Shopping mall
A shopping mall is a large indoor shopping center, usually anchored by department stores. The term mall originally meant a pedestrian promenade with shops along it, but in the late 1960s, it began to be used as a generic term for the large enclosed shopping centers that were becoming increasingly commonplace. In the United Kingdom and other countries, shopping malls may be called shopping centres.
In recent decades, malls have declined considerably in North America, partly due to the retail apocalypse, particularly in subprime locations, and some have closed and become so-called "dead malls". Successful exceptions have added entertainment and experiential features, added big-box stores as anchors, or converted to other specialized shopping center formats such as power centers, lifestyle centers, factory outlet centers, and festival marketplaces. In Canada, shopping centres have frequently been replaced with mixed-use high-rise communities. In many European countries and Asian countries, shopping malls continue to grow and thrive.
Terminology
In the United States, Persian Gulf countries, and India, the term shopping mall is usually applied to enclosed retail structures, while shopping center usually refers to open-air retail complexes; both types of facilities usually have large parking lots, face major traffic arterials, and have few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods. Outside of North America, the terms shopping precinct and shopping arcade are also used.In the UK, such complexes are considered shopping centres; however, shopping centre covers many more sizes and types of centers than the North American mall. Other countries follow UK usage. In Canadian English, and often in Australia and New Zealand, the term mall may be used informally but shopping centre or merely centre will feature in the name of the complex. The term mall is less-commonly a part of the name of the complex.
Types
The International Council of Shopping Centers, based in New York City, classifies two types of shopping centers as malls: regional malls and super regional malls. A regional mall, per the International Council of Shopping Centers, is a shopping mall with to gross leasable area with at least two anchor stores. A super-regional mall, per the International Council of Shopping Centers, is a shopping mall with over of gross leasable area, three or more anchors, mass merchant, more variety, fashion apparel, and serves as the dominant shopping venue for the region in which it is located. Not classified as malls are smaller formats such as strip malls and neighborhood shopping centers, and specialized formats such as power centers, festival marketplaces, and outlet centers.History
Forerunners to the shopping mall
Shopping centers in general may have their origins in public markets and, in the Middle East, covered bazaars.In 1798, the first covered shopping passage was built in Paris, the Passage du Caire. In London, the Royal Opera Arcade opened in 1816, and the more famous Burlington Arcade opened in 1819. Western European cities in particular built many arcade-style shopping centers. The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, built in 1828, claims to be the first shopping arcade in the United States. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, which opened in 1877, was larger than its predecessors, and inspired the use of the term "galleria" for many other shopping arcades and malls.
In the mid-20th century, with the rise of the suburb and automobile culture in the United States, a new style of shopping center was created away from downtowns. Early shopping centers designed for the automobile include Market Square, Lake Forest, Illinois, and Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri.
The suburban shopping center concept evolved further in the United States after World War II, with larger open-air shopping centers anchored by major department stores, such as the Broadway-Crenshaw Center in Los Angeles, built in 1947 and anchored by a five-story Broadway and a May Company California.
Downtown pedestrian malls and use of term ''mall''
In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the term "shopping mall" was first used, but in the original sense of the word "mall", meaning a pedestrian promenade in the U.S., or in U.K. usage, a "shopping precinct". Early downtown pedestrianized malls included the Kalamazoo Mall, "Shoppers' See-Way" in Toledo, Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach, Santa Monica Mall.Although Bergen Mall opened in 1957 using the name "mall" and inspired other suburban shopping centers to rebrand themselves as malls, these types of properties were still referred to as "shopping centers" until the late 1960s.
Enclosed malls
The enclosed shopping center, which would eventually be known as the shopping mall, did not appear in mainstream until the mid-1950s. One of the earliest examples was the Valley Fair Shopping Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, which opened on March 10, 1955. Valley Fair featured a number of modern features including central heating and cooling, a large outdoor parking area, semi-detached anchor stores, and restaurants. Later that year the world's first fully enclosed shopping mall was opened in Luleå, in northern Sweden and was named Shopping; the region now claims the highest shopping center density in Europe.The idea of a regionally-sized, fully enclosed shopping complex was pioneered in 1956 by the Austrian-born architect and American immigrant Victor Gruen. This new generation of regional-size shopping centers began with the Gruen-designed Southdale Center, which opened in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota, United States in October 1956. For pioneering the soon-to-be enormously popular mall concept in this form, Gruen has been called the "most influential architect of the twentieth century" by Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell.
