The Death of the Shopping Mall is less certain than the Death of Short Wave Radio ™.
Back in 2010, I put up a whimsical poll following one of my rare treks outside of my Internet Cave – it was surely as I was long overdue for a haircut. For several months, the Boston Post Mall was plastered with dangling banners announcing the arrival of “Cup IT”, touting its specialty of Cup of Corn, and the Belgian Wafel. I wasn’t sure if that was a typo or an affectation to make you think it was really European or some sort of odd trademark issue with “Belgian Waffle” or some FDA rule about what a real “Waffle” has to contain.
So if you went to the Kiosk at Central Court Level 2, there was nothing there 🙂 It stayed that way for a couple months, and long after the posters were gone, they did eventually open the place. My memory is the “Home Office” location was at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike or somewhere nearby – which is to put it mildly – a captive audience.
You will be “Shocked” to learn that today I discovered the place is gone. I never got brave enough to plop down $2.50 for my 5 cents of corn. The referenced web site is no longer functional (it’s domain server is located in Turkey), but there is a video online still on YouTube
See how many secret ingredients you can identify 🙂 Talk about a pointless labor intensive food mixing  process.
Anyhow, Boston Post Mall should be doing as well as any in the country (other than maybe where gas fracking is going on). It’s located on US Route 1, the Boston to New York Postal road that the Founding Fathers trod back and forth, and was about the only de facto reliable road until after the United States was formed and starting organizing other roads like the “National Road” connecting Maryland to Pittsburgh and Ohio in the early 1800s.
The mall sits next to a major exit on I-95 (the former Connecticut Turnpike) in between Milford, and Orange, two stable very old communities, which are the homes of people that commute to New York or summer homes on Long Island Sound.
The mall is operated by Westfield, one of the country’s larger mall operators. It is NOT an upscale mall like the one in Trumbull – the anchor tenants are Target, JC Penney, Sears and Macy’s. Trumbull has Abercrombie and Fitch, Lord & Taylor, Victoria’s Secret etc… as well as JC Penney, Target and Macy’s (Trumbull also seems to have lost many upscale tenants)
I admire Westfield – they have become very skilled at making a high vacancy mall look occupied – with soda machines in empty store fronts, “New Store coming soon” signs that are probably not true, but nobody will ever remember that later when they just update the date to a later date.
So the CupIT Kiosk is there, but has a new “tenant” – Wotz Poppin
Back in the first season or two of Saturday Night Live (about 1975), they had a running feature making fun of overspecialization in shopping malls – the setting was a store that only sold Scotch Tape and the goings on in the store and interaction with other similarly struggling tenants.
There was no person in evidence anywhere around this place (at about 2 PM on a Friday), the smell of stale popcorn and no obvious price list or 128 different ways you could enjoy your popcorn.  I can’t really find any evidence that any such business exists.  So you acquire a few hundred dollars in used popcorn equipment, and like magic you have an occupied Kiosk.  There is one box on the counter – if some swipes it, you’re out a few cents of stale popcorn (not likely).  The movie theater doesn’t allow you to bring in outside food, so I can’t imagine anyone buying popcorn at the mall at the center court from a kiosk that only sells popcorn.
So what clever ways are shopping malls convincing you they aren’t only half rented?
A fewer other observations as I tend to blather on
The Food Court was partly empty – they still have the Texas BBQ place staffed by the people from the Chinese Restaurant in the next place. The place that sold “Only Grilled Cheese” was gone. I actually did try that and it was okay – when you only have one product, it has to be fairly good 🙂
I stopped at another place that sold Shakes – I should have turned away, but I didn’t want to be a racist 🙂 After I was close enough to read the menu, I realized the woman was wearing a head scarf. There was another place not 100 feet away that was an ice cream place that also sells MILK shakes.
But I ordered my Large Chocolate Shake costing about as much as the meal I just had. She grabbed the mixer container and rinsed it at the sink (Allah only knows how long it had been sitting there at room temperature since the last customer). It good weird right away as she grabbed a bunch of ice cubes and added in some water from the soda machine. She did add in some soft serve “dairy stuff”, a little milk and a tiny amount of what I assume was ice cream, a squirt of some brownish syrupy stuff and pressed the blender button. When it came up a little short, she went back to the soda machine and added in more water.
Well, it was cold, all right! It wasn’t totally bad, and probably low enough in calories to make Mayor Bloomberg happy, but it wasn’t worth $7. I didn’t feel a need to leave a tip on top of that [an annoying practice here in Connecticut where an ice cream cone costs $4 and they think you should really pay even more for the “service” of waiting in line for half an hour.
Art-
They didn’t have to buy the Popcorn setup. A previous tenant left it as it skipped town on the 30th of the month.
The death of the Big Box chains is probably also coming. Best Buy is a great showroom for all those tech things, the only problem is people shop there, but buy on the web instead.
Jay
I fully agree. In the good old days, Malls were very picky about the merchants and how their products and behavior reflected on the reputation of the mall and the type of customers it would attract. That’s clearly no longer a factor.
Another less obvious things is they’re letting stores have a ton of floor space, probably for little or no additional rent. The occupied stores have aisles wide enough to hold wheelchair races, and large areas without any merchandise or displays.
Another related thing that has died (and somewhat related) is the “back room”, where you stored merchandise. With tight inventory and 1 or 2 day replenishment by UPS from a warehouse, there is no reason for “extra” stock in the back room. In most cases, if you do run out, you can offer to get it shipped in or check the nearest store online and see if they have one in stock and arrange to have it brought to the store, or tell the customer the item is in stock at the store a few miles away.
Which reminds me – on my latest adventure, I noticed the Gateway store where I bought a PC about 3 PCs ago – I think about 1998 – is still vacant with the gateway sign out front. I felt it was important to buy from a Brick and Mortar store so if it broke, some geek in the back room would be motivated to fix it or at least help me to fix it, not being on the phone with a guy in India. Unfortunately, my assumption was very wrong. That store had no service people and repairs were done at a place in about 30 miles away (and all they did was turn a small problem into a huge mess.
CompUSA lasted a few more years. The only computer store left is the local one that will charge you $100 just to look at your computer and conclude that pretty much everyone’s problem can be resolved by installing a new power supply and reinstalling Windows, and hand computer illiterates a$500 repair bill for a computer the could have replaced for $400.
No wonder the PC is dying fast. Store your data “in the cloud” and use a cheap disposable cell phone, laptop or iPad to talk to the cloud, and most of your problems go away. This is also bad news for Microsoft. Grandma doesn’t need Windoze and Microsoft Office to post pictures of her cats online. Business still needs Exchange and Office to schedule conference rooms to show power point presentations based on spreadsheet data, but even that is wearing thin.