Ultimate Challenge Awaits Shop-Till-You-Drop Crowd : Lifestyles: The monster Mall of America mixes unfettered retailing and thrill-a-minute recreation.
Connie and Bill Barnes and their two teen-age “I love to shop” daughters will pile into the family car next month for the 10-hour trek here from their home in Topeka, Kan., to buy school clothes.
In northeastern Montana, farmers Elizabeth and Carl Sauskojus, who have to drive 60 miles just to get groceries, are laying plans for a 700-mile pilgrimage to Bloomington to explore the exotic new department stores.
From across Japan, 60 tour groups have already booked rooms for this year in Bloomington, a serendipitous stopover on Northwest Airlines’ popular Tokyo-to-Disney World flight. In Winnipeg, Canada, White Owl Tours has doubled its business to these parts.
And 11 women friends from Huntington Beach, Calif.; Washington; Cleveland; Chicago; Tucson, Ariz.; Naples, Fla., and Appleton, Wis.--reunited via Christmas letter by the Springrose family of Columbia, Md.--will soon converge on Bloomington with families in tow to renew old ties against a backdrop of power shopping.
They’re all headed for the Mall of America, a grandiose and risky marriage of unfettered consumption and thrill-a-minute recreation that has arisen against heavy odds in this suburb of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
In a nation already malled to its knees, with the 1980s done and gone and people declaring they want simpler lives and shorter shopping trips, the Mall of America presumes to reinvent the way people spend time--melding shopping and organized “fun” on a scale dramatically greater than the formulaic shopping malls that already cover about 4.6 billion square feet of American soil.
Where this mega-mall will lead America remains to be seen, but the stakes are clear: More than half a billion schoolteacher pension dollars are being sunk into it. And if expectations are met, it will draw more people than any attraction in the nation--more than Disney World and Disneyland combined.
Now, after seven years of controversy, a tough recession and a scaling back of its original leviathan blueprint to a merely Titanic scope, the $625-million project is rushing headlong toward an Aug. 11 opening, and its siren call is heard around the globe.
And why not?
It will be the nation’s largest shopping and entertainment complex with the nation’s largest indoor amusement park, the world’s largest parking ramp, the world’s largest indoor planting of live shrubs, the world’s largest indoor miniature golf course and arguably the world’s largest concentration of Tivoli lights. It has Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and Macy’s--all new to this neck of the woods but known even on the most remote farmsteads.
“Isn’t Bloomingdale’s the place that went broke in New York City?” asks grain farmer Elizabeth Sauskojus.
In the mall’s center, where in simpler times one might have found a grade-school art show, stands a seven-acre amusement park called Knott’s Camp Snoopy. It is the first venture outside of California for the family that created Knott’s Berry Farm. The roller coaster is outfitted with silicone wheels so that shoppers don’t have to yell to be heard.
The mall has a public school to serve the offspring of its 10,000 employees. It has its own doctors, dentists, sports bars, police station, ZIP code and a nightclub district with an Australian beach club. There are 14 movie theaters and 46 places to eat. There’s a store that sells mounted butterflies and a store with half a basketball court and a boxing ring. There is a giant fantasy factory made of Lego blocks. And there are four “family rooms” with TVs and microwave ovens where everyone can go to decompress.
The fruition of this vast project despite a one-legged economy raises a question as the shopping century winds down: Where will it all end? Asked about the new hyper-mall, Garrison Keillor, the author and radio philosopher-humorist who created Minnesota’s fictional Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, said:
“Minnesota is where the shopping mall was invented, so it’s natural that the biggest one should be there . . . but some people disappear in them and never come out, thousands in Minnesota alone, and the Mall of America is going to triple the toll.”
Warming to his subject, Keillor went on: “Fifteen thousand shoppers will vanish in the next year, never to bring their purchases home, and the terrible tragedy is that they will not be particularly missed. Their families will simply order duplicate credit cards and go on without them.”
People’s souls aside, this is a serious business deal with a lot at stake, notably $625 million being put up by the giant pension fund Teachers Insurance & Annuity Assn. of America, the 55% owner with Melvin Simon & Associates, an Indianapolis-based developer, and partner Triple Five Corp. of Edmonton, Canada.
The collaborators think this is such a great concept that it will bring in $700 million in sales this year alone and eventually attract 46 million visitors a year. A dubious claim to some, that would easily make it the biggest single attraction of any kind in the nation, half again as big as Disney World.
As such, it is being watched closely in the worlds of real estate, shopping and entertainment as a glimpse of the 21st Century.
Indeed, the Mall of America was probably inevitable. It is a coming together of all that the shopping center has come to represent since it was invented just a few miles from here in suburban Edina, where the first enclosed mall, Southdale, opened in 1956.
