The Future Of Malls As The Consumer Attention Span Gets Shorter

By NICOLE MURRAY Successful malls are offering more than a little retail therapy these days. Shopping malls across the country have been forced to pivot their business strategies as inflation rates spike, retail spaces become vacant, and e-commerce grows in popularity. Experts say malls have performed differently depending on their class. According to Kelly Mangold, principal at RCLCO Real Estate Consulting, class A malls with exclusive, high-end luxury retailers with few vacancies have continued to perform the best. “Malls tend to be successful when they are transformed into a one-stop shop for high-end goods that people cannot get anywhere else nearby,” Mangold said. Class B malls, whose success relies on their anchor retailers, have struggled because, “their level of business…

Commercial Spaces: The Future Of Malls

By PATRICK LAVERY “Let’s go to the mall!” wasn’t just a catchphrase popularized by alter-ego Robin Sparkles on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” In the 1980s and 1990s, shoppers flocked to malls to satisfy their needs for a variety of goods, and adolescents went there just to hang out, patronize the food court, and be social. But sometime in the two decades between the turn of the millennium and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the megamall as an American institution gave way to the likes of Walmart, eBay, and Amazon. It’s gotten to the point where thumbing through slideshows of abandoned malls has become almost as perverse a pleasure as seeing what’s happened to former Olympic venues.…

They Used To Be A Pizza Hut: Finding New Purposes For Commercial Spaces

By PATRICK LAVERY You’ve seen them. They masquerade as churches, funeral homes, radio stations, pharmacies, even – blasphemy! – other restaurants. But they all have one thing in common. They used to be a Pizza Hut. Now, it may be true that no one out-pizzas the Hut, but the huts themselves have slowly become outmoded relics over the past two to three decades when it comes to the chain’s business model. In that time, the take-out option that was always an alternative to sitting under the red, trapezoidal roof has brought Pizza Hut closer in spirit to its main competitors Domino’s, Little Caesars, and Papa John’s. It’s now common to see Pizza Hut paired in strip malls, airports, or rest…