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Yes, I can see the Malls offsetting their costs for heating/air. Unfortunately, they raise them 2X, or 3x and most often on the little stores than the big named ones. I can understand the rationale for the smaller ones leaving. It’s sad, especially when it’s one that you visited/like more than the others and they relocate on the other side of town from where you normally travel to.
Something that I watched start happening in the 90s also was more and more of the independent stores with a wide range of interesting product got replaced with Standard Mall Retailer #1, Standard Mall Retailer #2, and so on. All carrying basically the same product. Maybe a different label, but still basically clones of one another to the point it really didn't matter what store you were in. There was no reason to go to the mall because they had nothing I wanted to buy.
Yep. I recall wanting to get a jewelry box for for my wife's birthday, and dumb as I was, I thought the mall would be the place - dozens of stores, right? Wrong. All the chain stores select inventory by more or less the same algorithm, and jewelry boxes are a seasonal item.
There are always exceptions but generally speaking the malls in Canadian cities that are still thriving are the high-end ones. The upkeep of malls is quite high and of course those higher costs are passed onto consumers. Higher income people however are not as price sensitive so are more than willing to pay extra for the comfort of shopping in an air conditioned or snow free enclosed mall with no rain to deal with. They are also more likely to enjoy shopping where they get more personal attention and pleasant environment as opposed to bargain basement Walmart where you are left to your own devices navigating an ugly monster warehouse.
Malls might do well to look how Library's have re-invented themselves to stay viable with the seemingly slow demise of printed books and similar media in the wake of ever increasing technology giving us Kindles, Tablets, Online Media, etc.
They now have magazine/reading rooms with fireplaces, collections of very recent DVD's for those who don't want to shell out $8.00+ to see some stinker. Public meeting rooms where classes are given on a variety of subjects, skills, etc. by visiting teachers (and they are free), free passes to local museums and other venues, arranged bus tours to cultural events, etc.
In one Mall near me, a store that sells nearly everything one could want for their kitchen, they actually have a demonstration kitchen where they teach cooking classes. The idea being, I would imagine, offer something to the public that motivates them to go to the Mall, that they simply cannot get/reproduce with a faster/cheaper/easier method with technology/online shopping/improvements in shipping services.
The King of Prussia Mall and Sawgrass Mills are as far from walkable as you're likely to get. KoP is your classic enclosed mall (actually 2) in the suburbs with a sea of parking, now with restaurants, a Crate and Barrel, a big-box strip mall (including a Nordstrom Rack), and a huge movie theatre on the perimeter. Sawgrass Mills is an enclosed outlet mall in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a sea of parking, and containing a ridiculous number of so-called outlet stores, many of them duplicates of each other. Both pull in visitors not only locally, but regionally and even internationally (particularly in the case of Sawgrass Mills).
I'm not sure where they got that list; King of Prussia is bigger than Macy's Herald Square by any measure I can think of besides height. Also Macy's isn't a mall... it's one store.
Anyway, the death of the mall is greatly exaggerated.
KOP is because it's in the middle of limited anythingville like much of central to central east PA, and it's not far from Philly.
The Malls around here are busy, walkable, in walking distance of transit, many jobs, housing, and condos, apartments right there.
Response to a six year old post. Walkable is the answer with more restaurants, and less/minimal retail.
The death of Malls in much of outer suburbia were many of them were built is far from exaggerated.
A list of some of the monsters is they are located in an area where transportation is limited, and COL can be lower.
Nothing like that around here. And still many people are driving.
I have spent alot of time in Aus & London, been to all the Westfield malls in Sydney including Burwood and Parramatta..and also the Westfield Malls in White CIty and Stratford, in London. Compared to the US, there is more residential built closely around the malls plus public transit/ trains connecting to many of the malls....the malls also have grocery stores, services like post office, hardware stores/ pound stores etc. in the malls themselves (US malls don't usually have grocery stores or dollar stores or post offices in them...no banks in US malls either- just ATMs)
In the case of London malls- well the population density is very intense and people are all taking trains, buses etc near the malls, it is like the malls are "transit hubs" in a way, the crowd flow is alot...you just don't see that in the US. Even if you see it in NYC, it is not necessarily "near a mall"
I've been to malls in Asia and Canada too, and their good malls seem to be in good shape. I think it is mainly in the US where shopping malls are dying...
Bellevue Mall, is one of the few malls in the US where I think it still does quite well...
Not here in Baltimore County. All of that is here, and everything is close together. As long as you are not far from the York Road Corridor.
Rather ironically Amazon is buying up shopping malls and turning them in to giant Amazon Warehouse facilities.
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