As ubiquitous as the automobiles and suburbs that created it, the shopping mall--there are now 38,000 in this country, 5,000 in California alone--has been described as the signature structure of our age, the cathedral of post-World War II culture. Rand McNally puts them on its maps.
The mall is praised as a stage for communal rituals and a place for seniors to exercise in winter; it is condemned for blandness and its role as climate-controlled fortress against the real world. Futurists have called it a prototype for habitats in space. It affords pleasure to millions but gives some the heebie-jeebies--a mix of claustrophobia and sensory overload that William Kowinski, author of the book “The Malling of America,” calls “mallaise” or “mal de mall.”
Now, some say a reckoning is near--that America is finally over-malled.
Although the 1,400 new U.S. shopping malls built last year alone might seem like a lot, it was the slowest growth rate since the mall’s invention, and it marked the seventh straight year of decline. Existing malls are threatened by nearby discount centers, deteriorating neighborhoods and changing shopping habits and lifestyles.
It has been estimated that the nation already has 10% more mall space than it needs. Many malls lose their retail tenants and become low-grade office space. Owners of some struggling places are even “de-malling” them by removing the roof and turning them into open-air propositions.
While the last thing the country needs is yet another mall, Mall of America developers hope that the combination of major league amusements and shopping will energize consumers jaded by cookie-cutter shopping centers.
Malls have already tried practically everything--zoos, funeral services, wandering minstrels, Roman streetscapes, wedding chapels, auto shows, Weight Watchers meetings, ice rinks, bumper cars--to capture people. The carnival approach has gained momentum, but in haphazard, add-on fashion.
“The question is, how large can the entertainment be and not interfere with shopping? Everyone’s looking at the Mall of America as answering some of these questions,” says John Gilchrist, president of Hahn Co. in La Jolla, the West Coast’s leading developer of shopping centers.
Inspired by a decade-old monster mall in West Edmonton, Canada, the Mall of America turned up here because the Twin Cities area is statistically “undermalled,” has a well-educated and affluent population and is a frequent destination for visitors from a 400-mile radius with 28 million people who don’t have a lot else to do.
The West Edmonton mall attracts 20 million a year with only one-fourth as many people to draw from and, since Wayne Gretzky left, little else in town to offer. The Mall of America calculates that the promise of a log flume ride in January, a few famous retail names and the Twin Cities’ rich mix of sports, theater and gambling will lure many more.
But nobody is running out to emulate this enterprise just yet. And the trees around the mall’s sea of concrete near the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport are full of snipers.
Competitors and some analysts snort that the Mall of America will never fly, calling it a last gasp of 1980s excess that is out of step with today’s shoppers.
“It’s risky, very risky,” says William Flatley, a consultant at Kurt Salmon & Associates, a New York firm that sells advice to retailers. “Few people really see shopping as recreation anymore. People are time-strapped.”
Indeed, who’s going to come here, tourists or shoppers? Will a woman from a Twin Cities suburb, archetype for 70% of the mall’s projected business, drive here to buy a blouse if she fears being trampled by vacationing Germans?
That is the chaotic picture the mall’s critics like to draw. Steven Claytor, a Chicago marketing consultant to several competing Twin Cities shopping centers, calls it “an absolute nightmare for a customer. The typical woman doesn’t want to have to walk through Disneyland to buy a pair of shoes.”
The Mall of America, designed by noted shopping mall architect John Jerde of Los Angeles, addresses this danger with an airy series of “streets” on three levels that surround shoppers but remove them from the skylighted Camp Snoopy hoopla. All agree it will attract millions of first-time gawkers, but whether it works over time is anybody’s guess.
Herbert Simon, president of Melvin Simon & Associates, lead developer of the mall, sorts out his own expectations:
“Right now we’re mildly confident that this thing will be what we want it to be. . . . How about moderately confident? How about very encouraged? We’re feeling very upbeat.”
That America’s Mall was built in Minnesota seems ironic to some, and getting it done was no cakewalk. Home to dour Scandinavians with conservative lifestyles and liberal politics, the state has always had an unextravagant sort of bent.
When Norwest Bank built a new 57-story headquarters in downtown Minneapolis during the 1980s, it consciously made the place 30 inches shorter than the city’s tallest building rather than seem boastful or impolite.
The same instinct--fueled by worried Twin Cities retailers--led to deep local skepticism about the Mall of America that has prevailed since it was first proposed in 1985. Opponents couldn’t kill it, but they did help beat the place down in size and slash its public subsidies from a proposed $800 million to a mere $180 million. The mayor of Bloomington, a big booster, got voted out of office at least in part because of his support.
“ ‘Skepticism’ is a mild word,” says developer Simon. “This mall and its breadth attacked a lot of entrenched interests.”
