What's to come for Puente Hills Mall?

[SamSpade]

LA Times wrote an interesting piece about what it's like to be the shopping center Santa at Puente Hills. Things do not sound good for the center overall.
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... ente-hills

Anyone know if "The Boulevard" in Las Vegas has a Santa station? Mentioned in another thread, Lloyd Center in Portland is keeping the fires stoked near their ice rink and I believe the only 'charge' is a donation to the local chapter of Salvation Army.

Videos of Puente Hills / Back to the Future's Twin Pines Mall, here:
5 years ago
6 months ago, earlier in 2023

[ClownLoach]

LA Times wrote an interesting piece about what it's like to be the shopping center Santa at Puente Hills. Things do not sound good for the center overall.
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor ... ente-hills

Anyone know if "The Boulevard" in Las Vegas has a Santa station? Mentioned in another thread, Lloyd Center in Portland is keeping the fires stoked near their ice rink and I believe the only 'charge' is a donation to the local chapter of Salvation Army.

Videos of Puente Hills / Back to the Future's Twin Pines Mall, here:
5 years ago
6 months ago, earlier in 2023

One of the first stores I ever had the privilege of leading a Grand Opening store setup on was at Puente Hills twenty years ago, and it was a Circuit City that moved across the freeway. The old store was vintage old Circuit City, tiny, no selection (didn't have room for music, movies or video games) and did respectable sales volume. The new store was absolutely gorgeous, 40,000 Sq Ft with all the bells and whistles. It was symbolic of everything the chain was working on, moving old low quality stores into better locations that could compete with Best Buy. It should have been a dynamite store by all accounts. Grand opening day it took me nearly 20 minutes to get out of the parking lot, and I wondered if they had made a mistake moving there. Customers said they absolutely loved the new store, nobody could believe Circuit City had a store that kicked Best Buy's butt all around. A year later sales had deteriorated at that store so badly they were about half of the crappy old store across the freeway that had subsequently been torn down to expand the service bay of a car dealership. The chain meanwhile was flying high and nobody could forsee a liquidation coming 5 years later, so this store was something insane like a 70% delta from the chain comp sales performance. It was unprofitable and one of the first to close before the company was forced into bankruptcy. A real shame but the real problem was the mall design itself, not the other factors some blame (demographic changes, etc.). It was way, way too inconvenient to get in and out of there, especially the side that faced the freeway but then was far from Colima Rd. The main issue is that you could only enter the mall from two sides since it was on a corner butted up against the freeway.

The Puente Hills Mall parking lot design was a giant loop too far from the mall itself, and the mall had multiple levels as if it was built into the side of a hill. The congestion and difficulty getting around was the killer. The mall was nice, but so inconvenient for customers to get into and park that they avoided the place.

If they had torn the place apart 25 years ago and drastically reworked the site into a better layout with easier ingress/egress/navigation I believe it would be one of the few malls still performing well and would be comparable to Santa Anita today. They needed to effectively take the site and make a giant "X" across the map then bulldoze along those two lines and replace with service roads for customers to cross the property diagonally.

[buckguy]

Puente Hills had a major shooting in the early 90s---that sort of thing that killed malls. The existence of malls was partly predicated on being "safe" places, even though the actual design usually makes them terrible places to manage an emergency of any sort, with few obvious exits. Violating the myth of safety and making people realize that the layouts are probably unsafe---not a good thing. Puente Hills also was within relatively few miles of numerous other malls with similar lineups and there are geographic barriers to many places that are in their potential market. Sears and other chains normally wanted 10 mile separations between stores and the distance to say, West Covina, would be less than that. It's lucky to have lasted this long in any form.

The main reason to go there from say, Arcadia, was all the big boxes around the periphery. Most of them have had other locations in the area but the layout around the mall lent itself to having more of them there than elsewhere and ultimately putting them into the mall. If Circuit City couldn't succeed there, it wasn't going to succeed anywhere in the region. I even remember going to the old one and a couple competitors in the mid-90s.

