The mall: Its death has been greatly exaggerated

MomSeattle · Pets · SPI · MySeattlePix · My account

Local

US/World

Sports

Business

A&E

Life

Comics

Photos

Opinion

Blogs

Buy Ads

Jobs

Autos

Homes

Rentals

NWsource

Bill Virgin

The mall: Its death has been greatly exaggerated

Monday, September 10, 2001

By BILL VIRGIN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Soft-focus sepia-tinted images float across the screen as the narrator in muted and wistful tones speaks of times gone by and familiar landmarks fading into memory, to the accompaniment of Frank Sinatra crooning "There Used to be a Shopping Mall."

Uh, hold it. Bring up the lights, get the stupid camera back in focus and the color back in register. And tell Ol' Blue Eyes to give it a rest.

The news item from my Midwestern home town -- that the regional shopping mall I grew up with is in trouble after the departure of its anchor department stores -- is not the stuff of gushy nostalgia. Old Frank never sang the retailing version of "There Used to be a Ballpark," and for good reason.

A shopping mall is, after all, just a place to buy stuff.

But the rise and fall of that shopping mall and the contrast to malls around here do provide some insights into the changing landscape of retailing, and how, for all the seismic shifts, the shopping mall still seems to be standing quite securely.

The hometown mall of which I speak was something impressive when it opened in the early 1960s. It was, in contrast to the traditional strip-style shopping centers, well, a mall, an open-air, pedestrian-only corridor lined with stores. Later came such monumental advances as enclosing the mall, keeping it a constant temperature despite muggy summers or nasty winters outside, and a movie theater that showed more than one film.

But 40 years is an eternity in suburban retailing, and the mall that was once a novelty and a marvel is now routine, even tired. Shopper tastes and habits have moved on. The old mall's place in the retailing universe is being superseded by... another mall.

That in itself is rather remarkable, given the number of times the obituary has been written for the shopping mall. Catalog shopping, huge discount chains, big-box and "category-killer" retailers in updated versions of strip malls known as a power centers, revitalized central business districts, and of course e-tailing, were all going to send the shopping mall to the scrap heap of obsolescence with tube radios and chrome bumpers.

Well, you certainly couldn't prove it by the crowds packing the corridors and parking lots at Southcenter Mall a week ago. Apparently the way the populace chose to celebrate Labor Day was to shop. Even the aisles at the department stores, themselves written off more than a few times, were packed.

I would have attributed the crowds to the holiday and back-to-school shopping, except that I saw much the same thing a few weeks ago when there was no holiday or retailing season. Furthermore, I spotted few vacant storefronts in Southcenter's corridors.

Why do Southcenter and other regional centers like Bellevue Square and Alderwood thrive, at least from outward appearances? Because the basic concept of the mall still works -- a central concentration of stores with free parking and, except for the worst pre-Christmas snarls, reasonably easy vehicle access.

It was a concept that dramatically altered the civic landscape. Malls became hubs of sprawling retailing complexes; movie theaters, restaurants and smaller retailing centers all wanted to be near the mall. Established commercial centers, meanwhile, were faced with the challenge of changing or dying. Most didn't get around to the former soon enough to ward off the latter.

This region's malls benefited from the absence of a factor that has imperiled that Midwestern mall of my youth -- flat, developable land. In the Midwest, you can build from the Great Lakes to the Ohio River, and some seem intent on doing so. As the next ring of suburbia develops, it creates new demand for retailing centers, which in turn suck retailers and customers out of the previous generation's developments.

For all the talk of sprawl and suburban development around here, the fact is that the squeeze between the mountains and the sound resulted in a scarcity of the big chunks of land malls require and high prices for what parcels there were.

Those constraints have helped keep the lid on cannibalistic mall development.

Not to say that every mall is guaranteed a prosperous existence. You can walk through Factoria Mall, for example, and see plentiful store vacancies along its corridor, which may be the result of its proximity to Bellevue Square or its uneasy combination of an enclosed mall with the sort of retailers which more commonly anchor strip retailing centers (one project the mall has in mind is a new children's museum).

Nationally, mall development is slowing, part of a larger national reaction to too much retail development in the past two decades. The International Council of Shopping Centers, which compiled the numbers showing fewer but larger regional and superregional projects are being opened compared with a decade ago, says developers are fiddling with the mix of tenants (more service or entertainment, for example) and the physical layout of malls.

Whatever they come up with, the underlying notion of the mall is likely to endure.

It certainly won't do so from nostalgia -- phrases such as "mall culture" and "mall rats" did not enter the national vocabulary as terms of affection.

But nostalgia has limited utility as a business strategy. After all, it didn't do a lot for many of those old ballparks, or old downtowns either.

P-I reporter Bill Virgin can be reached at 206-448-8319 or billvirgin@seattlepi.com. His column appears Mondays and Wednesdays.

Add P-I Business headlines to