We went to the mall nearest to my parent’s house and I was shocked to see about 60% of the stores closed. The grocery store and drug store were busy, but while my mom waited for a prescription I went looking for a coffee, and the rest of the mall was almost empty. The closest I got to finding coffee was a Subway and Booster Juice, both with no customers in the stores. Both had shuttered, empty sores next to them.

The strip mall and small malls that we’ve known for decades are dead. There won’t be a revival. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online shopping sites are in direct competition with these malls and unless someone is pulled to these malls by the need for groceries or a prescription, none of the other few remaining stores will get a visit.

That said, all malls won’t die just the stand-alone ones. The newest form of densification in cities is to build a mall or commercial level shopping below high rises… stack the customers on top of the shopping spaces and make the mall convenient to visit. You don’t even need to put on a coat to visit the mall, it’s just a trip down the elevator, or a walk through an underground parking lot.

Goodbye strip mall. They will all be torn down and revived only when a few hundred condos are built above the mall space. You want customers in your mall? Make the mall an extension of their living space. Until that happens, you’ll see more and more empty, shut down, and abandoned stores… Malls that are mere shells of what they used to be.

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