But I like the mall 🙁
Are malls actually a dying breed? Let’s talk about it!
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SOURCES
https://www.newsweek.com/map-cities-malls-dying-online-shopping-2090968
https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2025/03/28/abandoned-closed-malls-across-america/82705030007/
The Death (and Revival?) of the American Mall
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/09/americas-dying-shopping-malls-have-surprising-rebound-in-store.html
https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/mall-closure-statistics/
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2022/q3_economic_history
Picture sources:
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2015/11/17/former-st-louis-mills-mall-gets-interest-at.html
America’s First Indoor Shopping Mall: Southdale
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
It’s back to school season, and my team and I at RPG – the same folks who produce this podcast – were talking about shopping malls, and more specifically, why we’re down to about 2 decent ones in the St. Louis area – the St. Louis Galleria, just down the street from our office, which used to be the prestige mall for our area but has fallen on hard times, and the West County Mall, which has turned from being the one hardly anyone went to into the one that attracts people from all over the metro area.
The other malls that remain open are all struggling, and unless they can find different ways to utilize their space, I suspect they’ll probably follow the same fate as the ones that closed.
But it wasn’t always like this. When I was growing up, there were at least a dozen full-sized shopping malls in the Metro area. Some of them, like the Jamestown Mall, Crestwood Plaza, Northwest Plaza, St. Louis Centre and Chesterfield Mall, are completely gone now.
Others, like the Mid Rivers Mall, Alton Square, South County Mall and St. Clair Square, are still around, but they’re not the draws they used to be for retail shoppers.
And then there’s Union Station, which used to be a full-size mall that brought in all sorts of locals and tourists, but which is now mostly empty, while a portion that used to be the food court and the showcase known as The Fudgery is taken up by the aquarium and theme park rides outside.
Now, here’s the thing. When I travel, I still see malls in operation, and a lot of them are pretty busy. The business model is still viable in certain parts of the world, particularly in cities where shopping centers can be built into skyscrapers, repurposed buildings or underground.
But research from CapitalOne says that 87% of shopping malls in the United States are destined to die in the next 10 years, and I think it’s a good idea for us to take a step back and ask… why?
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Shopping malls as we know them really derive from the 1950s, and while we can point to all sorts of marketplaces or bazaars in ancient cultures that were mall-like, what most of us would recognize as a shopping mall today hails back to 1956 in Edina, Minnesota when the Southdale Center was built to be the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the United States.
This makes sense when you understand that Edina is in the Twin Cities metro area of Minneapolis-St. Paul and that Minnesota is a place where, if I can put it charitably, ice fishing and dog sled season are as big a deal to the folks there as summer beach season is in the warmer climates.
Southdale Center was designed to replicate the idea of European arcades – not the video game variety, but the shopping districts – where people could eat, drink, gather and chat while they had easy access to shops and services.
The original idea planned by Architect Victor Gruen was to eventually expand the mall concept to include residences and medical offices and other non-commercial tenants, but of course that’s not exactly the direction in which things evolved.
What was the alternative, you might wonder? Well, in a city, there was often a commercial district lined with retail businesses ranging from boutique shops to department stores, and one of those, Dayton’s, was actually headquartered in Minneapolis, and it was the family that owned that chain that helped finance and develop the Southdale Center.
They even designed their department store in the mall – what we now call an “anchor store” – to match the design of their flagship store downtown.
Dayton’s is not a familiar brand to most people today because their department stores don’t exist anymore, but you probably know them for another brand that they launched in 1962 – the retail chain Target, for which the Dayton corporation has been named since they became the Target Corporation in 2000.
That’s pretty incredible to think that they launched both the shopping mall and one of the primary general merchandise chains in America.
But let’s go back to Southdale Center, because the original concept situated the mall between Dayon’s and another anchor store called Donaldson’s.
As the mall began to fill up, JCPenney wanted in, and a new section of the mall had to be built to accommodate them, along with a new corridor leading to the store. This opened in 1972.
Meanwhile, just across the street, a developer named Don Gabbert decided to build a similar concept built around Gabbert’s Furniture Store.
This new shopping center, called the Galleria, opened in 1976, and it gradually morphed into becoming an upscale mall to compete with the broader mass market concept Southdale Center had pioneered.
These two malls formed the template for an explosion of enclosed suburban shopping malls across the United States.
The term “shopping mall” was coined by the Bergen Mall in Paramus, New Jersey, which was built in 1957 initially with an open-air design, but which was enclosed in the 1970s.
Obviously, the name stuck both as a common part of the names of other shopping center and also in the generic sense where a “Mall” became a known quantity.
