Lack of competition is one factor to weigh in, too.
There is Town Center and the Huntington Mall and what else in a reasonable drive, really? Which is a good thing, really - malls were "overcooked" back in the 80s everywhere, and due to it's size Charleston avoided this, while the larger cities were saturated with them. Atlanta (metro) has roughly
twelve major malls (130-225 stores each) with a dozen more that are smaller than that, and who knows how many "open air malls" that were trendy to build a few years ago. Some of them are still thriving due to the population in their areas, but a few are hurting pretty badly now, too.
Momentary topic deviation: Many years ago in school, we had to design a mall but it had to be completely different layout than what most malls were. Huntington is the "standard" layout - Town Center a bit better but still pretty standard. I designed a mall that had a central lawn area with a botanical garden style dome over it for light, with real grass, trees, and a small pond - basically a small park in the center. Three spurs would go out from there, and each one would mimic store facades for the fronts of the shops - looking like an outdoor main street. One would have a New Yorkish theme to it, another would be an old style European theme, and the third an International theme (Asian, Latino, etc) No one has ever tried that since back then, so I have no idea if it would have worked to draw crowds or not - but it wouldn't have been as "blah" as what's out there today. - end of deviated chatter.
The open air mall concept does pretty well here. Not far from me is one of "
The Avenues" shopping complexes. Outdoor mall - basically a very elaborately done shopping center in a "U" shape - they built 4-5 of these in varying parts of the metro area. The parking lots stay PACKED most days. Rumor was the developers of the Kanawha Mall redo came down to look at them, but unfortunately I think they doofed on that one - Kanawha Mall being much more like a regular stucco shopping center with lower-end stuff in it... my Sister says she hasn't even been there more than once or twice since it reopened.
Three words to keep things going... service, service, service. You can have all the "boutique stores" in the world, but if you don't make customers feel like their business is wanted, they'll find somewhere else to do, though - only mall or not.
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