51–60 of 275 posts
USA Malls are a symptom of car sprawl, and are textbook terrible landuse planning; they happen to have a super-simple business formula and appeal to certain fiefdom's egos.. cannot be fast enough for these formats to dry up, in my opinion
I imagine Sbarro, Orange Julius, Aunt Annies, etc, are probably also struggling.
I see a lot of Sbarros at airports. Which is absolutely not to say they're not struggling - they probably very much are - but only to say that they're not a mall-only place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of Sbarros at airports. Which is absolutely not to say they're not struggling - they probably very much are - but only to say that they're not a mall-only place.
Was curious so I pulled their list of 571 locations. 204 say either "Mall", "Center" or "Food Court". 18 say "Airport". Raw html if anyone is curious: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/tyingq/0e5701c4cb666cba9d...
Thanks for looking that up!
Malls seem like the perfect mixed use type property. Stores on 1 floor, offices on 2nd floor, then 2-3 floors of housing. 1 of the big department stores could be a grocery store.
Office + mall examples usually seem to be working fine, except there always are one entrance for each, distanced physically as well as in general aesthetics.
How many of these are genuinely because the store couldn't make a profit vs got saddled by a bunch of private equity financial engineering debt? Guitar Center is a good example--if you sent them through a full blown Chapter 7 where they could finally discharge the stupid private equity debt they would be a perfectly profitable running business.
Aren't those two roughly equivalent by opportunity costs? One which is raking in money is too expensive if your goal is borderline debt dumping fraud when you can buy a mediocre stable business for those shenanigans.
An unprofitable business with $1 billion in cash flow is way more useful for financial engineering than a profitable business with $100 million in cash flow.
The point of shoving something like Guitar Center through Chapter 7 is that the financial engineering debt holders actually take a bath and consequently think twice about wading into this with another firm.
If these kinds of financial engineering games can just keep getting handed around, there is no incentive to stop as you can shuffle the chairs around and keep looting the cash.
Malls need to be remade. I like the few I've gone to that are mostly outside or have some open airways and greenery, art, music, some sort of novelty event or thing to check out. I don't really miss giant generic malls at all. They're used more as a free babysitter and I hate visiting them.
Agreed. The more popular new shopping areas I’ve been are outdoor “malls”. Shopping mixed with outdoors, and as you said greenery, art, music and novelties. A lot of indoor malls are dying. I can remember when the same empty places exploded in the 90s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like this exist in some city centers - but I’ve never seen one in the normal areas malls lurk. The three types usually try to stay some distance from each other unless forced together by exorbitant land prices. The surviving stores that used to be anchor candidates seem to be happy being on their own in a sea of dedicated parking.
Wonder if zoning laws have a big effect on that.
(The low-key method for normal people is to get “variances” - which are not as impossible to obtain as you may think if you work slowly and quietly on them.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see a lot of Sbarros at airports. Which is absolutely not to say they're not struggling - they probably very much are - but only to say that they're not a mall-only place.
Was curious so I pulled their list of 571 locations. 204 say either "Mall", "Center" or "Food Court". 18 say "Airport". Raw html if anyone is curious: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/tyingq/0e5701c4cb666cba9d...
Looking at it further, it does go both ways as well - for example "Gurnee Mills" is in a mall.
There also seem to be a surprising number of Sbarros outside of the U.S though they are all listed first in the list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things like this exist in some city centers - but I’ve never seen one in the normal areas malls lurk. The three types usually try to stay some distance from each other unless forced together by exorbitant land prices. The surviving stores that used to be anchor candidates seem to be happy being on their own in a sea of dedicated parking.
Wonder if zoning laws have a big effect on that.
Malls seem like the perfect mixed use type property. Stores on 1 floor, offices on 2nd floor, then 2-3 floors of housing. 1 of the big department stores could be a grocery store.
Such proposals have been made. San Francisco's Stonestown Galleria has a proosal for adding 3,000 housing units, in the outer Sunset: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Stonestown-Galleri... San Jose's Santana Row, completed in 2002, has over 1,200 residential units: https://web.archive.org/web/20170107101031/https://westernit... (PDF)