Brent Barkin has seen the past of retail, and he’s preparing for the future.
The President and CEO of Shoe Station, Barkin has been involved in his family business since he was 10 years old, shifting shelves at the family store at Mobile’s Bel-Air Mall. And he was there when the company opened its newest store in March across Airport Boulevard at Springdale Mall.
It was needed, Barkin said. “There’s been a shift in how customers perceive indoor malls in general.”
The new store, occupying a 21,000-square-foot space facing outside, is a “more relaxed, more open” store with room to grow. he said. And it’s been part of a resurgence at Springdale Mall, which has occupied a place in Mobile’s retail landscape for 60 years.
Shopping malls in Alabama, as in other parts of the nation, are encountering challenges from retail’s shifting landscape, and several are struggling, while some no longer exist.
In Huntsville, Madison Square Mall closed in 2017 after 32 years of operation and was demolished to make way for MidCity Huntsville, a mixed-use retail site that is the fourth-largest real estate development in the country. Its first phase opened a year later with Topgolf and the outdoor music, art and food venue The Camp at MidCity, followed by High Point Climbing and Fitness, and Dave and Busters. Other shops and restaurants have been announced.
Tuscaloosa city leaders are mulling over purchasing the 35-acre site of McFarland Mall, the city’s first enclosed shopping mall. Last month, the city was set to vote on a deal that packaged it with another property for $28 million, according to The Tuscaloosa News. Various ideas have been floated by city leaders and developers for revamping the property, such as a community center or a hotel and shopping destination. However, the council gave itself another month to consider.
A 2017 report by Credit Suisse estimated that a quarter of the nation’s 1,100 malls were at risk of closing within five years. Financial Times reports that vacancies in shopping malls have hit an eight-year high. Just this week, Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy, with plans to close 178 stores.
News sites are populated with haunting photographs of dead and dying shopping centers, once filled with consumers, families and teens seeking out bargains, a bite to eat and a space to meet. The rot was hastened by the Great Recession and the rise of online retail, as well as the failure of long-time mall anchor “big box” chains.
To stay alive, malls, and those businesses that populate them, have had to adopt different strategies. In some cases, local pride and moxie are finding a way to lure shoppers back.
Like a cancer
Quintard Mall in Oxford will be 50 years old next year. It sits about a quarter-mile from Interstate 20 along two major highways. Quintard got an expansion and facelift in 2000, but, as Oxford Mayor Alton Craft said, within the last few years it become obvious the once bustling mall, and businesses around it, was dying.
One reason was the coming of Oxford Exchange, a 334,000-square-foot shopping center one exit down off I-20 with more than 30 retail stores and restaurants on out parcels. Back in its prime, Craft said, Quintard Mall raked in about $90 in million gross sales before the Oxford Exchange opened. Now Oxford Exchange does about $150 million in gross sales, while Quintard is at about $40 million annually.
So Oxford had a choice – it could embrace the new shopping center completely and let the inevitable happen. But Craft said a dying shopping center can act like a cancer to the surrounding area – leaving a dead commercial sector at the heart of the city.
“We as a council realized that, if we didn’t do something as a city, it was going to continue to die, and once it dies, we may not have the funds to bring her back,” he said.
Acting on the advice of a consultant, Oxford bought the vacant Sears portion of the mall for about $1.5 million, then sold it back at a modest profit to the Hull Property Group, which bought the mall. The city did this to keep the property from being flipped. When the mall was in foreclosure, the city also made an unsuccessful bid for the mall, to avoid the same situation.
“Then you’d have had a disaster,” he said.
Now Quintard is embarking on an ambitious three-year, $60 million revision of the property, transforming it into a “lifestyle center” - an outdoor concept, apart from the traditional enclosed retail space, which aims at upscale customers, along with outparcel development. Demolition of the oldest parts of Quintard began this summer.
To help, the city committed $16.5 million over a 25-year period, with payoffs related to performance. Hull gets more money with better tenants and sustained success.
