Internet retailing is eating into mall revenue, but competition from newer shopping centers was the most common cause of death for malls over the past decade, The Wall Street Journal reports.
While the situations were different, the dead malls generally struggled to compete with newer malls that offered more modern features and a broader selection of stores, according to a Wells Fargo Securities study of 72 closed malls.
The dead malls were built in the mid-1970s and were overtaken by larger malls built from the late 1970s to the early 1990s that better capitalized on demographic and transportation shifts.
One common hallmark of a dead or dying mall is the closure of an anchor store. When that happened, fewer customers tended to visit, resulting in more store closures, which led to even fewer shoppers, and so on.
“Relocation of an anchor department store from the weaker property to the newer mall was a common tipping point for the downfall of the weaker mall,” Jeffrey Donnelly, senior analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, tells The Wall Street Journal.
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