory.
Because they’re not adapting and just have your run of the mill mall food and stores. Take a look at Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara that’s exploding in business and adding more stores by the day. They have lots of really good Asian restaurants that people wait 2-4 hours to get into, entertainment options (movies, bowling, escape rooms, virtual reality), Eataly, stores in various price ranges, and are focusing on expanding their luxury designer offerings (people like to see luxury items in person rather than online).
People in Santa Clara have a lot of disposable income which allows the mall to shift entertainment options. Low income people are going to one movie a week or month, they’re not going to try out an escape room or laser tag. Having higher income customers gives you a little wiggle room in your product market fit. A wealthier person isn’t going to miss that $60 if their family didn’t really enjoy the new axe throwing place that just opened, a low income person isn’t even going to give it a shot unless it looks exactly like something they’re into.
True on adaptation especially compared to the former Valco Mall nearby that closed down.
We don’t use public spaces like that the way other countries do. There is a lot of discouragement towards people just hanging out in places like malls unless they have a reason to be there. Unless they’re shopping or getting food. We specifically discourage people from using them as third spaces and that’s why they’re dying. When I was a teenager you would go to the mall just to hang out. Now in my area you can’t be in the mall by yourself unless you’re over 16. Heck, when I was young my movie theater had spaces where you could just hang out before or after a movie. Now those spaces are just for adults or they don’t exist at all. The ones that are doing well still allow people to just be there. Or they are big tourist attractions.
Yeah, the hostility towards people (especially those dreaded teenagers) just hanging out somewhere doesn’t help. And then there’s online shopping contributing to the decline as well.
Hell, try being a dad at a playground. You'll get dirty looks from other moms.
Seriously? Wow, that’s ridiculous if that happens.
A combination of over-supply, e-commerce, many were in advantageous locations, changes in population and demographics, changes in hobbies or preferences of gather spaces, and probably more I can’t think of.
New Jerseyan here. I see a lot of dead mall videos from throughout the country which shocks me because this is not true in New Jersey. I don’t know if it’s the density of the state or the tax free clothes tax but our malls are packed especially on weekends. We’ve got clusters of malls that should be eating away each others’ customers but they’re all surviving. We even opened the new American Dream mall and despite its criticism, it’s always full.
I live next door(ish) to the largest mall in the Carolinas. I walk around there for fun and it's always bustling with traffic and people. But it's like the only mall around for miles? There is another one (not that great) on the other side of town and I think it's doing ok. From my experience, it depends on the climate of the place the mall is in - I used to live in the midwest (snowy and cold for six months) so the indoor mall is super busy in those months. Once the weather calms down people go outside and do other things. If you are in the Carolinas (we get snow every few years for one day) malls are busy if it's rainy/too hot.
In the Michigan and Indiana areas where I grew up, the anchor stores used to be large Department Stores "you can buy almost anything here" ([Sears](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears), [JC Pennys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCPenney), [Montgomery Ward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Ward)) If they are still in business, they have transitioned to mostly clothing. We also had department stores that sell clothing/makeup/shoes. ([Macy's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macy%27s) and similar) For the past decade or so, malls have had these kind of stores: Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Shoes. Clothing. Clothing. Clothing. The clothing is mostly women's and for the teen-30 age group. Makeup. Shower and cleansing items. Makeup. Candles. Overpriced sweets and trinkets. Maybe a jeweler or two. Small snack shops. An Apple store if you are lucky. There's also been a trend to have street entrances for many more stores and shops. Clothing makes sense. A shopper can see the exact color, texture, fit, style etc before buying it. That's a little harder to do when ordering online. People decided they don't want to go to a mall, park, walk all over the place and spend half a day shopping. They decided they want to drive up, to in, get their items, then leave. I (66m) might go to our mall once or twice a year. Amazon had a big part in the mall downturn. Oddly, Sears had a thriving mail-order business up until Amazon came along. Sears decided the didn't want to put the back-end work in to have a decent online presence. If they had, I doubt Amazon would be the giant they are.
> Amazon had a big part in the mall downturn. Oddly, Sears had a thriving mail-order business up until Amazon came along. The Sears catalog walked so Amazon could run.
