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Oh no bad news for one of our local malls. They want to put a Fallas store where our old Mervyn's is. We already have Factory 2 U. Any suggestions I could make to not let that permit go through? I was thinking getting council to offer tax incentives or some other form of incentive to another store like BCF which has shown interest. Otherwise suggest it be publically condemned than rather get a store that will detract from the brand new movie theater and high end stores going in.
My worse nightmare is this Fallas detracts Macy's customers and Macy's closes and it becomes a.......Wal-Mart anchored mall. NOOOO!
I was recently in a new mall in Kuwait City. In actuality it's just a huge mall but they actually recreated small town America mainstreet by building a huge industrial shell with super-high maybe 60-70' high ceiling cleverly lit to make a blue-purple "sky" and the stores are not just plaster-walled cutouts of the building itself but are built as freestanding two-story brick buildings resembling a small-town MidWest downtown with one part typical American middle-classes clothing, eyeglass, sporting-good stores etc, another part with restaurants including verandas on the 2nd floor to watch the people walking below on the concrete "streets" (look like streets too, not like tiled mall floor). Then there is a sidestreet - kind of hidden - where the simple monochromatic flat "sky" is replaced by an ornate celestial half-dome with Fendi, Gucci, Chanel, etc etc arrayed around it in a two-story storefront resembling Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
I'm not sure you could do this in North America because the volume of air enclosed. Here you have to be A/C'd during 130d days in the Arabian Desert summer but we're sitting on the 2nd biggest oilfield in the world and gasoline is 80 cents per gallon. Natural gas prices have come down in the US though, maybe you could heat and A/C this type of mall OK. It's a pretty cool concept - kind of the best of both worlds. It actually creates a "walkable" (albeit "virtual") downtown and you can really get some good cardio excersize because the main street is nearly 2 kms long so if you make several laps you've done a mini-marathon! Great people-watching too with the mix of Westerners and Arabs and Indians and SE Asian guestworkers.
Have you ever thought that people get annoyed by the amount of traffic in malls? When I was a child, people went to malls to shop & eat not mall walk and loiter because kids or adults have nothing better to do. Nowadays there are a lot of people who hang out in malls and spend no money or at least that is the case around here. I would rather shop at a strip mall than deal with that crap constantly when I am actually there to spend money.
When I was 40 I spent a lot of money at the mall because the anchor stores were where I shopped. Thirty years later those stores have either moved into strip malls, life style centers or gone out of business. At my age walking miles in a large mall is not a priority, and neither is shopping.
Salem Mall and Rolling Acres Mall in Dayton and Akron Ohio, respectively. Randall Park Mall outside of Cleveland.
I still don't know why. Dayton and Akron still have two other malls and Cleveland has a few. Too much retail for a dying economy perhaps.
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