That is a very interesting use of that space, although it is something that would probably only work in some very specific places.
When I was in highschool, I worked at a K-Mart. This was back in the 90’s.
Man, some of my best stories come from working there. Even then, K-Mart was on the decline. Not as bad as it got later, but still trashy. This was kind of before Walmart, I guess? So it had all the trash that later moved there, along with the turbo ghetto trash that is still at KMart. But the decline that KMart later went through was kind of sad, it was so drawn out.
There’s still a KMart operating here in the town I’m at now. It’s actually in the city, but I can count the times I’ve gone there on one hand. I, and basically everyone else, would rather drive 15 minutes out of the city to go to Walmart… and honestly, I’d rather drive 20 minutes PAST the walmart (as in literally past the walmart), to the Target.
When you go into KMart, it’s like visiting a cancer ward or something. It just exudes depression. As they started going downhill, instead of facing the problem head-on, they just tried to cut corners and save their already slim margins. They stuffed more shelves into the store, making everything feel crowded, and giving the place the feeling of a flea-market. Even if the floors are clean, they look dirty, because they’re the same linoleum tiles laid down in the 1860’s or whenvever the store opened, and they’re yellowed and gross. In trying to make the store more profitable, they made it less enjoyable to shop at, which drove away their customers, and made the problem worse… which ended up just being a crazy downward spiral. In a lot of ways, the spiral just made it worse. They should have just pushed the yolk forward, done a nose-dive into the ground, and ended it ten years ago.
But damn… such good stories. I should write up a thread of the epic tales of KMart. It was kind of like “The Office”, but with hookers and cocaine.
It depends on the mall. Location/region has a lot to do with it.
The Seattle area has a booming economy, and pretty much all our malls are not just healthy, but popular. It also helps that we don’t have that many malls to begin with, compared to population. It’s pretty impressive considering this is also the home of Amazon, which has probably killed more malls than any other company.
But a lot of regions built too many malls, and between their regional decline and the rise of online shopping, they were devastated. Just look at the list at Deadmalls.
It’s less a problem with malls dying and more a problem with there being too many malls. Adam Ruins Everything did a nice little segment about them on the “Adam Ruins Shopping” episode. Malls were built because they could be, not because demand required more malls. Now there are just too many of the things.
Omaha used to have 4 major malls. Over the years, 2 of the malls closed and the remaining 2 are thriving to the point of being expanded. The closures brought the supply in line with the demand. As the city has grown, the extra demand has gone towards building smaller outdoor malls instead of the giant mall-cities that were made in the past.
I remember when we had a White Front, which might have become KMart. Kmart became messy and you went to the next store, probably Walmart. Walmarts became a mess and you went to Target. Most the Targets here now are a mess.
I think this is the first X-Mas season I never went into one of the really big stores like that. We still have Kmarts here but I don’t go there. I avoid Walmarts like the plague, and Target is just about there.
Around here everyone laments the death of a local chain that went big and then died out, after about 40 years. Gottschalks.
Not familiar with White Front, do you mean that store changed into a KMart? Because KMart was originally Kresges.
You really should.
Yeah, I’d read those.
Same, but in the '80s.
I still have the muzak version of “Caravan” embedded in my mind and eternally associated with the smell of cleaning products I shelved.
On topic, Sears just sold their last exclusive asset. This is a slow-motion liquidation.
I don’t know if they became Kmart or just went under because of KMart, but disappeared here about the time KMart’s came in. Same type stores with big arched entries.
I am somewhat involved professionally in retail real estate, particularly on the retail/mall/big-box strategy side, and I’ve got some free time at lunch, so you get a TL;DR post! There are a couple of big trends:
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As a couple of others have mentioned, there are too many malls… but there are particularly too many low-end malls. It’s not universal, but for the most part the Class A malls are doing really well and Class B/C malls are in a ton of trouble. If you look at Macy’s, almost all of the announced closures are in B malls, not A (the ones where the co-anchors are Sears and JCPenney, vs the ones with Nordstrom and Lord & Taylor). That holds maybe even more for the smaller tenants: those in Class B/C malls are likely targeting the customer base that goes away in a recession, so unless it’s for needs instead of discretionary purchases, they’re going to be in trouble well before the Apple Store is.
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A lot of the traditional big-box stores want less space than they currently have: in the pre-internet big box era you needed X square feet, now you can sell what you need to sell and be profitable in half or two thirds of that. Unfortunately, they’re already paying rent in locations with X square feet, and it costs lots of money to move or downsize those stores, at the same time as there is pricing pressure from online (so less free cash to make those moves). Best Buy is a great example here - they spent the better part of a decade figuring out how to use all that extra space where those huge music/video/software sections used to be, and getting store-within-a-store brand shops right was probably the biggest part of their turnaround.
