Still a Mall, Mall World? : Fashion: Shopping center operators are looking for new ways to attract new customers. Their first conclusion: There’s no business like show business.

Stroll through almost any mall and you’ll notice two familiar sights: a crowd at the movie theaters and sale signs in the windows of stores that are still in business.

But big changes are on the way at your local shopping center. Particularly if the visions of imaginative architects, designers, developers and consultants come to pass. Or if the innovations starring in the newest entertainment/shopping monoliths are widely imitated.

Indeed, the mall of tomorrow is destined to be far more than a spot to catch a movie, inspect reduced-price fashions or slurp an Orange Julius.

For one thing, there’s a lot more entertainment coming to malls in the immediate future. And stores may be remarkably different, too. The experts predict mall shops won’t just just sell stuff. They will teach customers how to use their purchases (a pair of skis, for instance) and provide them with vacation packages so they can show off their new equipment.

For now, however, it’s entertainment that’s taking center stage. No where is this more apparent than in Bloomington, Minn., and Las Vegas. Consider:

* At Mall of America in Bloomington, the recently opened, seven-acre theme park/400-store mall combo, shoppers can visit Paul Bunyan’s Log Chute, a “Ripsaw” roller coaster, Camp Snoopy . . . and outposts of Bloomingdale’s, Spago and Sears.

* In the Forum at Caesar’s in Las Vegas, it’s impossible to ignore a lavish fountain in which the bellies of Roman gods wiggle when they giggle, a “sky” that changes color (from pre-dawn to post-dusk) and--what else?--banks of video poker machines. Almost as a sideline, there are about 50 stores: North Beach Leather, Gianni Versace, Louis Vuitton and other, mostly upscale retailers.

Meanwhile, some older, more traditional malls are tiptoeing into showbiz, too. The Glendale Galleria recently offered kids a chance to participate in the making of a rock video. And Santa Monica Place has life-sized Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird characters scheduled to roam the mall tomorrow.

Linda Berman, a Los Angeles-based consultant to shopping center developers, believes such events signify that developers are no longer stuck in a ‘70s and ‘80s mode of “merely building, building and more building--moving bodies and housing stores.”

Because most of the prime mall locations have already been developed and financing for new centers is difficult to come by, she has noticed developers are focusing on improving existing centers. “They’re looking ahead and coming up with creative solutions to the retail slump we’re experiencing nationwide,” says Berman, co-owner of Berman/Katz in Hollywood.

“The shopping center people I and my partner have been talking to are looking primarily at entertainment. It’s still considered a progressive idea. A couple of years ago, it was considered avant-garde.”

Berman ventures that malls of the future will provide “family entertainment centers with virtual reality rides and other ways of experiencing the latest technologies. A few years from now, entertainment in malls will be seen as standard and necessary.”

*

Though many consider the shopping center to be a basic necessity of life, the world lived without malls until Oct. 8, 1956, when the two-tiered, climate-controlled, Southdale Center opened in Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. Until then “strip centers”--lineups of connected stores built along a strip with the stores facing the street--provided the biggest competition to downtown and village-style shopping districts.

As suburbia spread, so did malls. They quickly became popular meeting places and community centers with construction peaking in the early 1970s, according to figures compiled by the New York City-based International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

At the end of 1991, the ICSC counted 37,975 shopping centers (including strip centers) in the United States; about 5% of those were enclosed regional malls.

But don’t look for too many new centers in the near future, especially not the larger ones.

John Riordan, executive vice president of ICSC, predicts that a few more of the big, mega mall/entertainment complexes will crop up but, “but you can count them on the fingers of your two hands. The current state of financing is very off-putting. In terms of everyday shopping, my guess is that structurally, physically, there isn’t going to be a lot of change, especially not in North America. Most of the good, thriving sites have been occupied.”

More importantly, Riordan expects that new forms of retailing will have an even bigger impact.

“If there are going to be changes, they’re going to come from retailers. The heart of the business is retailing,” he says. “A lot of ideas are going to come from places other than North America. For example, a French chain, Fnac, sells culture. If you want to buy a camera, they’ll not only sell you the camera, but the lessons and photo opportunities and memberships in photography clubs. Things like music and sports equipment will be sold on a similar basis.”

George Rosenbaum, chief executive officer of Leo J. Shapiro & Associates, a Chicago market research firm, suggests that malls consider more traditional businesses.

Rosenbaum would like to see USO offices, dry cleaning establishments, driver’s license bureaus, doctor’s offices, museum branches, Christian Science Reading Rooms and even legitimate massage parlors filling up the empty store spaces now in many malls.

“The vacancies are going to be a blessing in disguise,” he predicts, suggesting that even old-time merchants and craftsmen such as violin makers and cobblers be invited to join the show.

