The Gauntlet’s Been Thrown Down – the U.S. Needs a Bigger Spiral Escalator!
Your humble newsletter editor has never had the pleasure of taking a ride on one of these “spiral” escalators before. There’s one in Caesars Palace Forum Shops in Las Vegas, but now it’s been reported that the largest one is in a mall in China. According to Gizmodo and the NY Daily News, the New World Daimaru Department Store in Shanghai, the curved escalators cover seven stories. OK, so they aren’t exactly the escalator equivalent of a spiral staircase, but they’re still pretty darn cool. Yours truly yearns for a curved escalator closer to home – is anyone up to the challenge? Is there any reason why these aren’t more popular in the U.S? Tweet your comments to us @Dir_Major_Malls, or let us know via email.
Four Reasons Why Malls are Thriving (Instead of Dying, as some Suggest)
Have your “friends” been sending you links to websites that have been cataloging old malls, and not in a positive way? Here’s a way to respond, thanks to some new data released by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). The top four reasons why, according to The Cheat Sheet, the shopping mall isn’t dead, are: occupancy rates are rising, attention to efficiency has grown, the size of the market is a factor (“Developers are much more careful since the recession to make sure they’re not overextending their market by added too many new buildings,” said Jesse Tron, director of communications for the ICSC) and the shopping experience is changing (and that’s ok).
Does Your Community Need a Rocket Camp? Check the Shopping Data!
We often talk about the need to study a demographic in a community to figure out what stores they may want to shop in, the clothing they might most desire, the movies they’d be interested in watching or the food they most crave. That can also work in reverse: the camps they want to go to or the classes they might want to take can be derived from a community’s shopping habits. The Toronto-based company, Environics Analytics, was recently featured in Maclean’s, a national, weekly, current affairs magazine covering Canada. In a recent article, author Chris Sorensen looked at ten years’ worth of data to find how Canadian communities had changed. The study “drew on vast databases about Canadians’ incomes, shopping habits, lifestyle preferences and even social values” leading municipal leaders to conclude that their residents didn’t want to play volleyball or take crafts classes (as traditionally thought and offered), but rather they wanted to learn about robotics and economics. The data, so critical in many facets of building a community’s shopping centers, was needs to meet a community’s needs by “understanding the diversity within the diversity,” said Jan Kestle, the founder and president of Environics Analytics.
DMM Database Tops 8,100
The Directory of Major Malls has made it over the 8,100 mark with 8,106 major shopping centers and has a total of 303,427 tenant locations. This equals 3,539,219,009 square feet of retail GLA. The DMM Database includes 27,545 primary contacts for owner/developer, leasing, management and marketing and we have more than 4,600 site/leasing plans. For additional information and to learn how to take advantage of all this data, take a peek at our 3 minute intro video and sign up for a trial subscription..
Spotlight Listing: Tikahtnu Commons, Anchorage, AK