I can’t emphasize enough how transformative shopping malls were for the United States in the 60s and 70s; they moved retail commerce out of crowded downtown commercial districts and allowed people to shop comfortably in places closer to home.
Shopping malls were monolithic and tended to attract large crowds who just wanted a place to spend time in an all-weather environment, and the fact that many malls started attracting new branches for national branded stores helped to spread new fashions and styles a lot more quickly across the country than the old days of department stores and catalog sales had.
By the 1980s, there were around 2500 malls in existence in the United States, which averages out to about 50 per state, though obviously, there were a lot more in populated states along the Eastern and Western coasts than in the more sparsely populated areas of the Midwest, South and West.
Where you’d tend to see the most malls were in the suburbs of big cities or in communities that were large enough to draw in people from a wide area.
There’s a reason, for example, that the larger cities that exist in Central Illinois like Peoria, Bloomington-Normal, Decatur, Champaign-Urbana and Springfield still have active shopping malls, and the same is true for Missouri, where you’ll find malls in cities like Branson, Columbia, Jefferson City, Hannibal and Cape Girardeau.
These shopping centers still draw people in because the alternatives are generally stores like Dollar General, Walmart, Rural King or Target.
But… a lot of these malls aren’t too impressive today, and some are on absolute life support. I’ve been into malls where broad swaths of retail space have been taken over by other types of institutions like churches, colleges, health care organizations, indoor amusement centers or even government offices.
All of these types of organizations benefit from the large parking lots and infrastructure already available, so it does make sense.
The most extreme case of pivoting is probably the St. Louis Mills Mall, which opened in the mid-2000s with a lot of excitement and huge crowds because of a huge attached ice rink where the Blues would practice, a NASCAR go-kart track, an indoor skate park, a glow in the dark mini-golf course and a state of the art movie theater.
Believe me, I remember how crowded it was when it opened – I helped open a store there!
But 20 years later, the property was gutted and turned into a warehouse and business park, and only the Cabela’s anchor store remains.
So let’s return to our statistic about 87% of malls being likely to go under in the next 10 years, and let’s explore why.
For most people, the answer is simple – online retailers have killed malls with cheaper prices.
But I don’t find that answer very satisfying, personally, because many of the stores that still exist in malls have managed to co-exist with online sales and even have ecommerce platforms of their own.
Price alone is not the issue. Something’s misaligned about the experience.
So, let’s first see where malls are dying off.
A Newsweek article from last year included a map that showed where malls tended to be the most threatened. Many of the areas shown are around big cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dalles-Fort Worth, Houstin, Nashville, Denver, Jacksonville and Boston.
What I find interesting about this is that if you were to look at a population map and see where people are migrating to and from in the United States, a lot of the areas where these shopping malls are located are areas where outmigrations are happening.
In other words, many people, especially younger people, are moving away from the malls and as a result, they’re no longer as convenient as they once were.
Consumers are not willing to drive to malls that don’t offer a variety of stores and a wide selection of products and experiences.
In the 1980s and 90s, malls often had all sorts of draws to bring people in – toy stores, book stores, science and nature stores, gadget stores, electronics stores, pet stores, eyeglasses stores and so forth.
Many malls today primarily focus on clothing stores with very little else to appeal to other shoppers beyond accessories like jewelry and shoes.
And while I’m not arguing the older formats need to come back – they died off for a reason – there are definitely markets that malls could be serving with new, creative concepts which they are currently not.
And since many malls are themselves distressed or even underwater in terms of their operational costs, there’s opportunity for community governments and small business development programs to start looking for ways to incubate those new concepts rather than to put all the risk on entrepreneurs or large corporations.
Pop-up shops and more affordable retail options like stalls or kiosks can help businesses to grow, but malls can also reconfigure their retail space to lower the barrier to entry and make it easier for retail businesses to get started by adding in smaller storefront spaces or partnering with local organizations to host events to draw in foot traffic.
The second issue is that the COVID pandemic trained a lot of people to shop online, and home delivery has never been easier or offered consumers more favorable pricing and return policies.
Big retail chains like Target and Walmart didn’t move exclusively to online sales; they instead doubled down on the technology they’d already been developing to allow customers to place online orders and pick them up at counters or in drive-up lanes.
Mall retailers, by contrast, didn’t do that as capably, and even those who did offer in-store pickup still required you to find a spot, park, go into the mall and then enter their store to pick up your item.
Ordering from the apps offered by these same retailers tended to result in faster, easier home delivery. This explains why the numbers show a huge swing from people buying items in person prior to the pandemic to simply making purchases online – the business model didn’t allow for the convenience.
But, malls still had – and have! – an edge in allowing customers who want an item to purchase it and have it right away, and that’s why you see the more urban malls struggling the most while the suburban and regional ones are hanging in there.
