IT’s 8pm on Wednesday, an hour before Southdale shopping mall officially closes, and the vacuum cleaners are drowning out the muzak. Most shoppers have left so the cleaning staff have started work early.
Outside the giant concrete box on the outskirts of Minneapolis, a small crowd of shoppers waits in the rain for the shuttle bus. The neon sign above their heads should say Macy’s, but three of the letters are missing, so it simply reads Ma.
Southdale may not look impressive but it is where it all started — the ocean-sized car parks, the two-tier shopping, the escalators carefully arranged to route shoppers past every outlet.
Southdale opened its 72 stores 50 years ago this week and created the model for modern retailing — the mall. The £10m centre was the first to be enclosed and introverted — with shops facing an internal pedestrian walkway. It was revolutionary and wildly popular, attracting more than 1m shoppers in its first two months.
Southdale itself may be long past its glory days but the model it created has never been more popular. In the US, so many new malls have been completed in the past decade that they outnumber high schools. They generate more than $2 trillion (£1,060 billion) in annual sales — about three-quarters of the nation’s retail activity, excluding cars and petrol.
“The call of the mall has never been stronger,” says Jeremy Baker, senior lecturer in marketing at London Metropolitan University.
In Britain the biggest urban malls ever built are rising through a forest of red cranes in east and west London, Leeds and Bristol. By 2010 some 700 malls and mini-malls will cover just over 17m square metres — an area bigger than Derby.
It is the same story across Europe. In France and Germany mall developers are building giant, retail hangars, while in Moscow millionaire women are preparing to cane their credit in the glass and steel Yevropeisky mall when it opens next month.
“Fifteen years ago, we had coupons for vodka and bread,” said Konstantin Sakharov, a retail consultant. “And now we are talking about shopping centres in every corner of town.”
The expansion is even more frenetic in fast-industrialising nations. Seven years ago there were only three malls in India. Now there are 55 and the number is expected to rise to 320 by 2010 to feed the £200 billion-a-year retail market.
China holds the record for the biggest malls. The £800m Golden Resources shopping centre in Beijing and the South China Mall, which opened in Dongguan earlier this year, boast 20,000 workers apiece and each cover an area bigger than 50 football pitches.
Analysts point to a powerful combination of exploding demand and benign planning regimes. “Consumers who have been denied western goods crave them and there are less draconian limitations than in the West on how and where developers can build malls,” said John Strachan, at property consultant Cushman and Wakefield and president of the British Council of Shopping Centres.
Standing outside the Atria mall in Mumbai, which boasts outlets for brands as varied as Rolls-Royce cars and Mango clothes, is Devyani Raman. She managed business development for Chinawhite nightclub in London before moving to India.
“Countries like India and China are only just opening up to western-style consumerism so, for most ordinary shoppers, malls are as exciting now as they were in the US 50 years ago,” she said.
“But the new designer outlets in malls also appeal to upmarket consumers. Wealthy Indians and Chinese are the biggest label snobs. They used to have to travel abroad to buy Armani and Versace. Now they can do it at home.”
In the Middle East, malls are creating a new “shoppertariat” — catered for on women-only floors in Saudi Arabia’s malls, where retailers include Harvey Nichols.
In Britain and America something different — and more radical — is happening. The mall is being reinvented. In the mid-1990s, campaigns by environmental lobby groups, who successfully argued that out-of-town retailing was destroying town centres, prompted planning authorities to clamp down on unfettered development.
In Britain, strict new laws made it impossible to open new, out-of-town centres, such as Brent Cross in north London, Merry Hill in the West Midlands, or Gateshead’s Metro Centre.
But mall builders have kept building faster and bigger. They have done it by turning the idea of the mall on its head. Instead of trying to create simulated, mini-downtowns in the suburbs, developers are bringing the malls back into the city centres they abandoned.
The result is that mall developers are turning round rundown city centres. The new Bullring mall has injected £1 billion into central Birmingham, and the White City development in London, by Australian developer Westfield, is expected to generate more than £2 billion of fresh investment in the 10 years after it opens in 2008.
“The mall is reinventing itself as a town-centre product. We are reintegrating with the city, putting some of the pride back into areas that have lost it,” said Michael Gutman, UK and Europe managing director of Westfield, the biggest mall owner on the planet with 120 centres worldwide.
Some 93% of all new malls that will open in Britain by 2010 will be in town centres, figures from the British Council of Shopping Centres show.
Hammerson, the lead developer behind the Bullring, plans to invest £4 billion in 750,000 square metre city-centre projects in Leeds, Bristol, Southampton, Leicester, Aberdeen, Sheffield and Peterborough.
Not everyone, of course, thinks that is a good thing. Lindsay Mackie of the London-based New Economics Foundation pressure group, blames malls for “replacing oncevibrant city centres with sanitised wastelands of jerry-built nowheres”.
The Federation of Small Businesses says malls have fostered the creation of “clone-town Britain” — shopping centres, malls and high streets where all the shops are the same whether you are in Southampton or Stornoway.
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, points out that “graceless out-of-town merchandise barns” have created an ozone-busting environmental problem by encouraging us to drive to the shops. And many parents blame shopping centres for turning their teenage children into “mall rats”, who prowl the halls and loiter outside burger joints.
But John Bywater, managing director of Hammerson, naturally disagrees. “Downtown used to be a lost cause. Birmingham Bullring was seriously crap, the most bloody awful place,” he said in the shadow of the elegant, silver new Selfridges. “But now consumers here, like in every other UK city, are moving back into city centres. They want to live, work, play, pray and be entertained in town centres.”
Early figures from the Bullring are encouraging. Some 600,000 shoppers a week visit the centre, 45% more than in the nearest out-of-town mall, Merry Hill.
Which is cause for celebration in Minneapolis, too.
Fifty days of “Mall Festivities” begin tonight and reach a climax when a giant birthday cake is cut in the central courtyard.
The party will mark the 50th birthday of arguably the most influential building of the 20th century. Love it or loathe it, it’s a mall world.
