2433 Limit Sky’s The.

This is how I feel about indoor malls now. Around the turn of the millennium, there were basically two types of stores in those malls – the big corporate owned ones like you mentioned that sold the same stuff in every indoor mall; and the small locally owned business. The problem is that the big corporate stores bought up more and more of the space to increase the costs of renting a space in the City Mall, so that destroyed the small local stores in the malls.

The upside of Sears and several others blowing up is that the price to rent a space in an indoor mall went down. Like to dangerously low levels. Local businesses looking for a place could easily swarm the malls now and bring back the fun to such a place. One mall here was going to sell to someone who was going to knock it down, but then eight local businesses took over and paid enough to prevent the city from practically giving the land away. We now have a comic book store, a board game store and a video game store in the mall that would have never survived there in the early 90s. And now there’s a bar and a retro arcade/trampoline place going in there.

The serious downside is if the corporate stores were the only thing holding up the mall, the entire complex becomes a ghost town. It becomes undesirable for businesses to start up and stay there. The money to maintain the place will drop until it was too decrepit to leave standing. They would demolish those malls, which could in turn lower the housing prices in the area and commercially destroy others. We’ve seen it happen across the river from us. Once they tore down the local mall, the banks and grocery stores around it closed, until it was miles to the next store (instead of walking distance as before). The entire area is literally condemned now – on the news I read how yet another meth bust or meth lab explosion happened in that area.

I guess that was the problem with surrounding commercial centers with more commercial centers surrounded by residential areas. If the stores fail, the supporting commercial property fails. Then the surrounding residential areas lose a major economic advantage which will lead to their gentrification or destruction.

For a lot of malls that have managed to remain viable, that seems to be a good strategy: offer more niche and local businesses instead of cookie-cutter chain stores. They’ve also turned to alternatives to retail, such as bringing in some desks, etc. to turn vacant units into co-working spaces or even renting former stores to local businesses who need additional office space. It’s a win-win, since adapting an existing building can be a lot cheaper than building from scratch, plus the office workers may provide a little traffic for remaining businesses, especially restaurants/food courts.

Other malls are still shutting down completely, of course. For many that were already on the ropes, the pandemic was the nail in the coffin. But, hey, retailing has gone through plenty off changes in the past. Malls themselves did a lot to replace large downtown department stores, and department stores and mail-order displaced older general stores. Who knows what further changes the future might bring? Continuing improvements to 3-D printing and related technologies could theoretically replace large sectors of retailing, much the way streaming and downloading have replaced much of the traditional music and video market. Instead of going to the store or ordering online, just fill up your home fabricator with some basic feed stock, and then buy (or create!) a template for whatever new thing you need. How cool would that be, especially if the fabricated items could be readily disassembled and recycled?