Retail Darwinism impacts the Shopping Mall

Seth Harry said yesterday "What a lot of people don't know is just how highly leveraged the national/suburban retail industry really is, and how close it is to a sort of "dot.com" kind of meltdown."

This got me thinking about this more in terms of the Federated-May merger. What's going on now is like how center city downtowns lost out to the suburbs through the development of Malls primarily (and of course through the outmigration of residents and businesses to the suburbs). While malls, and the department stores that have traditionally been their anchors, have been losing out to the bigger box stores for some time, the brutal competitiveness of the market has entered the next stage for department stores.

We can think of the retail marketplace having developed something like this:

• Center City Downtowns
• Urban Neighborhood Commercial Districts
• Park and Shop Strip Shopping Centers (see this link for an example of one of the first, in Cleveland Park in Washington, DC)
• First Wave/Satellite Suburban Department Stores (Washington examples would be Hecht's stores in Silver Spring, which opened in 1947, and in Parkington, now Ballston Commons, in Arlington)
• Malls
• Discount Stores
• Power Center Format
• Big(ger) Boxes
• Lifestyle Centers/Mixed Use Developments/Town Centers

then what we are witnessing is the confirmation of the primacy of big box retail formats that concentrate on one category: (i.e., Bed Bath and Beyond, Home Depot, Lowes, Sports Authority); super-retailtainment stores like Bass Pro; and discounters like Walmart, Target, and Kohls. Where they locate is another question.

The shopping mall has been losing out to discounters and big box formats as well as to the newer "Main Street" like lifestyle-town center. See "Wolves in Shops' Clothing" and "Getting Real about Faux" from Fortune Magazine.

These articles discuss the Crocker Park lifestyle center in metropolitan Columbus, Ohio. Check out the Crocker Park website. They do farmers markets and a lot of programming, the kind of programming based on authenticity that is supposed to be the hallmark of traditional commercial shopping districts.