Is the American Shopping Mall Dead?

There's something growing in the New Jersey Meadowlands, the marsh just nine miles west of Manhattan--and it isn't the gentle ferns that the bucolic name suggests. Instead, what's emerging is a man-made behemoth, the largest and most expensive mall ever built in the United States. Originally slated to open this month, Xanadu is now scheduled for completion next summer. Lawsuits, political grandstanding and construction delays have nearly doubled the mall's cost to $2.3 billion. When it's finished, the half-mile "retailtainment" center will be a Vegas-meets-Disneyland pleasure dome with the country's tallest Ferris wheel and first indoor artificial ski slope. There will also be a two free-fall skydiving jumps, indoor surfing, a mini-city for kids, a digital media river on the ceiling--and, oh, some 200 shops.

The scale and scope of the project would be breathtaking in its own right. But what makes Xanadu extraordinary is the fact that it is emerging just as the American mall--that most quintessential of American institutions--is in its dying throes, if not already dead. Moribund malls have not gone unnoticed amongst industry analysts and Web sites like Deadmalls.com that feature photos of hundreds of now-abandoned sites. But what were once just worrying signs appear to have finally flat-lined. Last year was the first in half a century that a new indoor mall didn't open somewhere in the country--a precipitous decline since the mid-1990s when they rose at a rate of 140 a year, according to Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham-Jones, coauthor of the forthcoming book "Retrofitting Suburbia," which focuses on the decline of malls and other commercial strips. Today, nearly a fifth of the country's largest 2,000 regional malls are failing, she says, and according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, and a record 150,000 retail outlets, including such mall mainstays as the Gap and Foot Locker, will close this year. Xanadu, whose officials declined NEWSWEEK's requests for comment, has named just nine tenants for its 200 spaces.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[DuPageDem]

Of course they're dead. That's why zombies congregate there in George Romero movies.

[RobinSeattle]

This is the comment of the day.

Man, some of you guys are just natural born comedians. Wish I had that talent.

[Hirnlego]

I know...somewhere up there, George Carlin is looking down on us and smiling...

;)

[Mike169]

Isn't that always the way. As I reach retirement age my pension is gone, my 401(k) is in the toilet, I can't afford health care after June and I'm not eligible for social security and medicare for 6 more years and now the malls are obsolete and I can't even do my mall walking. The American Dream is dead (or maybe I am).

[RobinSeattle]

Nowhere in the article is mentioned the internet nor big box warehouse outfits such as Costco. When possible, I buy off the net, which saves me gas, the hassles of parking and using malls and traffic (or even getting dressed to go to one). Malls are also a big favorite of car thieves and attractive targets for terrorists or just the psychotic homicidal maniac.

EBay has also added to the new interest in second hand goods and has become a multibillion dollar business.

The fact is that people have more stuff than ever and storage companies have been doing a land office business the last decade or so by giving consumers a place to put their overflow goods that don't fit in their homes. So just how thrifty or green they are becoming is still an open question. It just seems to me that the venues of consumer desire have changed while the scale of it has not.

[UncleJimbo]

The only places I shop any more are supermarkets,because the only thing I can afford is food! Christmas has been cancelled!

[marymansour]

I thought, as a young woman, returning for visits from my overseas home, that the American mall of the 70s was the greatest invention since bread and ice cream. Long before I reached the senior citizen years, I began to eschew them. Too much circus atmosphere with the kiddies shrieking and running about after school and on weekends - with no parental supervision. I've returned to frequenting shops in neighborhood strip malls. Before I left the larger town for my retirement years in a much smaller community, there were multiple reports of criminal incidents in those same malls. They had become something of a gang hangout.

[loril]

If the mall is dead in Jersey...these are truly transforming times.

I'll admit it. I was a mall rat. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and the mall was king. I have weaned myself as an adult...shopping less and less with each passing year. When this decade hit I had all but stopped. Yes, it was for some of the more noble reasons cited in the article...but the Bush years have also drained us dry. What once was discretionary income has now become necessary for bills. And perhaps a pittance left over for saving.

Not enough people have "Mad Money" now. At least, not enough to support a mega-complex devoted to buying stuff like "Xanadu". (Sheesh...even the name is terrible. It evokes the glory days of the mall, though...when I was a kid and Olivia Newton John was a disco princess.)

[LeonBNJ]

I go by the future disaster discussed in the article every day on my commuter bus to and from work in NY City. On top of that, they are replacing a fine Giants Stadium across the road with another huge stadium that will only be accessable to the rich yet on State property and overtaxed NJ taxpayers subsidising it. I suspect that Xandau will become a big beached whale and it's investors ending up in Chapter 11.
As to the death of the malls, I thing we are going to see for a number of years of no new ones, some current ones getting smaller, or going downscale with lesser stores. Already here in NJ, I have seen 2 failed malls being torn down and replaced with office buildings and others losing tennats with more empty storefronts.

[Buckywunder]

Yes. And good riddance...

[MajorKong]

Another one? We already live on the third mall from the sun.

[DevRock]

I'm still disgusted those corrupt sumb@gs in NJ allow MORE of the Meadowlands wetlands to be filled in. I hope this mega-mall and many others FAIL miserably. I agree with some other poster. Knock them down, and restore open space for nature.

[bluguy8]

plow them down and plant tress to help the planet . There are way to many and the stores are all offering them same crap. Nobody has anything different and store management has gotten that yet...if everything is made with cheap labor way are the prices so high on things--its just greed .
If there has to be malls come up with a new concept , not just the sos --those days are over

[majorteddy]

God , we can only hope so. I just love going to the mall and having to go in one entrance which I have to walk a quarter mile to, after having driven 20 miles to it, and then walk another quarter of a mile inside the mall through dopey people, to buy a birthday card, and then do it all in reverse. The same thing for Walmart. I don't understand how people with leg problems can do this. It was so much more economical when we had small stores near your home and you could bop in and bop out in 2 minutes and not have to drive so far. Try going to Walmart or these malls in less than an hour. That's the idea behind them , get you to walk past all the merchandise. I hate it.

[vippy]

I have not been to a mall in years. I saw the decline when the 1990s approached. I remember
we had the busiest mall in Texas here and it is just about dead now. Dillard's used to be upscale
but when I last seen it, they had huge sales and the store was crowded with too much merchandise
which is a sure sign of going out of business. Beall's is the same way, one can hardly move between
the fixtures without knocking down some of the merchandise. Well, Sears is slashed to bankrupt
too and Penny's is having a hard time to stay afloat. What is left are the TJMaxx's and the ROSS
Stores, which are not in malls. All the small stores in the mall change from one visit to the next.
Yes, I would say that the malls are dead.

[carrieanna]

I used to enjoy going to the malls in Dallas just to see the newest perfume, shoes, clothes, stereos, etc. But I always had will power and rarely made impulse purchases...except for once in a while in William Sonoma. But I got bored of the constant glut of new stuff b/c it seemed the ideas were just being rehashed and I was becoming more and more anti-consumerist.

I've been in a mall twice in the past 6 months and that's mainly b/c I went with someone who was looking for something particular.

Best Buy and Barnes & Noble are my meccas.