If you go a mall in a busy city like New York or Chicago, you’ll not only face huge crowds, but also find frequent stockouts and staff who aren’t able to help you beyond selling you what’s on the shelf that day.
The entire strength of malls – allowing you to have what you want when you want it, and to physically handle it and perhaps even try it on before you buy it – is lost when the supply chain can’t keep up but people can jump on their phones and order what they want online.
But the retailers who are hanging in there or even thriving in malls have figured out a secret, and that’s in offering a distinct and engaging experience that isn’t easy to achieve online.
So, for example, the Chinese chain Miniso is thriving in malls and in urban commercial shopping districts because it offers popular low-cost goods from brands like Disney, Harry Potter and Sanrio and delivers an experience rooted in discovery and value.
The retailer Lululemon, which is not exclusive to malls, is still a big draw within shopping malls because of its cult-like following among primarily female consumers, and this is a brand that’s weathered quite a few PR storms over the last two decades.
The reason people still love to shop there is for the experience – women often report the environment in the store is positive and affirming, engaging, energetic and visually stimulating.
Retailers like Hot Topic and Box Lunch have become masters of using bounceback coupon offers to bring shoppers back into their stores to redeem discounts within a few weeks of purchases.
And of course the LEGO store, which is selling the exact same products you can get at any other store that sells LEGO branded merchandise, attracts customers who just really want to make a pilgrimage to visit one of their favorite brands and be surrounded by it.
In other words, stores that compete on service, value and customer engagement still tend to do pretty well, and they can command the higher prices often associated with shopping in malls.
But is that enough to sustain the model?
Well, I’d argue… maybe, yes! Because Gen Z is starting to love malls, and the greatest increases in mall traffic are coming from people in this age group.
Malls offer an alternative to all of the other things that people switched to in order to get away from going to the mall have stopped offering, like nice indoor spaces, ample choices for browsing and shopping, food courts and places to just sit and hang out.
The problem, though, is that Gen Z is also able to go into malls and find similar products easily online, and so the stores that are catering to them need to offer fun experiences and instant gratification by making purchases easy and fun.
Department store anchors and traditional mall retailers like jewelry stores, boutiques and shoe shops aren’t well-aligned with this generation, but amusement centers, experiences, stores that offer items seen on social media and pop culture-focused stores definitely are.
Another thing we need to acknowledge is that malls traditionally sold a sort of conformity by insisting on a monoculture.
You could go into a lot of malls around the country and find the same stores offering the same items, and while that was very popular in the 1980s, it doesn’t match today’s culture well.
Likewise, I remember the surprise people felt back in the 1990s and the early 2000s when they started realizing that many mall stores, in trying to be trendy, intentionally carried smaller sizes of clothing and were positioned only towards people of certain body shapes and sizes.
That kind of exclusion of people doesn’t fit today’s culture at all.
Malls today need to offer things that are surprising and distinctive and interesting to continue to attract customers.
They also need to have policies in place that promote public safety without being too restrictive, because the draconian policies many malls employ tend to chase customers away rather than attract them.
Here in St. Louis, for example, malls have had to enforce curfews or age restrictions due to swells of younger people showing up on weekends looking for something to do, but the malls are ill-equipped to handle them and often treat them adversarially rather than trying to offer experiences, products and services catered to their needs.
This creates a dynamic where people are afraid to go to the mall at certain times or where the malls have to close early for fear of rowdy groups being too hard to handle.
There are solutions to these problems, and they often involve community engagement and involvement as well as smart design.
For example, in the mall just down the street from my house, many of the worst incidents occur in the food court because large groups of people can congregate there.
The solution is to break those bigger spaces up through smart design and to provide food businesses presence in smaller pockets of the mall as opposed to offering a giant food court.
Then use those bigger spaces for community attractions that can fill the space with positive purpose, not just groups of bored teenagers.
Community spaces that draw in families and the broader community tend to naturally discourage teens from wanting to hang out in large, unsupervised groups and also justify a stronger presence for public safety officers and security policies.
Shopping malls can also reconsider their role as a public square.
The original design, if you recall, was intended to integrate other services and organizations, and that’s still a possibility today.
Portions of aging malls have been repurposed into many other things including residential communities for senior citizens, government-run public recreation centers or even offices for large businesses.
As marketers, we of course should look at malls as well with an eye towards new and interesting ways they can be used.
As Gen Z grows up and begins searching for that mall-like experience, I have a feeling there’s going to be enormous opportunity to reconfigure what this experience can look like and to determine how retailers can be successful serving them.
There’s still plenty of opportunity out there for those with the eyes to see it!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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