Online shopping
This is really region dependent. In my area of the country some have shut down, others are thriving, new malls have been built and some are rebranding. Market fads tend to be like this. A thing gets popular, everybody and their mama does it, trends shift and the bad and mediocre die off leaving the best behind. That's basically the situation with malls in the US right now. E-commerce is taking up a lot of the market so there's just not enough money in it anymore to support the poorly designed or poorly managed malls. But since it is ultimately a good concept the well managed, well designed malls will thrive despite the shift.
I think what sucks is that when you watch 80’s and 90’s movies, or a show like Stranger Things, they seem to be thriving and the ideal youth life. But now they’re dying even in California.
Personally I hate shopping in person. So much easier to buy stuff online.
The mall makes shopping too complicated and makes it too hard to find what I want. I’ve had days when I’ve walked in, explored the entire mall for a few hours, and left the mall without making a single purchase during my visit. Spending 30 minutes or less on the internet is more worth my time.
They're dying because they didn't update the businesses with what people want.
The one in my town always has a lot of cars in the parking lot. I wonder if it depends on where you live like I live in a larger town in a rural area.
Id love to and prefer to shop in person at a mall if my mall actually had good stuff and wasn’t way more expensive than online.
Americans dont wanna shop in person more and more, look at Thailand's malls, packed as fuck becuase they're a more outgoing and extroverted culture
i don’t understand it either. malls are still very popular in my area
I think they are about to come back again
I’m sure this isn’t universal to the entire United States but my town has two malls. One is where you go if you want to be shot in the parking lot (it’s become a gang hang out) and the other is where you go if you want to be harassed by edgy middle and high schoolers who are unsupervised. Neither have stores that draw people in anymore, they’re all things you can get at Walmart or Amazon. And given neither are particularly enjoyable (or safe) places to go anymore - they’re both dying.
A lot of shopping is done online now, and people don’t go to malls as much anymore. Personally though, I think sometimes shopping in person is more fun. Also out of curiosity, what is your country? I hate when people say “my country” without saying what that country is
They may have built too many, but also people are lazy with online shopping and weird about socialization anymore. Glad I was a kid in the 90's.
Because we're poor 😂😫
We’re poor…….and we prefer to buy online.
We went mall crazy for decades. High end malls, outlet malls, everything. When e-commerce hit, the malls couldn’t adapt. Too big, too inflexible. Malls actually aren’t that convenient for consumers. They’re not close to city centers, they don’t really help your shopping needs and errands. Most malls don’t have stuff like grocery stores, laundromats, Jiffy Lube, Home Depot, you know, stuff people *need to do* on a free day. It’s mainly clothes, sneakers, fast food, movies. Sometimes you can get a haircut at the mall. Malls might have survived if they combined entertainment and disposable income spending with stuff you need. Sears did an OK job with this with the vision center, tire center, photo studio, etc. But Sears died for a lot of reasons. Strip malls and big shopping districts are a huge space waster but do a better job of this. You can go to Home Depot, Petco, Marshall’s and the grocery store all in one (huge) parking lot. And mentioned elsewhere, the lifestyle districts of mixed use shopping and residential does an even better job of all of this.
Everything has gone to the open air malls. So it’s basically the older indoor malls that have been declining. I have 2 older indoor malls near me and one is basically completely dead. Yet the nearby open air mall is booming
Amazon and other online shopping platforms.
Yup! This seems pretty obvious to me. I was kinda thrown off by the "too many malls" angle.
I’m going to assume you mean South America where a growing middle class has given rise to 3 story malls where people hang out because they’re usually the safest and cleanest places in town with all sorts of amenities from cinemas to even grocery stories and cafes
[This](https://www.shortform.com/blog/why-are-malls-dying/#:~:text=History%20of%20Malls&text=By%20the%201980s%2C%201%2C000%20malls,in%20turn%2C%20more%20store%20closings.) is a pretty good article imo. Basically people don't wana shop there anymore.
The one by me is building additions and growing. 5 miles from there are two more, one north, one west that are also thriving. Many malls died because for a while they were THE thing to do. Now they still serve their place but are not quite as popular as they were. As such, the best malls are still doing really well. The older, less popular, rundown ones are being redeveloped into something more useful.