Defenders of local sensibilities bemoan the “mauling of Minnesota.” Others say that if it succeeds, it could threaten local merchants whose own tax money helped subsidize the big joint and drain people and money away from the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Dayton Hudson Corp., Minneapolis-based owner of the well-regarded Dayton’s department stores that have had this market largely to themselves for 90 years, rejected a spot as an anchor of the new mall after concluding a store there would get 70% of its customers from other Dayton’s stores. It has since led the opposition to the mall and its public subsidy.
“I have a problem with public policy creating an uneven playing field that is going to create a lot of problems for a lot of longtime Minnesotans,” says Steven Watson, president of Dayton Hudson.
It promises to be bloody. Dayton’s shot across the bow is replacing older stores at nearby malls with two big new stores. And Erik Nordstrom, 28-year-old manager of the new Nordstrom store here, concedes that the Twin Cities area probably didn’t need another department store. But then, his has 100,000 pair of shoes and 66 different sizes in men’s dress shirts.
“We think they need our store. We want everybody’s money,” says Nordstrom, a great-grandson of founder John W. Nordstrom and onetime assistant manager of the ladies’ shoe department at South Coast Plaza.
That’s fine with Paula Nostvedt, 30, a wife, mother and flight attendant from nearby Chanhassen, who can’t wait for the place to open. She was shopping at Southdale the other day but thinking about the mondo mall.
“I think it’ll be great. The bigger, the better,” she said. “Nordstrom will give Dayton’s a run for their money. My husband loves Hooters (one of the mall’s sports bars), so he can go there while I shop. I’ve been to the West Edmonton mall, and it was so big I got dizzy. It was wonderful.”
What will all these shoppers and fun-seekers find?
Less than promised in the first wild proposals floated to eager local officials by the original developers, Edmonton’s Ghermezian family, in 1985.
The mall will open with just 4.2 million square feet--still the nation’s biggest shopping and entertainment complex under one roof but smaller than the Ghermezians’ twice-enlarged Edmonton mall, where one can bungee jump and ride a submarine. It has room for 400 stores, but the dirty secret is that, with 2.47 million square feet of actual retail space, it is 17% smaller than Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, Calif., still the nation’s biggest by that measure.
The proposed 1,000-room hotel and shark-infested hyper-aquarium are still awaiting financing, an airport-to-mall monorail is in limbo, and only about 70% of the planned stores will open with the mall on Aug. 11. But that’s not considered a bad start for a recession.
The withering economy, tight money and bankrupt status of two of the anchor stores, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, reportedly prompted the developers to pay most of the tab for building the four anchor stores (Sears is the fourth). The developers also coughed up the $70 million to build Camp Snoopy, where admission is free and the 23 rides are $1 to $2.50. Knott’s will operate it for a fee.
“I don’t know much about real estate, but I know it was a pretty good deal,” said Nordstrom, crediting developers for pulling the deal off in such dicey times. “Seventy percent occupancy is absolutely amazing to be able to do in 1992. We’ve opened stores in a lot of malls that were 50% full.”
The mall’s logicians, meanwhile, are scrambling to undo perceptions--largely due to the mall’s self-hype--as a place so leviathan as to be some people’s idea of hell on earth. There is an unusual array of customer services, among them a free tram, 60 “hosts” to point out the plentiful bathrooms and $10-a-day cellular phone rental to keep in touch with friends.
“Our philosophy is based on three things: Where am I? Where do I want to be? How do I get there?” says tour guide Mike Dorsey.
At the Registry Hotel across the street, employees are poised and ready in their red “Mall of America” golf shirts. The free mall shuttle has swung into service. Twenty-two tour groups are already booked at the hotel, nine of them Japanese. When they buy things, the mall will check the boxes like baggage directly onto their Northwest flight back to Tokyo--a big undertaking if the Japanese influx reaches its projected 200,000 a year by 1995.
Meanwhile, the cross-country network of women organized by Jean Springrose will arrive in time for the gala grand opening on Aug. 11. Springrose, a Realtor, figures to spend about $1,000 for school clothes and $2,500 on Christmas.
“I’m real excited,” she says.
The Biggest Mall of All
Here are some facts and figures on the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., due to open in August: Things that could fit inside:
* 32 Boeing 747 aircraft
* 27 Lincoln Memorials
* 34 normal shopping malls
* 78 football fields
Things that are inside:
* 10 men’s bathrooms, 10 women’s and two for either sex
* 31,000 live shrubs and trees
* 60,000 underground drip spouts
* A store where people can learn to gamble but can’t actually gamble
Other facts:
* Heating and air-conditioning units were hoisted on roof with the world’s largest helicopter
* Roller coaster only goes 30 miles an hour
* A local Indian gambling casino will bus shoppers from the mall to its blackjack tables
* There is a big hole in the basement where the aquarium was supposed to go before it was axed because of financial concerns
* Wolfgang Puck will sell pizza at Macy’s