Dead Malls and the Generational Cycle

[bobc]

Stores are still being built. Enclosed malls are not, and are often changed to stores with exterior entrances only.
This is true even in places with harsh climate much of the year.
Why? Lack of security and ability to prevent problematic persons from taking over the public space.

[pbrower2a]

[quote pid='34583' dateline='1517204148']

(01-28-2018, 07:12 PM)bobc Wrote: Stores are still being built. Enclosed malls are not, and are often changed to stores with exterior entrances only.
This is true even in places with harsh climate much of the year.
Why? Lack of security and ability to prevent problematic persons from taking over the public space.

As I last read, the last enclosed mall built in America was built in 2006. It's not that there was a boom in building malls that ended abruptly in the economic meltdown of 2007-2009; they were understood to be a losing proposition before then. Many of the malls that wend dead were already at or past the end of their projected service life -- that is, they were fully depreciated.

Shopping malls are expensive to build and maintain. They require huge amounts of parking space, and their public space requires expensive HVAC.  The public space is typically a loss-taker for the developer-lessor. The economic justification for a shopping mall was that the mall attracted a large number of middle-class shoppers who had money to burn not only in the department stores (business term "anchors") at the ends, small chain retailers in between, and the food court. The middle-class shoppers (typically white, as they were the most predictable and needed fewer accommodations for their culture) could be expected to spend freely, not caring that they were paying full retail unlike proles who were going to K-Mart (and later, Wal*Mart, Target, or even Dollar General, Family Dollar, or Big Lots). Eventually Wal*Mart started taking over sections of some malls, and Wal*Mart can undercut the boutique stores that compete with Wal*Mart on merchandise -- if those stores exist. But what the heck? Well-heeled customers justify expensive operations, and not-so-well-heeled customers never were the desired customers at the mall.

The thrill is gone. A warning sign was the 'mall rats' , a suburban version  of urban delinquents who might have spent a little money at a video arcade and the food court, but certainly not at a boutique, let alone the department stores (which already had a rather old clientele by the 1980s) -- and businesses that have an aging clientele not being replaced by a steady stream of younger clients faces doom from demographic trends alone (think of Montgomery-Ward) . People used to go there as entertainment, of all things. Now they have surfeits of recorded music and video, so they need not go to the mall. The stores are changing. Some places now deal in used goods as well as new, or in things unthinkable in a mall in the 1960s -. like building materials and close-out items. If you ever see a Five Below store... here's my warning. You will find cheap stuff that will go to the landfill fast.
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(a few modifications of an older post since deleted).

[Tim Randal Walker]

As for brick and mortar, the big box stores proliferated. I now think of these are average in terms or today's retail. A few enclosed malls might survive, offering what passes for higher end retail.

[pbrower2a]

American retail space is now overbuilt.

[pbrower2a]

Closest mall to where I live -- and it seems to be dying.





Poor location (too close to a giant mall in the Kalamazoo area, and no close-by captive markets) and the bad luck to have a Macy's that called it quits before JC Penney and Sears stores shuttered... not a bad-looking mall. It is easy to get to from Interstate 94 (one of the busiest non-metropolitan freeways in America, and I am surprised that the freeway is still only four lanes even if it was built about sixty years ago and is fully inadequate for the traffic that it now has)... but much other retail is close by that isn't in this mall (Target, Best Buy, Kohl's) which often ends up in a mall but didn't in Battle Creek  while Sears, Macy's, and JS Penney were still there. Target, Best Buy, and Kohl's are in a mall about forty miles away in Jackson, Michigan, which is even more of a dump than Battle Creek. (Jackson has a big men's prison, and the wives of convicts staying there have often moved there. The mall in Battle Creek has a Barnes and Noble; Jackson has nothing of the sort. Criminals as a rule didn't go to prison for 'excessive reading', and if they got wives, they did not select them for intellectual interests. It's fairly easy to get good cheap help in Jackson, but try finding a bookstore there. The mall in Jackson seems to be doing OK even if it had a Toys 'R' Us that, as elsewhere, went belly-up.

[pbrower2a]

(04-06-2018, 01:43 PM)Ti m Randal Walker Wrote: As for brick and mortar, the big box stores proliferated.   I now think of these are average in terms or today's retail.  A few enclosed malls might survive, offering what passes for higher end retail.

It went this way: the shopping malls depended upon anchor stores, bloated versions of department stores that already existed, which would offer the convenience of allowing an exit from them into a mall which would lead to specialty boutiques and to restaurants. The problem for the anchor stores that a convenient exit was an easy way for people to get through the stores to something else. Some retailers recognized such as a convenience that they could easily do without because that convenience would do that retailer no good. So it is with Home Depot, Best Buy, Kohl's (usually), Wal*Mart, and Meijer. Wal*Mart might allow a non-competing business (typically a hair salon, bank, or restaurant) operate inside the building. In one mall that I know, Kohl's and Best Buy closed off the mall entrances during the COVID-19 pandemic with medical concerns as the reason; I would not be surprised if those stores keep the mall entrances closed after the pandemic is over. (For one thing, that likely makes shoplifting more difficult).