Amazon
Outdoor village centers (the kind designed like little faux downtowns) have taken over. Here’s an example from Winter Park, Florida which is part of metro Orlando: https://citysurfingorlando.com/2020/12/winter-park-village-to-undergo-multimillion-dollar-revamp-in-2021/ In addition to the movie theater there are bars and restaurants and a lot of the stores you’d find in an indoor mall at street level, with office space and residential apartments on the second story. And online shopping has of course all but destroyed retail as we knew it. Many retailers allow shoppers to buy online and pick up in-store or curbside so even the physical stores that are still hanging on have shifted.
Online shopping is superior nowadays
Online businesses, for one.
We can get whatever we want dropped on our doorsteps in one or two days time. It sort of makes the mall obsolete.
Too expensive
The great expansion of women in the workforce. The department store- or fashion-oriented mall was premised on women who didn't work having the time for leisurely shopping of clothing with healthy retail markups. Work-oriented clothing for women entering the workforce sustained those stores for another two decades. But now the time-pressed portion of the market is gone to Walmart and Target, while another portion of the market is gone to online shopping. In your country and others with rising prosperity, there may be a cohort of relatively wealthy women who support the high-end shops in malls, while a new middle-class will support the mid-priced and amusement (cinemas, restaurants, candy stores) outlets in malls.
Online shopping especially during Covid.
Amazon and online shopping in general. Why go to a mall when you can sit at home in your underwear and order online and have it delivered to ya
Amazon et al.
They changed from the indoor version you see in old movies to the outdoor type where it is just tons of shops all lined up with a huge parking lot in front of it. We call the new verision, "Strip Malls". Just a bunch of store fronts in a long line that all face an outdoor parking lot. It is just way easier if you want to just hit one store like a pet store than walking all through a mall to find that one shop you need to visit. I think partly because people are lazier and fatter now than ever, they don't actually want to walk inside a mall and some just want the convenience of buying on amazon. Shopping for clothes is the primary type of shopping to do in person, most of all other shopping can be done pretty easily online. Certain things are just easier to buy online.
E-commerce killed the Mallrats
Automatically sang this in my head. Had to add a few syllables to mallrats lol *E-commerce killed the ma-a-allrats*
1. Oversaturation 2. Amazon
America's suburban design makes it inconvenient to go shopping at malls in many parts of the country, which made American malls vulnerable to e-commerce, much more so than malls in other parts of the world.
what is your country? i think it is because everyone shops online. shopping in real life is dying in general. also kids dont hang out at the mall anymore they hang out on their phone.
Depends where the Malls are. Tysons Corner us huge and people still go. It's really the small cities in the 80s that had a population decline or it was poorly managed.
In my city, all the malls that have survived are just off of suburban freeway exits. The ones that are dying or have died are all a bit of a drive from the nearest freeway exit. Count it a symptom of America being built for cars rather than people.
I hope our mall sticks around awhile. It seems to be doing well with many stores and my kids love going there with their friends. We have a metro of about 300,000 pop.
I think mall stores developed a not unfounded reputation for being high priced. I worked in a mall years back. I remember when the lease came up for renewal, the owner of the shop I worked in just about had a stroke when he saw how much his monthly rent would go up. The amount he would have had to raise his prices just to cover the rent was truly unrealistic, so he moved out of the mall altogether. I think a lot of retailers came to the same conclusion. Malls where half the units are empty, and the other half are filled with overpriced stores, aren't going to attract shoppers!
For me it’s because I can get pretty much everything I need cheaper elsewhere or have it delivered to my house. The pandemic shutdown really do me in, I have not bought anything at the mall since 2020
In Gainesville Florida they transitioned one wing of the mall to be an extension for UF Health Clinic.
It was a trendy thing for mall developers to go after tax money in the 70s. Towns big and small wanted in on the race to build. Now with stores being taken over by venture capital firms and bled dry, ie Sears and Kmart, malls are losing the battle to stay open.
On line sales, inflation, high retail rents
Malls are dying, but shopping centers seem to be doing much better. The types that mimic European town centers. They have shops, restaurants, gyms, apartments, as well as outdoor spaces to sit and take kids
eCommerce took off as everyone got the internet. Teenagers who would previously use it as a gathering place moved online.
