A good example from the 1980s is the Three Rivers Mall in Kelso, WA. The mall opened in 1987 and did well at first, even adding a smaller Newberry's a few years later (which was an anchor in nearby Longview's Triangle Mall which was enclosed at the time). The mall had variety then...Radio Shack, Kay-Bee Toys, Kits Cameras, J.K. Gill, Musicland/Sam Goody, Waldenbooks, as well as a other stores which were a mix of local and national, and the merchandise mix that a typical Sears had back then. One by one, these chains either went out of business or closed their locations in the mall as business dropped, which began to accelerate when the Emporium chain went out of business and the mall lost an anchor. Sears held on a while longer, but they did have variety that was lacking in the rest of the mall.buckguy wrote: ↑January 2nd, 2022, 6:41 am The 80s were when malls really homogenized, which was probably the beginning of their downward slide--every mall came to have the same stores and people easily moved on to a new mall if their old one wasn't keeping up or was in an area that had seen better days. By then, the developers had had dwindled in number and usually had a formula for how they built a mall. The fountains, plantings, etc. things were relics of earlier malls and not features of newer malls. The cheaper clothing and shoe chains began disappearing (most of them went out of business because of changing styles or demographics). Variety stores and drug stores were no longer tenants in new malls (the variety stores stopped going into malls during the 70s, drug stores shortly after). The jean store chains began to thin out, too. The next generation of mall stores weren't exactly upscale but were more expensive than their predecessors. Non-apparel stores began to disappear and the local/regional chains also disappeared, although that was mostly because of their demises.
As for Longview's Triangle Mall, it was built in the 1960s and converted to an enclosed mall in the 1970s. While a much smaller mall, there was actually good variety with the anchors: Montgomery Ward, Newberry's, and Pay 'N Save (which later became PayLess Drug, then Rite Aid) Newberry's and Wards went away, Rite Aid survived (and is the only building of the old mall still standing today) but a modern Rite Aid doesn't have the variety Pay 'N Save and PayLess had, such as Sporting Goods.
The Triangle Mall was redeveloped into an open-air development (and a few chains moved there from Three Rivers Mall), but Three Rivers is still limping along and doesn't have a whole lot to offer inside the mall..there is a library and a few locally owned shops where the hours do not line up with the main mall and many are closed at any given time during the day now. They still have JCPenney and Sportsman's Warehouse but I don't think they get much business from inside the mall.
I do think some malls could rebound if they simply had more variety and required those operating in the mall to actually open their stores during the posted mall hours. I spend very little time inside a mall if it's mostly clothes.