The Disappearance of the Shopping Mall

As my husband and I were taking our regular walk through our local mall, we discovered that overnight, another store had closed.  We “walk the mall” five days a week.  You never need to worry about weather, the walking surface is level, and there is no traffic nearby about which we need to be concerned.

We live in a city of only about 40,000 people, so our mall is pretty small, but vacancies are high.  There are two anchor stores and about 25 other businesses.  Of those, six are now vacant.  This is not unique to our local mall, and malls nationwide are struggling to fill their spaces and increase the number of shoppers.

When thinking about why there are so many vacancies, of course, the poor economy and high unemployment are the first reasons that come to mind.  However, there are other reasons that likely will not change as the economy improves.  There are far more “big box” stores, with stores like Walmart and Target becoming one-stop-shopping stores.  Consumers can buy nearly everything they need from clothing to electronics to groceries without going from store to store.

Online shopping has increased dramatically, taking a big slice of business from shopping malls.  The majority of big chains have now opened their own online stores to regain some of the business they lost at their retail stores.

I’ve noticed a large increase in vacancies in strip malls as well.  Just yesterday, I was going to purchase something from a local flooring store, only to discover the store is no longer there.  That strip mall had one open store out of six that were available.  We noticed two other strip malls in town with only a couple stores occupied, with the remainder empty.

At the beginning of 2012, for the first time in four years, there was a slight decrease in the number of mall vacancies.  That small improvement may be due to the fact that new mall construction has decreased because of the economy.  In fact fewer new malls were built in 2011 than at any time in the past 30 years.  Each time a newer, nicer mall opened, it hurt the existing malls. 

A lot of the major department stores, like Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, J.C. Penney's, did major renovations and held very attractive sales, which likely contributed to the slight improvement.  

As we became more observant about strip malls and our local mall vacancies, we realized that we had previously given no thought to this part of the economy and how it has suffered over the past several years.

I am not a “shopper” and won’t particularly miss shopping at malls.  However, Sears and J.C. Penney’s have always “been there,” and it is just a bit sad to think that sometime in the near future, they may exist only online - or not at all.

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