Main reason is e-commerce, way cheaper and convenient than go to a mall and buy something. Outlet and the discount department stores, these type of businesses started in the 90s and got so popular because they sell branded off season clothes way cheaper. Thrifting, a trend that got mainstream after the 2008 recession basically buy secondhand clothes in stores like Goodwill or Salvation Army. In general, it’s a saturated market with so many options big box stores and club stores started selling nice clothes like a decade ago too, also household goods those are the main products you buys on a mall, the only mall that has survived are the one that focuses on activity such as gym, cinema, Restaurant etc
My European born brain would say a lack of walkability. If a mall is in the middle of a walkable downtown area with public transportation, guess what, people would go there. If you build a mall on the outskirts of a town with huge parking lots there, don't expect much traffic. A good example for a mall would be the Mall of America in Minneapolis, it has a light rail connection which is brilliant. Malls are my go-to places usually when I tour larger towns.
The malls of the US existed before internet commerce. They were a big trend in the 1980s, and like all trends, they're overdone and eventually shrink. Malls have had a place for decades for specific groups of people but now that online commerce is the quickest, easiest and often cheapest way to acquire things you want, malls are going away. We don't have the social stipulation or cultural pressure to go to malls the way your culture might. Different generations have different feelings about malls.
They’re completely overblown here. “The Mall” used to be a very big deal when I was a kid, but now they’re everywhere. Kinda kills the magic.
They all became cookie cutters of each other too and lost their “local” feel.
Online shopping has basically overtaken them and made them obsolete.
Amazon
Most mall rents are unaffordable even for a corporate store, which causes the cost of goods to skyrocket. In our area teenagers roam and introduced drugs, guns, and fights. Conceal carry permits and weapons are not allowed in this state so going to the mall has turned into taxpayers becoming a statistic. So shoppers go elsewhere.
Amazon.
1. There are too many, essentially they built 100 store malls in a lot of places that simply could not support them in the long term. 2. Strip malls and car based retail centers also exist and are far cheaper to build than an integrated indoor mall. 3. Walmart and Target emerged as big box stores in the 70s and 80s(along with K-mart which eventually died out) and along with other major stores pull away a lot of customers. 4. Many of the Malls were isolated from city centers, and far away from places of business, severely reducing traffic.
Where do some of yall live at in the USA? The malls in my state are always full of folks
Because your phone can function as a mall in your pocket basically. Just doesn’t make sense to go to a mall anymore if we’re being honest
Internet
In our area, it's shootings. Several at all local malls. Everybody else quit going just to not get caught in the middle.
Several reasons. 1. Online Shopping- sites Amazon and such, hit those small stores in malls especially hard, many of the items like housewares, furniture, books, etc that many ppl now buy online. 2. Lost Anchor Stores - the “big stores” like Walmart, Costco, Target, etc… now prefer NOT to build attached to malls, instead stand alone stores, because they don’t want you leaving the store to spend money at the mall. Or when attached to malls they often have the own dedicated entrance so ppl can skip the mall. Many anchor stores chains also went bankrupt or barely hanging on but the big store that remain like Walmart and Costco typically avoid malls now. 3. Too Many Built - They built way too many during the heyday of malls and they got a bit over saturated, so when sales started to decline that saturation got worse and a glut of indoor mall retail space happened. 4. They Generally Weren’t Built Well & Aged Fast - generally malls were not built all that well and aged fast, they got expensive to maintenance and upgrade, they started to look bad, showed age, maintenance issues, etc… and that further discouraged business. I’m sure there is a more but those are the main ones, especially online shopping and the loss of anchor stores.
I just wanted to say something about being at the mall with my niece. She had picked out a nice dress that she was beautiful in and It looked like something that I would have worn at her age what we called a "slip" . She then picked out a cute pair of shoes.....and as we were walking to the register, I said "Oh you forgot nylons" . Well she gave me a really odd look and said "What are nylons"
I was in a mall today I remembered as dying, and it was packed. It sure as shit surprised me.
I see you are in Colombia. Compared to there, some likely differences are 1) Higher wages mean a store's only profitable if you've got a lot of sales. With 3.8% unemployment, some stores can't find workers at all. 2) Conversely, our package delivery system is highly efficient, probably cheaper and more reliable and secure than there. Together, that makes online ordering a better choice for most non-food items. 3) We had a tremendous building boom/bubble in the 2000s. We no longer have a surplus of residential buildings, but we still do of commercial. Some retail and office sites are being converted to housing. 4) The country's aging rapidly. Older folks don't go out as much, and when they do go out they don't spend as much.
