🠈 Malls 🠊
Shopping Malls
The goal of the Community Color project is to examine the way that different entities interface with communities. This page will be a holding place for comments about malls.
The basic idea of a shopping mall is that a limited number (or often just one) organization owns a large shopping district. Other businesses lease out space in the mall. The mall owner provides services to the shop tenants.
The advantage of a mall is that it is a lot easier to reconfigure a mall than it is to reconfigure a downtown area as there is a limited number of people who need to approve the reconfiguration.
The big disadvantage is that the shop tenants are not building up equity within their community. They are just there to feed off the traffic created by the mall.
Most of the malls in the United States were owned by a small number of firms that rolled out multiple malls. (I will add links about this later).
There are many other disadvantages. Malls tend to be shut off from the community at large. A typical suburban shopping mall might have a shopping area surrounded by a large ocean of parking spaces. This created an artificial disconnect between the shopping area and surrounding community.
I will start listing companies that own multiple malls below
- Simon Propety Group has 325 properties with 241,000,000 square feet of space. Many Malls bear the name "Mills."
- General Growth Properties had 126 properties with 121 million square feat of retail space.
- Vestar is a Phoenix based company that has 60 malls and shopping centers in the Western US
- Macerich owns about 60 Malls
Mall Shops
The roll out of malls created a special variety of store that one can call a Mall Shop. These are shops specifically designed for malls. The store might target particular niches or demographics. The shop would then be rolled out in malls across the nation.
I often come across brands where 90% of their stores are in shopping malls. I would consider this brand to be a "Mall Shop." Here are brands I consider to be Mall Shops.
- Zales is a jewelry store established in 1924. They opened their first mall store in 1957 and expanded with the mall system.
- The Limited is a clothing store designed for malls. It had a limited selection of clothes targeting a particular demographic. "The Limited" brand has closed.
- The Limited bought the brand Abercrombie & Fetch. The store was designed for the rich/cool kids in the mall. Hollister was designed for middle class kids who wanted the cool images.
- Pacific Sunwear has a successful model in which their buyers would figure out the clothes kids were wearing at the beach and skatepark, then sell them in a chain of mall stores.
- Claire's is a brand of "jewelry stores" that pressures young girls to get their ear's pierced. They have stores in 95% of US Malls. (They've grown through acquisition and have other stores as well. They have 3,569 stores in total)