Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
^ It's like an inversion of the old suburban shopping mall model. They pulled all the stores to the edges and put the parking in the middle because it really is ALL about parking and driving.
Instead of driving to the mall, parking your car, and getting out and actually waking around the mall, now you can just hop from store to store with your car, parking it in front of every store you wish to shop at. No more laborious walking from store to store!
The great American laziness ladder always finds a lower rung to sink to.
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I think it is also that each store can show more of its own unique identity in color and even shape, rather than blend into the bland colors most indoor malls have. It may be also a little easier to get to the store of choice. For example, in one mall I used to go to, JC Penny's was on the back side, so you had to drive around the mall to get to it from the mall entrances, which was sometimes a traffic bottleneck, and then you had to pull in the big lot to get near the entrance, which was not always obvious.
In DC area, some malls were very successful, like Pentagon City, and some were not like Landmark. I wonder if it has to do with ease of access (Pentagon was accessible via the metro, and Landmark was not), but it may also be choice of stores (Pentagon has an Apple store). Landmark is finally being redeveloped as mixed use - at one point the only store holdout was Sears (of course!), and most of the parking lot were Amazon vans.