"High-end malls flourish as others fade" by Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times January 04, 2015
OWINGS MILLS, Md. — Inside the gleaming mall here on the Sunday before Christmas, just one thing was missing: shoppers.
Well, you know, everyone did their shopping early this year.
The upbeat music of “Jingle Bell Rock” bounced off the tiles and the smell of teriyaki chicken drifted from the food court, but only a handful of stores were open at the enclosed shopping center. A few visitors walked down the hallways and peered through locked metal gates into vacant spaces once home to retailers like H&M, Wet Seal, and Kay Jewelers.
I sure am getting a lot of mixed me$$ages.
“It’s depressing,” Jill Kalata, 46, said as she tried on sneakers at The Athlete’s Foot, scheduled to close in a few weeks.
The Owings Mills Mall is poised to join a growing number of what real estate professionals, architects, urban planners, and Internet enthusiasts term “dead malls,” according to Green Street Advisors, which tracks the mall industry.
We have a few of them around here.
Premature obituaries for the shopping mall have been appearing since the late 1990s, but the reality today is more nuanced, reflecting broader trends remaking the US economy. With income inequality continuing to widen, high-end malls are thriving, even as stolid chains like Sears, Kmart, and J.C. Penney falter, taking the middle- and working-class malls they anchored with them.
“It is very much a haves and have-nots situation,” said D.J. Busch, a Green Street analyst....
And Obama says it's great by any measure!
At Owings Mills, J.C. Penney and Macy’s are hanging on, but having opened in 1986 with a renovation in 1998, Owings Mills is young for a dying mall.
They just announced massive layoffs and store closings during this great shopping season (it was all on-line), and a bunch more stores announced today.
And while its locale may have contributed to its demise, other forces played a crucial role, too, like changing shopping habits and demographics, experts say.
“I have no doubt some malls will survive, but major segments of our society have gotten sick of them,” said Mark Hinshaw, a Seattle architect, urban planner, and author.
Online shopping is having only a small effect, experts say. Less than 10 percent of retail sales take place online, and those sales tend to hit big-box stores harder, rather than specialty retailers in malls.
But.... but.... but.... I was told online was picking up all the slack.
Instead, the fundamental problem for malls is a glut of stores in parts of the country, the result of a long boom in building retail space.
And middle class consumers no longer have money.
“We are extremely over-retailed,” said Christopher Zahas, a real estate economist and urban planner in Oregon.
Like beached whales, dead malls draw fascination as well as dismay. There is a website devoted to the phenomenon — deadmalls.com — and it has also become something of a cultural meme, with one particularly spooky scene in the movie “Gone Girl” set in a dead mall.
I'm smelling psyop propaganda and mind-massaging media again.
“Everybody has memories from childhood of going to the mall,” said Jack Thomas, 26, one of three partners who run the site. “Nobody ever thinks a mall is going to up and die.”
I went and saw my movie in one.
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“You see the A-rated malls, the flagship malls, performing very well,” said Steven Lowy, co-chief executive of Westfield Corp., a global player among mall owners.
That is so strange because his mall was the stage for the Kenya mall production.
“Our business is more regional and high-end focused,” he said. “There are gradients of dead or dying or flat, but anything that’s caught in the middle of the market is problematic.’’
Be it the airport or anywhere else, it is a $ociety that caters to the elite.
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That (media) mall sucked.
