According to a recent story from The Guardian, a new major shopping mall hasn’t opened in the US in three years, and, less than 50 percent of the country’s existing 1,200 malls are expected to still be open in 2023.
These figures have led some mall operators to speculate that the last mall in America has already been built, regardless of what Vice President Pence has to say on the matter (ICYMI: just last week he was quoted as saying, “the best days for retailers are ahead,” which is stunning for like nine reasons).
And while the internet and rise of e-comm have received the lion’s share of the blame, just as culpable, according to the story, are the malls themselves – specifically, more modern malls like The Mall of America.
Built 25 years ago as a genre-pushing monument to consumerism, MoA has become a shiny reminder of all the things that other malls aren’t — huge, immersive, (relatively) new, and tax-free. And by providing that stark contrast, it’s also become “one of the reasons that America’s malls are dying. A Wells Fargo study of dead malls found that competition from newer malls was the most common cause of closures.”
As the article sums it up, “America has too much retail space and too many crappy malls,” and shutterings are “much less about technology than… about overbuilding.”
You can read more about it at The Guardian.