Rosenbaum hopes the people who run malls can abandon the outdated formulas of yesteryear.

“Malls are built on propaganda, old premises from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70,” he says. “A major premise is that if you have a critical mass of population and you have a site that’s easy to get to, you can build a profitable mall with an anchor department store, a number of specialty stores and a few service establishments such as restaurants and movie theaters. That just won’t work any more.”

Rosenbaum says Town Square Wheaton, a regional mall with 35 shops in a suburb of Chicago, broke the ultimate shopping center taboo earlier this year when it opened without a department store.

In the past, department stores were considered the key to wooing customers to malls, but that was before such successful specialty chains as the Gap and the Limited began drawing customers on their own.

In fact, the Gap is one of the partners in Town Square Wheaton, a one-level mall devoted to consumer convenience. It has no confusing parking structures. Instead, parking is designed to accommodate “destination” shoppers, with plenty of spaces close to every store. And, says developer Richard L. Friedman, it’s possible for customers to see every store in the square from every other store in the square.

“It’s convenience fashion retailing,” adds Friedman, president of Carpenter & Co., the Boston-based developer of Town Square Wheaton. “It’s not in competition with the big malls. It’s an alternative. I think we’re going to continue to see people wanting to go back to basics.

“I see retailing becoming simpler and more straightforward. Before, if you wanted to go to a (Ralph Lauren) Polo shop, you either had to go downtown or to a big mall. We’re trying to make a comfortable relationship between the car and the customer and the store.”

That comfort is also a concern for Jon Jerde, the architect who created the humongous Mall of America, West Los Angeles’ Westside Pavilion (a double mall with the latest addition called Westside Pavilion Too), San Diego’s mammoth Horton Plaza and other giant centers whose complex parking structures are nearly as large as they are.

If you ask Jerde what he’d most like to see in malls that isn’t there already, he jokes that Mall of America already has “everything but a pet hospital.”

He likes to point out that his latest projects (such as Universal City Walk, scheduled to open in early 1993 opposite the Universal Studios Tour) marry a permanent fixture with one that’s ever-changing: a rambunctious theme park where the attractions must last for decades and a stately mall, where the merchandise tends to change monthly if not more often.

One of the biggest problems Jerde has with big malls--including his own--is that they’re too antiseptic and artificial for his tastes. He’d like them to more closely resemble city streets. He isn’t joking when he says he’d like to see a soup kitchen and some homeless people in malls, for the sake of reality.

Jerde says malls of the future must look less generic and more reflective of the villages they serve. He’d also like to see shopping plazas offer a greater array of goods and services--including eclectic little places like button shops.

Jerde knows that such businesses can’t survive if they have to pay the relatively high rents that malls usually charge. He recommends that rates be reduced for little guys who deserve more than a cart.

(For those who haven’t visited a mall for a while, push carts--not unlike those used by bagel vendors in New York--have been added to many shopping centers in the last few years. Some sell unusual goods; others offer the same old mall fare.)

Besides adding eclectic merchandise and services, Jerde would like to remove a few things, too. Like the rat mazes developers have asked him to design so shoppers pass as many stores as possible to get from one place to another.

Jerde appears downright embarrassed when asked about the foot traffic travesty at the Westside Pavilion Too, where pedestrians must traverse the selling space of three floors to get from one shop to another. He speculates that consumers are increasingly aware of the manipulation factor in malls and that’s why many of them stay away.

Hollywood-based interior designers Terry Dougall and Michelle Head were faced with a similar dilemma when they were asked to design The Forum at Caesars. Shoppers could have easily bypassed an entire section of shops, so the two were asked to install an escalator in a location that forced pedestrians to walk past the stores in question.

Dougall hoped to prevent what happened to a group of small, non-chain shops on Beverly Center’s eighth floor. Those stores, located not far from the food court, were out of the main shopping loop and easily ignored. (The area was reconfigured, however, and the small stores have been replaced with larger “destination” shops such as Sam Goody and Champs.)

Consultant Berman argues that if developers concentrate on producing environments that are interesting and enticing, they won’t have to worry about forcing shoppers to walk past businesses that may be removed from the main thoroughfare.

“If there are 150 stores in a center, studies show that you will probably go in six of them and spend anywhere from eight to 12 minutes in a store. If you can create an experience for the shopper and they will want to go to an area of the mall or to a particular store, then they will go there and spend, say, 20 or 30 minutes in a store,” says Berman, who in addition to her consulting work, owns four Crabtree & Evelyn shops in Southern California malls.

“It’s kind of subliminal,” she says, “but once people make that investment in time, they usually feel like they have to buy something.”