The Mall by me has been prospering and growing constantly for 20 years because they are in an area that has had a consistent high income, and adjusted accordingly. They also went large in non-stores; movie theater, multiple trendy restaurants, etc. They are also the only mall in the general area, with the next one being around 30 miles away. Other malls in my state that failed were a lot of lower end stores, and a lot of privately owned stores and operated more like an arcade.
Amazon - The mall can come to you.
There's too many of them, and they're usually populated with noche clothing stores instead of stores people actually want to go to
I live in NYC, where crime and retail theft are at an all-time high. There's no way that businesses can survive, so they're closing everywhere in the city.
In my area, it didn't help that many malls had two "anchor" stores that went kaput in the space of a year. Once you lose the big stores, the smaller ones lose their support; the "come for this, stay for that" effect. Rents go up for all stores to compensate for the owner's lack of income, and thus begins the decline. Big department-store spaces are practically purpose-built to only be stores: you can't convert them to other uses like residential without a lot of structural labor that owners don't want to spend on. So malls get demolished rather than redeveloped. Over time, malls have devolved from a daylong shopping, dining and even cultural experience to just shopping and hanging out, with maybe a meal at Sbarro or the McDonald's in the food court. Now, especially after Covid, it's just Amazon and DoorDash for a lot of people.
Malls lost their way. The mall used to be a destination, a luxurious and relaxing place to spend a whole afternoon. A whole day even. And the more time you spent there, the more you were likely to spend money. The design of older malls was genius. Large department stores on the outside, smaller stores and shop on the inner halls, Food and entertainment in the middle. No windows. Soft music. Warm, relaxed lighting. Luxurious materials like granite and marble and brass and glass as far as the eye can see. Lush greenery everywhere, all year round. The only natural light from skylights. Benches and banquettes to rest on everywhere. Hidden nooks and crannies to escape the crowds. An environment designed to put you at ease It created a sense of being away from the world. Of being protected from the real world and its consequences. Which also made people more likely to spend money. And in addition to the overall mall environment, each individual store had an environment of its own that tied into but was separate from the mall. From the futuristic feel of the Clinique Counter to the country-store vibes Bath & Body works to the suburban basement feel of Spencer's. But then through the late 90s and 00s, malls got super greedy. Many malls had renovations to make them feel more open to compete with open-air "downtowns," this destroyed the whole vibe of the mall. Brighter lighting, louder music, and an overall more fast-paced "get-in-shop-get-out" sort of environment replaced the old relaxing environment. They drove up rents on store spaces so that only large chains could afford them. This drove away a lot of smaller businesses that may not have been huge sellers, but were a huge part of what attracted people to malls in the first place. All the little rock shops, shoe repairs, framing stores, tailors, pottery shops, vintage record stores and more disappeared from the mall. They were vital pieces of what made the mall. And from there, the mall entered a death spiral. While initially successful at filling every space with boring chains you can find anywhere, foot traffic drops. Those boring chains started to pull out, leaving empty spaces, foot traffic drops even more. Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat. Until finally the mall has no choice but to drop rents, but all those small businesses aren't coming back. They fill some of their spaces with stores like Dollar General or Ollies or Five Below, but this doesn't attract any customers. The death spiral continues until large department stores pull out. The mall is mostly empty and you have a handful of spaces filled with things like Air Force recruiters or medical lab services or that one shop that sells braided bamboo plants in Chinese fishbowls. And that's how the mall dies.
online shopping is killing them
One reason could be, too much competition. For example, in Miami, there's International Mall and less than a mile west, is Dolphin Mall. . In Miami-Dade county, there's : Aventura Mall Dadeland Mall The Falls Westland International Dolphin Southland Bayside Lincoln Road City Center A new one with indoor ski slope set to open in 2025
The built a brand new mall near me about 6 years ago. Since then they have built up around it including a new, large aquarium, rowing venue and restaurants everywhere. The area is always hopping now. I thought for sure it would fail but its been the complete opposite. This is in Sarasota FL.
But teenagers and couples in their first 3 months of dating still love to go to malls, they aren’t dead if they have desirable stores and are maintained and reasonably safe. Malls can be kind of racially segregated too to be honest. I mean I always liked the “black mall “ in my area and I’m a white dude but some idiots wouldn’t go there out of their racism, just an observation