[ClownLoach]

Puente Hills had a major shooting in the early 90s---that sort of thing that killed malls. The existence of malls was partly predicated on being "safe" places, even though the actual design usually makes them terrible places to manage an emergency of any sort, with few obvious exits. Violating the myth of safety and making people realize that the layouts are probably unsafe---not a good thing. Puente Hills also was within relatively few miles of numerous other malls with similar lineups and there are geographic barriers to many places that are in their potential market. Sears and other chains normally wanted 10 mile separations between stores and the distance to say, West Covina, would be less than that. It's lucky to have lasted this long in any form.

The main reason to go there from say, Arcadia, was all the big boxes around the periphery. Most of them have had other locations in the area but the layout around the mall lent itself to having more of them there than elsewhere and ultimately putting them into the mall. If Circuit City couldn't succeed there, it wasn't going to succeed anywhere in the region. I even remember going to the old one and a couple competitors in the mid-90s.

The layout of the mall was not conducive to bringing people into those peripheral boxes because you couldn't get from one to another without starting up the car and searching for parking again. From the Circuit City (which I believe was the 3rd floor of the former JCPenney) you could only walk outside to a mall corridor entrance but not reach any of the other boxes. All the boxes on the North and East sides of the property had great freeway visibility but one lane access roads to get there. If you entered on the busier West or South sides those big boxes were invisible and could not be accessed without going through the entire mall and exiting out the other side. One key to mention too is the older demographic in the area who may not like to drive freeways - they would have never known anyone was on the back of that mall as again it was extremely difficult to get through the ring road to the back.

To be very specific, once moving to the mall that specific store absolutely tanked in sales while all other SoCal region relocations were increasing volume anywhere from 50% to 350%, but the other nearby stores did see higher than chain increases especially West Covina so there was definitely brand loyalty and avoidance of the bad location but it was still a net decline in sales in that market as the customers had other places to shop between Puente Hills and the other locations. At that time the company had recovered from restructuring the staffing model and the exit of appliances and was riding high on what was at the time a massive trend where everyone and their brother were buying digital cameras, the start of the smartphone era, and the latest generation of video games. In the decade I was there, the first couple of years of that Puente Hills store were the best the company had seen and they opened or relocated about a hundred stores at that time, but that specific location wound up going from a very high performer that "earned" a costly relocation and high rent expanded format to a "bottom of region" store. Puente Hills Mall was the entire problem. I believe Toys R Us took the site after Circuit City and it was also a disaster for them. Several Best Buy stores in the area actually closed and reopened inside the new format Circuit City buildings opened around the same time including Rancho Cucamonga and Victorville because they had better facilities, parking and locations.

There are certain locations in retail that "look right" on paper and visually, but there are unseen barriers that will push the customer away to more frictionless experiences. The horrible parking configuration with a one lane "ring road" at Puente Hills was a source of misery until better shopping centers had captured the rest of the customers. Friction like bad lot design, poor ingress and egress will kill a site fast unless it is in a severely underserved urban environment like say Los Angeles. In the suburbs where ample choice exists there's no reason for a site like Puente Hills to survive unless they are willing to redevelop the site and simplify travel through it, but now it is too late.

I can think of two comparisons to Puente Hills. One bad is Westminster Mall which also has the one lane ring road that gets backed up and multi level lot configuration; it also can only be accessed from two sides but it at least has the benefit of direct access from the freeway on the Southbound side and it still flopped with superior centers in the area to meet customers needs (Huntington Beach, Seal Beach, and South Coast Plaza). A good example of similar design as you describe is the Temecula Promenade mall. It has a two lane ring road, access from major arterials on all four sides, traffic lights on the ring road to resolve backups, and a strong focus on perimeter businesses including at least a dozen major restaurants, a dozen big box stores, and even a perimeter Costco. The fact is that customers these days can buy whatever they want from the comfort of their couch at home, so if the experience of going to a store instead has any difficulty or friction added they are not going to accept it and will not go to that center, period.