YOU ARE HERE : One of the Biggest Malls in the World
Earl Bates was resting on a bench at Torrance’s Del Amo Fashion Center one morning last week, a testament to the drawing power of one of the world’s biggest shopping malls.
He and his wife, Lucy, had left their home outside Death Valley at 6:30 a.m. to get an early start on their Christmas shopping. They make the trek to Del Amo a few times a year, Lucy Bates said, because the biggest shop near their home is a Sears catalogue store 25 miles out of town, and “I like to see what I buy when I buy it.”
Although the Bateses are an extreme example, Del Amo--known in industry parlance as a “super-regional mall”--routinely draws customers from far beyond the South Bay. Surveys have found that residents of 15 cities throughout Los Angeles County are regular Del Amo shoppers.
A typical example is Larry Jones of Inglewood, who frequently visits the mall so he can find “whatever I want.” Last week, that included a bottle of soap-bubble mix for his 3-year-old daughter, Darnisha, who clapped the bubbles into oblivion as fast as her Daddy blew them.
Another repeat customer is Helen Crawford, who comes to Del Amo from her Torrance home a few times a month, sometimes when she doesn’t even want to shop. The bustling activity cheers her up, and the mall is so massive, she said, that “if I had guests coming from out of town, this is the first place I’d show them.”
“One of the nice things about this mall is it has all different price levels,” Crawford said. “You have expensive stores and middle-class stores. It appeals to everyone.”
Shopping in the traditional sense is not all that goes on at Del Amo, which is really three shopping centers joined into one 140-acre, 357-store mega-mall.
You can mail a letter at the U.S. Post Office’s Del Amo Station, or book your next flight at the airline ticket counter. When money runs low, you can exchange your precious metals or your foreign currency.
The hungry drift toward the International Cafe, the largest of Del Amo’s three food courts. When exhaustion hits, one hot spot is the bench in front of Video Concepts, where large-screen televisions blare the latest music videos.
“You can spend a whole day here and not see it all,” said Ehab Shafik of Lawndale, who walks at Del Amo as daily therapy for torn ligaments in his knee.
Last year, Del Amo’s crowds translated into $444 million in sales, enough to ensure that Del Amo retained its traditional place at the top of the county’s mall moneymakers. But Del Amo’s size, its maze of corridors and its crush of shoppers also sometimes create rush hour-like conditions. Among the most popular stops at Del Amo are the numerous electronic maps that serve as guides for shoppers to help them reach their destinations in the sprawling complex.
And outside, shoppers with armloads of merchandise weave across the seemingly endless expanse of asphalt asking themselves: Which of these 13,000 parking places is mine?
DEL AMO FASHION CENTER, TORRANCE
Year opened: 1980
Retail square footage: 3 million
Anchor stores: Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penney, The Broadway, Sears, Robinson’s, Bullocks
Number of stores: 357
Parking capacity: 13,000
1989 sales tax paid to city: $4.4 million
% of city’s sales tax revenue: 17%
Memorable feature: Its size, among largest enclosed malls in the nation.
