NEW YORK — They’re all about connections. The human kind, as in person to person.
While shopping malls — a 50-year-old fixture of American society — appear at first blush to be all about commerce, author and retail anthropologist Paco Underhill begs to differ.
“The fact that makes malls fundamentally viable is that they’re places to look at other people,” Underhill said in an interview. It also happens to describe what he does for a raft of corporate clients, from Saks Fifth Avenue and Gap to Starbucks and the U.S. Postal Service. He observes how people behave in such commercial settings in his role as chief executive officer of Envirosell, a global research and consulting company based here.
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“If malls were only places to get what we need, they would crumble,” maintained Underhill, author of the recently published “Call of the Mall” (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), comprising 221 pages of first-person narrative and anecdotes in which he dissects the dynamics of America’s 1,175 regional malls with a keen eye for detail. For example, he points out the stains on the outside of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., and grass poking up through cracks in its asphalt parking lot, which he claims in the book indicate the 13-year-old complex — the country’s biggest regional shopping center, at more than four million square feet — has not aged gracefully.
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In an overarching manner, malls serve as a cultural touchstone for the country’s population. “We look to these shopping venues as a good dipstick to measure who we are,” Underhill observed in the interview. “Some of us love them, some are ambivalent and some hate them. Like it or not, though, shopping malls represent what we are,” he added. “It’s a great place to look at America.”
Indeed, slightly more than half of what people do in malls is unrelated to shopping — such as eating, socializing, playing games, hanging out and watching movies, Underhill writes. Too, the perceived entertainment value of a mall is unrelated to the amount of time people devote to shopping there or the number of items they buy, he relates, despite decades-old efforts by retailers to make the store experience more entertaining. “So shoppers can be exceedingly fond of their mall and still not spend much money or time in stores,” Underhill states. “It’s a risk” for stores that lease space in them.
It’s not that the author is disavowing the role of malls as shopping palaces. In fact, he notes they account for some $308 billion in annual sales, or about 14 percent of U.S. retailing, excluding sales of automobiles and gasoline.
In “Call of The Mall,” though, Underhill places those halls of commerce in a broader societal context and does so in a chatty voice inflected with a wry sense of humor. For instance, even as he draws a parallel between his research at a mall like Tyson’s Corner in McLean, Va., and an archaeology dig in Peru, he acknowledges analyzing shoppers and shopping venues is a rather unusual way to make a living. “On the other hand,” he quips, “I never run out of socks.” (And his first book, the four-year-old “Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,” is now published in 20 languages.)
Naturally, shopping malls spring up where housing is developed. With many of the country’s 83 million Baby Boomers currently considering “where they are going to live the last third of their lives,” as Underhill put it in the interview, some suburban malls are poised to benefit from relocations both to and within suburbia by people age 50 and up. Not that he’s expecting a mass migration to the ’burbs by Boomers who don’t already live there, but the generation is sizable enough for malls to benefit from those who do, or who may simply shift suburban locales. Others may opt for rural settings or urban environs such as Boston, New York, Chicago and Seattle — cities already experiencing an influx of individuals 50 and older, noted Underhill, who also is an urban geographer.
“The mall is very real for suburban culture,” he observed, describing a reality that persists despite the typical regional mall’s artificial, bubble-like quality, a controlled environment housed in a sterile design. “It remains a concentrated place to shop — even for some urbanites,” he added, pointing to the $2 billion Time Warner Center, opened here in February, as an example.
This environment is especially alluring, in Underhill’s view, for the Millennial generation, which comprises some 71 million individuals, including today’s tweens, teens and young adults through age 26. “It’s the first place they go to check out who they are — to try themselves out in a safe setting,” he maintained. “For them, the mall will continue to be a place to hang out.”
“Brands like Louis Vuitton and Betsey Johnson are making their way into shopping malls,” Underhill said. “They’re smart enough to realize the malls are the place they will encounter a new generation of people.”
For such reasons, regional malls aren’t going away anytime soon, Underhill insisted, despite various claims to the contrary over the past decade or so as vacancy rates have climbed; some malls have been torn down or redeveloped for alternative uses, and shopping itself has lost some luster as a leisure activity. For instance, there’s a group of government buildings in Greenville County in South Carolina that was the Bell Tower Mall; in Tupelo, Miss., a convention center occupies the former Downtown Mall; and in High Point, N.C., the former Westchester Mall has been converted into a Wesleyan religious complex including a sanctuary, a nursing home and a bookstore.
Nonetheless, in his quest to analyze and relate the roles regional malls play in our lives, Underhill has uncovered some troubles in shopping’s halls of paradise, in the form of missed opportunities. Some of the most glaring include:
- The failure to offer a mix of basic services, such as a dry cleaner, tailor, locksmith and laundromat.
- The absence of supermarkets.
- The dearth of coat-check areas, let alone ones located near mall entrances — ideally, each one.
- The lack of will-call desks where purchases can be dropped off and picked up when shoppers are ready to leave.
- The short supply of baby strollers, especially those offered for free.
- Parking lots and garages that are difficult to negotiate.
Filling such voids at the country’s regional malls, Underhill said, “would help construct them as a complete solution” to people’s everyday needs — a particularly compelling role given the ever-ascending priority placed on convenience.
In fact, one of the most common reasons people are opting to buy things online rather than in a mall is to avoid wasting time looking for a parking place. In some European malls, Underhill said, parking guides or computer-based technologies direct cars to the nearest open spot.
Regional malls that add, say, a dry cleaner and a supermarket might grab business from neighborhood shopping centers, which commonly feature such tenants. And the nation’s shoppers might respond favorably to a laundromat placed near a mall’s entrance, as they are in many South American malls, Underhill suggested, which would allow mall patrons to drop off their laundry, shop and return to pick up clean clothing.
Those suggestions hint at what the author views as the biggest mistake U.S. mall developers have made during the past 50 years: aiming too low, when their projects have succeeded town squares as focal points of contemporary society. “Malls are begun first as real estate projects, unlike stores like Macy’s and Altman’s that were retail palaces merchants proudly put their name on,” Underhill said. “The overwhelming majority of malls in the U.S. are over 20 years old, and I can’t see many of them achieving landmark status.”
As the author writes in “Call of The Mall,” shopping centers in Brazil, Japan and Portugal, though inspired in a broad sense by America’s malls, have aesthetics far surpassing their objects of inspiration — objects he describes as big, beige, boxy and virtually featureless. America’s malls, Underhill exhorts, “could be much better, more vivid, intelligent, adventurous, entertaining, imaginative, alive with the human quest for art and beauty and truth. But it’s not. It’s the mall.”
By the Numbers: The Malling of America
- Regional malls in the U.S.: 1,175
- Sales produced by America’s regional malls annually: $308 billion
- Regional malls’ share of U.S. retailing volume*: 14 percent
- Share of apparel shoppers who wait for dressing rooms at regional malls: 40 percent
- Share of apparel shoppers who wait for dressing rooms at city stores: 25 percent
- Regional malls in the U.S. more than 20 years old: 783, or two-thirds
- Birth of America’s first enclosed regional mall: 1934, Edina, Minn.
- Largest regional mall in the U.S.: Mall of America, Bloomington, Minn., approximately 4 million square feet.
- Largest regional mall in the world: West Edmonton Mall, Alberta, Canada, approximately 5 million square feet.
*U.S. retailing volume excluding auto and gasoline sales
Source: “Call of The Mall” by Paco Underhill.