Malls and retail in general are going to continue to exist and even thrive, but we’re going to keep seeing significant long-running retailer die-offs for at least the next 5-10 years. Many of the long-existing and successful big retail businesses are incompatible with the online world in a fundamental enough way that it’s hard to see some of them surviving even if they do make the right decisions.
Basically, the presence of an Apple Store indicates you’ve got a Class-A mall, right? Apple only puts those in affluent shopping areas. (Although, I’ve read that malls, and even local governments, are so desperate for Apple Stores that they’ll literally give any concession away to land one).
All I know is my local mall is basically nothing but teen girl clothing stores now. It seems like malls used to have a bit more diversity - sporting goods, hardware, electronics, eclectic, shoe stores, men’s fashion, even book stores - now the few malls I’ve gone into the last few years seem dominated by women’s and girl’s fashion. I feel out of place even visiting my local one now, there’s no reason for me to be there. I can go the men’s Dillard’s without actually entering the mall proper.
Smoking in the mall. That’s always the most amazing thing to me about my early years. Smoking was allowed everywhere and I just took it for granted that it was okay. Now? I forget it was ever a thing, and I’m jarred when I see it in old movies and photos all the time.
For the most part, yes. I’m sure there are some smaller or mid-size metro areas when a combination of the market and the incentives you’ve mentioned have an Apple Store somewhere that might strictly be Class B, but in that case it’s still probably the nicest mall in the region.
@Enidigm: that’s the story of a Class B mall in a nutshell… most of those ‘diversity’ stores, particularly the ones that were probably there in a mall with Dillard’s as an anchor, are the ones that got killed by both online and the Great Recession. The electronics stores in my local Class A: Apple, Microsoft, Bose, an Amazon pop-up, and the four major cell carriers. You might get the cell phone stores, but those first four aren’t looking for the same space as the Radio Shack that went out of business, so the mall owners give up on diverse offerings and get whomever can pay rent in that target market. Which in your case ends up being women’s fashion. Sorry!
K-Mart, and Kresges before it, were not always ghetto stores. When I was a kid in the, um, 1960s, early seventies, we could go there without embarrassment. Sears was definitely a part of my childhood, especially the Wish Book every holiday season. But yeah, the last time I was in a K-Mart I think was when my mother in law was still alive, some ten or more years ago. And Sears? Can’t recall, really.
We have two traditional malls in my area. One is downtown, and it’s pretty much totally dead. The property is the center of a real estate development proposal to completely redo the downtown area in some ways, with multi-use stuff. My students who work there tell me horror stories that make it seem like working in shops there is like being in some slasher flick waiting for the bogeyman to strike. The mall is dark, empty, and creepy.
The other one, the more successful, relatively, of the two, is just outside the main “city” area, at the intersection of the interstate and main street. Its proximity to the university and suburban-type neighborhoods, and its location vis a vis the main arteries of traffic, have helped keep it going, but the anchors are dead department stores and there’s always a lot of empty spaces inside, filled seasonally with pop-ups sometimes. It’s not creepy, just sad.
Of course, as states crack down on not paying taxes on Internet sales, and as the Supreme Court has at least been sending some signals that they may well uphold state laws mandating such tax payments, maybe malls will try to recapture some of the business they’ve lost to Amazon et al. But really, I’d pay a premium not to go to the mall, ever.
Several years ago we took the kids to the Grand Canyon. Smoking in a public place has probably been illegal their whole lives, and long enough that I had mostly forgotten about it. But a restaurant just outside the park, full of foreign tourists (you could tell by the different languages being spoken around you), reeked of smoke. I don’t know if it was legal there or if it was just put up with but it was kind of a shock to us.
Then on the way home we spent a day or so in Las Vegas and ran into it again there.
Not sure where it applies but I do know that casinos in Michigan, at least those under Indian licencing have a waiver that allows people to smoke in the casinos. I found out the hard way because I went to a concert at one of the casino venues and spent a little time in the casino before the show. The smoke almost unbearable. But you cant have those smoking gamblers leaving their seats to go outside and smoke.
Same here. There’s something about the smell.
Every year, a buddy and I used to compile our Christmas lists, plan an overly detailed route with elaborate contingencies, and then get slightly drunk and do a speed run through the local mall. Ideally, one mad dash would do it, and then we could go somewhere else and finish the whiskey.
Then, about 20 years ago, the trip to the mall became optional.