Community Corner
The Mall of the Past Vs. Retailing of the Future
It fits the archetype of 20th-century shopping, but doesn't bridge the gap to meet present-day needs. What then becomes of a teetering ship in a crowded sea of commerce?
You know what seemed like a great idea in the 1960s? Plastics. At the time, there was nothing but unmitigated virtue about the emerging technology. Today, we're all too aware of the serious downside of an entity that is past its useful life, but which you can never get rid of.
Another darling of a concept born of the 1960s is the enclosed, inward-facing shopping mall. With the rise of the suburb and the proliferation of the automobile, these constructs were as much a monument to our advancing technologies as they were to meeting actual shopping needs.
The mall in Moorestown is an iconic one. Built in 1963, it embodied the trend toward superstructures and retailing as an experience. But today, with nearly a third of its 90 stores without tenants, its fate may hang in the balance.
The upcoming liquor referendum, in by , addresses this topic for sure. But no matter which direction the town's residents steer the ship, the fundamentals of why its largest taxpayer is foundering is owed some close inspection.
Examining that "Why?" could fill volumes and form a thesis in the science of retailing. But for starters, there's this: The International Council of Shopping Centers distinguishes between regional and super-regional malls. A regional occupies 400,000 to 800,000 square feet and is intended to serve an area of 15 square miles. It's bigger brother, the super-regional, is larger than 800,000 square feet and serves 25 square miles.
Moorestown Mall clocks in at 1,060,000 square feet. It sits three miles down Route 38 from the Cherry Hill Mall, which tips the scales at 1.3 million square feet. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the East Gate Square complex rose to buttress the Moorestown Mall with another 900,000 square feet. And in 2005, Centerton Square Shopping Center popped up—four miles in the other direction—offering 800,000 square feet.
That's five super-regional mall equivalents occupying a seven-mile diameter. Per the leading shopping center association's own guidelines, aren't we deep, deep into market saturation?
That's to speak nothing of the trajectory of consumer preferences. The enclosed model is quickly becoming a relic, in favor of open-air complexes where store owners have greater control over their visibility and can create higher branding experiences. Add to that the explosive growth of online shopping, which on the grand-scale timeline is only in its infancy.
What of the boost to the local economy? Four million square feet of condensed-geography shopping goodness is a heck of a lot of jobs, wages, and ripple-effect commerce (employees buying food and gas, for instance) with dollars staying local. Or do they?
There's a misconception here. Given today's immensely inequitable relationship between ownership income versus worker income, shopping at chain stores is hardly a favor to the hometown economy. If you've walked the Moorestown Mall recently, you know national chains are their bread and butter. Those in-store revenues fast flow up the ladder to high-ranking executives, and ultimately to shareholders of the parent corporation—spread indiscriminately across the nation and world.
While the mall may sit within town borders, the reality is, it's more king and queen than mom and pop.
What then should become of this artifact? Ah, here's the best part. We don't need to know! There's this invisible force that will guide its future with dexterity—like a hand, I suppose. If all of its million square feet failed, doors shuttered, windows boarded over, would it remain as such for eons, cobwebbing its way into a distant future?
Or is it more likely a resourceful real estate developer would transform it? And would that transformed entity be better or worse than what stands today? Again, hard to know, but you could bet it would be dramatically different.
Wherever the takes us, couch it within the context of a broader perspective. There's a lot of work to do in our towns, our region and our nation. It's more than a single day's work—whether you'll have a drink at the end of that day or not.
