lifemix's weblog

Are malls dead?

Shopping malls are essentially a place that provides an indoor, multi-stores environment for people to shop in. The idea has been around for centuries, but the first sign of an organized constructed effort was probably around early eighteen hundreds in London, and then the idea was intorduced first in the United States, in Providence, Rhode Island with a joint called The Arcade.

In the mid-20th century, the idea of the mall really exploded when suburbs and automobiles became a common thing, malls were able to move away from city centers, and into suburbia where land is plenty and consumers didn't want to travel afar for their shopping fix. The rest as we know it, is pretty much what we have today - malls have pretty much infiltrated most suburbs, and in them, are chain stores after chain stores of cookie cutter retail concepts across the entire nation.

We won't be the first and the last to say that it's pretty boring to shop in a mall nowadays, if you go to a mall in California, it is pretty much the exact same experience as if you would to goto one in upstate New York; you have your Gaps, and you have your Macy's. The repetition is efficient and effective, but it does make a dull shopping experience when you're craving for something 'different'.

In a way, we as consumers created our own evil; we want things to be good, and we want things to be cheap. It is this exact desire that drove the growth of malls and chain stores, but the thing with us human beings is, once we get something we want, all of a sudden, that's not good enough for us anymore. So we whine and complain that the shopping experience in the US is bland and uninteresting.

It is really not the malls fault that they do what they do, it is not the chain store's fault either, because both of these guys, are really only doing what we ask of them. So if we want things to change, if we want more interesting stuff in our stores, then quite simply, we have to change the way we buy things.

In Europe, people don't buy 20 bargain shirts a year, they buy 3 high quality ones and treat them with care. If we were to chart out how many of one thing we buy, and how often we throw them away after they fall a part, the result would be interesting - It will probably just show that, it's worth the money to get something that's slightly more expensive, but higher quality.

We don't go out to buy a car with the thought that it'll be temporary and we'll change it next season, so why do we do it with our clothes? Why do we do it with our accessories? When we buy a car, we know exactly what we're getting because we took the time to understand what we're buying, if only we apply the same effort to the rest of the stuff we buy, we will make a statement that quality matters, and buying the look is simply not enough anymore. When we make these types of buying decisions, we are telling the people who sell them, we waant better stuff! Only then, would retailers understand that we are willing to pay the price for quality, so they will respond over time, and bring in higher quality products.

So no, the mall will probably stick around. As for the stores, they have to change, and they have to risk changing in order to serve the next generation of quality shoppers.

last modified Jun 18, 2006 at 0:20

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