‘We didn’t want to see that go away’
In nearby Gadsden, entrepreneurs are working with the local mall’s management to revitalize the property. Gadsden Mall opened in 1974, with several renovations and expansions over the last 30 years. But J.C. Penney closed its anchor store in 2017, and Sears, one of the mall’s original anchor tenants, shuttered earlier this year. That leaves only Belk as an anchor, as well as a 16-screen movie theatre.
Almost immediately though, work began to transform the old Sears portion of the mall into an entertainment and dining center. Spinoso Real Estate Group, which leases and manages the mall, said it is not ready to release its full plan. However, it includes a location for a local Italian restaurant, Tre Ragazzi’s, revamped retail space and a new entertainment concept, The Alley.
The Alley is the brainchild of Bethanne Mashburn, the owner of The Factory, an indoor trampoline, party hosting site and recreation center with games, batting cages and attractions. It has locations in Etowah County and Gulf Shores.
Taking about 35,000-square-feet in the middle of the old Sears location, The Alley will have 18 lanes of bowling, an arcade with more than 60 games, dining space, virtual reality party rooms and Fowling — a game combining football and bowling which allows players to knock down pins with a football pass.
But Mashburn said the plan also calls for transforming the space into something close to “Dave and Busters meets Disney World.” Though the attraction will be kid-friendly, it will also seek to draw families, teens and young professionals.
“It’s going to be something different,” she said. “When you walk in, it will look like a back alley in a big city. There will be a Central Park for the playground, a subway system theme, storefronts. It’ll be something Gadsden’s never seen before.”
Demolition and preliminary site work began earlier this summer, with plans to open next spring.
Mashburn said she considered the Gadsden Mall for the site of her new venture once she heard Sears was closing.
“We didn’t want to see that go away,” she said. “It was really important. Nothing would make me more sick than to see a whole bunch of empty stores there. We really liked the management company. We just clicked with them immediately, and we saw this as a good opportunity.”
‘Like night and day’
A photo of a closed storefront at Springdale Mall was used by Time Magazine two years ago to illustrate the state of America’s declining shopping malls.
The mall, which was built in 1959 as an open-air venue, was redeveloped in 1974 with an enclosure as an answer to Bel-Air Mall, just across Airport Boulevard. Springdale was initially anchored by W.T. Grant, JC Penney and Delchamps and National supermarkets. Eventually it grew to have its own movie theatre. But by earlier in this decade, parts of the mall were vacant and dead.
Across Airport Boulevard, the City of Mobile in 2016 approved giving New York-based Rouse Properties, the owners of the Shoppes at Bel-Air, up to $500,000 a year in sales tax incentives for 15 years, for a maximum of $7.5 million, to revamp the property. The incentives came only by hitting targeted sales benchmarks. Bel-Air also landed several sought-after restaurants, such as Texas de Brazil, P.F. Chang’s and one of Bob Baumhower’s restaurants, and underwent a $25 million renovation.
Barkin took Shoe Station out of its original outparcel store at Bel-Air to Springdale, while at the same time, Burlington moved from one site in the mall to a new 40,800-square-foot space.
The shoe retailer’s move had been long in consideration, Barkin said.
“There’s only so much dressing up you can do,” he said. “The original store got us to where we are, but we couldn’t raise the low ceilings, we couldn’t move the walls out. It felt claustrophobic with the amount of merchandise we had. Some of the fixtures had been there 35 years. We had switched to LED lights, we redid the tile in the front, but no matter what we would do, we were seeing less traffic. At some point, while we were putting in additional investment, we weren’t seeing a return.”
The Springdale location has 30-foot ceilings with descending lights, and a double-wide center aisle to invite customers in.
“Moving made sense if we picked up between five to 10 percent more business,” he said. “We’re at 25 to 30 percent.”
Barkin, who teaches a course in retail at USA’s Mitchell College of Business, said the fragmentation of media has made it harder for businesses to market their products and advertise. At the same time, changes in what shoppers are looking for – and how they are looking – mean that retailers have to get more creative.
Enclosed buildings and food courts didn’t build America’s great retailers, he said; customer service did. The online experience, while convenient, can’t replace what made the chains grow rapidly.
“The only way the chains get back to the roots of customer service is to care about the customer,” he said. “The customer can’t be nameless and faceless. They have to be respected. If you don’t do that, you will fail.”