More people appear to be shopping – and for longer – at Mall of America and many malls across America.
BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — The start of the holiday shopping season has been encouraging at the Mall of America and many more malls across America.
“A lot more retail therapy going on, if you want to think about it that way,” said University of St Thomas marketing professor Dr. Mike Porter. “We’re really looking for experiences now, and while we’re going to continue to purchase online there is something about getting out and shopping and engaging with others.”
Reports from Simon Malls and Placer.ai both indicate traffic up between 5-10% at all types of different malls nationwide during the long Thanksgiving/Black Friday holiday weekend.
Porter said some of that surge can be explained by the later, more truncated, start to the holiday shopping season.
Dr. Mike Porter: “Marketers have turned Black Friday into the beginning of that shopping season, well if that beginning starts later, then we have to accommodate with truncated sales and everything is kind of crammed together.”
Kent Erdahl: “It probably doesn’t hurt, in Minnesota, that it was also super cold.”
Porter: “Colder than it certainly has been, it started late, just like Thanksgiving, so all of those triggers that get people to say, ‘Oh, it’s time to go Christmas shopping,’ it all come together at once.”
Though the timing may have played a role, in a year when many other physical stores saw traffic dip, shoppers certainly seem to be coming together more at malls.
Standalone Store to Mall Staple
Jaxen Grey, the local men’s clothing retailer that began with a standalone store in the North Loop, now has several locations in area malls, and the owners are glad they did.
“Hearing from all of our mall stores and then hearing from our non-mall stores, the difference was substantial,” said Adam Bevis, co-owner and fashion director for Jaxen Grey.
Because Jaxen Grey features many brands that began selling their products online, Bevis said adding stores in shopping malls has been a natural progression as traffic has returned in recent years.
“We’ve definitely seen malls make a comeback,” he said. “With the pandemic and everything the scales tipped too far towards (e-commerce) and now I think we’re just seeing a leveling out,”
In some cases that has involved leveling anchor stores. Porter said the push began when local malls started to rethink — and re-work — those pivotal spaces to make room for the likes of LifeTime Fitness, Kowalski’s Market and large-format Dick’s Sporting Goods stores.
From there, he’s seen the malls work to bring in new tenants, pop-ups and experiences to fill the rest of the vacant spaces that piled up amid the pandemic.
“If you just walk around here at the Mall of America, the number of empty storefronts is dramatically less,” he said. “And once you get to 90% plus occupancy, it looks like a place you want to go as opposed to going into a mall that’s half empty.”
Pop-Up Appeal
“I feel like malls are making things more interesting,” said local artist Adam Turman, who opened his first pop-up shop at the Mall of America this holiday season.
Turman said the experiment has already started to pay off after Black Friday.
“I’ve really been enjoying the experience. It’s also interesting too, because I’m getting a new audience. I have a very big Minnesota audience, and I’ve heard from people who have worked the store that it’s about 50/50, with about half of visitors from out of town,” he said.
Though store traffic in November was about what he had expected, Turman said Black Friday is proving the experience to be worthwhile.
“It ended up being a booming day,” he said. “We did at least 300% — if not more — in business than we would have done in a normal day.”
Neither Turman, nor Porter, knows where things will go from here this holiday season, but they’re both pretty sure the appeal of malls isn’t going anywhere.
Erdahl: “Three years ago, many people were asking were asking, ‘Is that mall dead?’ You said, ‘Nay.’ Do you want to take a victory lap around here?”
Porter: “I’m not sure that I had a whole lot of clairvoyance there. Everything cycles and if we’re at the bottom, it’s pretty easy to say it’s going to come back. I’m not going to take any victory laps.”
He is not the only one not taking a victory lap. Because this holiday shopping season is essentially a week shorter, multiple retailers say there is even more pressure on every day from here until the end of the year. They say only time will tell if the increased traffic will translate into increased spending overall.
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