The first retail complex to be promoted as a "mall" was Paramus, New Jersey's Bergen Mall, which opened with an open-air format on November 14, 1957, and was later enclosed in 1973. Aside from Southdale Center, significant early enclosed shopping malls were Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, Big Town Mall in Mesquite, Texas, Chris-Town Mall in Phoenix, Arizona, and Randhurst Center in Mount Prospect, Illinois.
Other early malls moved retailing away from the dense, commercial downtowns into the largely residential suburbs. This formula became a popular way to build retail across the world. Gruen himself came to abhor this effect of his new design; he decried the creation of enormous "land wasting seas of parking" and the spread of suburban sprawl.
Even though malls mostly appeared in suburban areas in the U.S., some U.S. cities facilitated the construction of enclosed malls downtown as an effort to revive city centers and allow them to compete effectively with suburban malls. Examples included Main Place Mall in Buffalo and The Gallery in Philadelphia. Other cities created open-air pedestrian malls.
In the United States, developers such as A. Alfred Taubman of Taubman Centers extended the concept further in 1980, with terrazzo tiles at the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey, indoor fountains, and two levels allowing a shopper to make a circuit of all the stores. Taubman believed carpeting increased friction, slowing down customers, so it was removed. Fading daylight through glass panels was supplemented by gradually increased electric lighting, making it seem like the afternoon was lasting longer, which encouraged shoppers to linger.
Decline of shopping malls in the United States
In the United States, in the mid-1990s, malls were still being constructed at a rate of 140 a year. But in 2001, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that underperforming and vacant malls, known as "greyfield" and "dead mall" estates, were an emerging problem. In 2007, a year before the Great Recession, no new malls were built in America, for the first time in 50 years. City Creek Center Mall in Salt Lake City, which opened in March 2012, was the first to be built since the recession.Malls began to lose consumers to open-air power centers and lifestyle centers during the 1990s, as consumers preferred to park right in front of and walk directly into big-box stores with lower prices and without the overhead of traditional malls.
Another issue was that the growth-crazed American commercial real estate industry had simply built too many nice places to shop—far more than could be reasonably justified by the actual growth of the American population, retail sales, or any other economic indicator. The number of American shopping centers exploded from 4,500 in 1960 to 70,000 by 1986 to just under 108,000 by 2010.
Thus, the number of dead malls increased significantly in the early 21st century. The economic health of malls across the United States has been in decline, as revealed by high vacancy rates. From 2006 to 2010, the percentage of malls that are considered to be "dying" by real estate experts, unhealthy, or in trouble all increased greatly, and these high vacancy rates only partially decreased from 2010 to 2014. In 2014, nearly 3% of all malls in the United States were considered to be "dying" and nearly one-fifth of all malls had vacancy rates considered "troubling". Some real estate experts say the "fundamental problem" is a glut of malls in many parts of the country creating a market that is "extremely over-retailed". By the time shopping mall operator Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield decided to exit the American market in 2022, the United States had an average of 24.5 square feet of retail space per capita.
In 2019, The Shops & Restaurants at Hudson Yards opened as an upscale mall in New York City with "a 'Fifth Avenue' mix of shops", such as H&M, Zara, and Sephora below them. This is one of the first two malls built recently, along with American Dream in which both opened in 2019 since City Creek Center.
Online shopping has also emerged as a major competitor to shopping malls. In the United States, online shopping has accounted for an increasing share of total retail sales. In 2013, roughly 200 out of 1,300 malls across the United States were going out of business. To combat this trend, developers have converted malls into other uses including attractions such as parks, movie theaters, gyms, and even fishing lakes. In the United States, the 600,000 square foot Highland Mall will be a campus for Austin Community College. In France, the So Ouest mall outside of Paris was designed to resemble elegant, Louis XV-style apartments and includes of green space. The Australian mall company Westfield launched an online mall with 150 stores, 3,000 brands and over 1 million products.
The COVID-19 pandemic also significantly impacted the retail industry. Government regulations temporarily closed malls, increased entrance controls, and imposed strict public sanitation requirements.