There are probably many reasons why the indoor shopping mall--once an important fixture of life in the United States--has declined. The easy answer is that Amazon killed the shopping mall, but the shopping mall was in decline long before Amazon become the dominant shopping experience. Other reasons cited for the decline of malls include how onerous it can be to visit one. As Nick Lopez points out in his article defending the strip mall:
Malls are failing because they ultimately share the same critical design flaw as downtown: Parking proximity to limited entry points for the business makes it a more difficult shopping option for consumers, and a more difficult restocking option for retailers.
Strip malls don’t have this issue. You park in front of the store you want to go to, and enter and exit the store directly to your car. Meanwhile, the goods enter the store directly from the back and exit out the front.
When it comes to dealing with the things you buy, while ordering online and having the stuff delivered to your door is most convenient, the second most convenient option is a strip mall or power center. Other malls or downtown shopping require remote parking, and a bit of a walk to get to and from the retailer.
I believe another problem with the indoor malls is that they have become a mono-culture of stores. Just as Sears, in its last couple of decades, stopped being a department store and increasingly became a clothing store, so malls became infested with clothing stores and little else.
But an important draw of malls was also the social experience--a place to hang out and perhaps have a snack or cheap bite to eat. But as the Daily Caller video below describes, malls have become overrun with undesirable groups making them unpleasant, at best, and possibly dangerous to visit.
VIDEO: "Is THIS What Really Killed Shopping Malls?"
TheDC Shorts (3 min.)
Extend public transportation to a mall, and the "teens" will come.
ReplyDeleteOr even easy access from a freeway.
DeleteI, just like many other members of Generation X, lament the disappearance of shopping malls. For anyone who was of high school age in the 1980's, it was an important institution for socialization. Most of them had video arcades aka "game rooms making them attractive to teenage boys. And then there were girls at the mall...more interested in clothes shopping than boys. IDK if I agree with the author about the causes, though. I always thought that it was the competition from the emergence of large stores like WalMart, Target and others. The newly emerging internet with its online ordering capabilities dealt the final blow. Amazon grew to massive proportions, further ensuring that the malls would not recover. It's all about money - brick and mortar retail stores with high overhead costs, just cannot compete and turn a profit. The same phenomenon happened with "mom and pop" shops like hardware stores trying to compete with Home Depot and Lowe's.
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason that "mall prices" was used as a synonym for "expensive".
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