WASHINGTON “The Shopping centers They’re dying,” says Joseph, a 32yearold man who worked for three years as a clerk at a department store on the outskirts of Washington. This is how this salesman sums up a phenomenon that could be wiping out one of the pillars of American culture: the greats. Shopping centers.
The number of shopping centers fell from around 2,500 a year US in the 1980s to about 750 today, and their decline is so sharp that within 15 years it is projected that there will only be 150 left in the country, according to SiteWorks President Nick Egelian.
Incidentally, Joseph, who works at Tysons Corner — one of the few large malls left on the outskirts of the capital — believes his work will “disappear” within a few years, along with those large complexes.
Walking through Tysons Corner on a weekday morning it’s easy to see empty shops. Many people are opting for restaurants and concessions over shopping, one of the strategies malls continue to use to attract visitors.
Shopping in New Jersey, United States; Shopping centers have suffered Photo: Sarah Yenesel/Efe/Epa
According to Egelanian, who has been following the evolution of department stores in the United States for more than a quarter century, there is no way to change the trajectory of the disappearance of malls, which is paradoxical since “they were not built to die and are physical and legally hard to kill.”
According to the analyst, even Tyson’s corner “is likely to shrink over time,” as has been the case in other cases, although it should continue to survive.
The socalled American “Mall” has been one of the foundations of social development in the country for decades. The US has the largest shopping area per capita in the world: around 2 square meters per person, compared to a figure like Spain and most European countries, which does not even reach half a square meter. According to the Mexican magazine Real State Market, this indicator is only 0.11148 square meters in Mexico.
For the director of consultancy Global Data, Neil Saunders, “there will no doubt be more closures, but some will survive and continue to function well.”
“Buying habits have changed: now we’re buying more online and more locally,” says Saunders. According to him, there are “too many malls relative to demand” in the United States.
Just look at retailers’ location strategies that have led to the emergence of “neighborhood hubs,” he says. Many stores are following the pattern of abandoning shopping centers in the center of cities and moving to the periphery, with smaller branches in residential areas.
In fact, the number of clothing stores is growing, but today they are located individually in the suburbs, and not in shopping centers. Although the apparel industry closed a total of 750 stores in 2022, it recorded the secondhighest number of new store openings with a total of 1,395, according to analysis by Coresight Research. Many of them settled in the suburbs.
The question is whether malls will be able to “adapt to what consumers want,” Saunders says. “After all, the majority of sales are still in physical stores, so the cost is there. Shopping centers simply have to be able to capture it.”/Efe