Courting Teenagers at the Mall
The sun is setting at the mall, and swarms of new customers are being drawn by the soft light of 91-foot advertising totems.
Boys looking for girls and girls looking for boys. Yellow hair, green hair, pink hair, spiked hair and no hair. Pierced eyebrows, tongues and chins. Shorts below the knees and miniskirts well above them.
Boys posing as men, self-consciously puffing on cheap sweet cigars. Girls practicing to be women with their masks of makeup and their midriffs exposed. Sullen-looking boys with poor posture and knit caps pulled down to their eyes. Tough boys with tattoos bulging out of their “wife beater” tank tops.
“Come on, guys, off the table, keep moving,” a security guard tells a group of kids acting as if this were their backyard.
It’s a typical Friday night at the Block at Orange--ground zero of the retail industry’s most concerted attempt to court the lucrative youth market.
Billing itself as an urban “shoppertainment” venue, the mall is a high-concept carnival of bright lights, bold graphics and pulsating music where the anchors aren’t Nordstrom or Macy’s but a Ron Jon Surf Shop, Vans Skate Park and the highest-grossing movie theater complex in Southern California.
The Block is out there on the edge--further than Universal CityWalk, the Irvine Spectrum and other malls and shopping centers that have found the teen market too big to ignore.
Few malls have dared to cast as wide a net for teenagers, because the youth market is notoriously fickle. Too many kids could drive away mainstream shoppers. Mall operators also don’t want to take on bigger security concerns that could undercut the bottom line, experts say.
So far, that hasn’t happened at the 2-year-old Block. But a brawl in a parking lot there earlier this month, in which an 18-year-old man was fatally stabbed and two other teenagers were injured, illustrates the tightrope of risk and reward that this competitive, image-conscious industry finds itself walking.
Even though the killing was the first at the Block and police data show that the center is far from a crime zone, the slaying has shaken some customers’ perceptions of safety.
“It’s terrible at night. It gets bad on weekends,” said Kasey Blocher, a 34-year-old Riverside mother of two who was shopping at the Block one recent day--and planned to leave before dusk. “They act like this is their territory. Maybe they’re up to nothing, but I don’t know. I don’t want to take the chance.”
In retail, perceptions matter. Feeling safe is of primary importance to shoppers--more so than price, convenience or the selection of merchandise, according to one industry study.
Once the Bane of Mall Managers
Teenagers used to be the bane of mall managers. As recently as five years ago, most shopping centers dismissed teens as “mall rats” who did more loitering than buying and made adult patrons feel uncomfortable, even threatened.
But money is a powerful changer of attitude. Last year, more than 31 million teens rang up $153 billion in retail sales nationwide, a 25% increase in three years. It’s a market that is expected to grow until at least 2010.
At the moment, teenagers account for 7% of retail sales in the United States; adults spend the rest. It’s a breakdown that creates a tough choice for many mall managers, who are at the same time attracted and repulsed by the idea of swarms of teenagers cruising their walkways.
“Young people spend money, and there’s no question that you want to appeal to them,” said Rosemary Erickson, a San Diego sociologist and criminologist who designs security programs for hospitals, banks and retailers. But she added: “It’s just common sense that if you’re going to do that, you’re courting problems.”
Even as malls in Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks and elsewhere are trying to restyle themselves as entertainment retail centers, they are not aggressively courting the teen market. Others have chosen to put up separate sections for youth.
The Glendale Galleria’s new $2.5-million shopping area on the second floor is dubbed the Zone, featuring a handful of new retailers such as No Fear, Vans and Catwalk and a lounge area where young people can congregate under large overhead video screens.
“What they’re learning is, to attract this market, they have to take risks,” said Michael Wood, vice president of Teenage Research Unlimited, an Illinois market research firm. “They’re having to kind of loosen up a little bit and take some chances.”
There’s no ambivalence at the Block. The mall has never marketed itself directly to teens. They just showed up.
“I love these young kids, because they are the shoppers of tomorrow,” said James Mance, general manager of the Block. He is 55 years old; the Block is his 13th mall in 25 years. “Most malls are copies of one another. Copies are boring. Nothing about this is boring.”
The Block--a few miles southeast of Disneyland at the confluence of three freeways, the notorious Orange Crush--attracts a cross-section of people in the daytime. But the average age goes down with the sun, especially Friday and Saturday nights, when about 25,000 people jam the place.
At 9 p.m. on a Friday, it’s as if someone had taken a high school cafeteria and dumped its contents on the Las Vegas Strip. There are tall kids and short kids. Fat kids and skinny kids. Black kids, white kids, Asian kids, Latino kids.
Your kids.
“I heard about this place the second I got here,” said Heather Halk, an 18-year-old who moved to Orange County from a small town in Northern California two months ago. “The Block is so cool.”
Most merchants might agree.
“We didn’t know what it was going to be like. We deal mostly with professional musicians,” said Gerard Ganaden, a manager for Mars Music, a Florida instrument and audio gear retailer that opened its first California outlet at the Block less than two months ago. “But sales have been too huge to mention--a lot more than we expected.
“We don’t just get pros coming in. We get a lot of kids who are curious about the technology,” Ganaden said. “Kids discovering music for the first time.”
But although sales at the Block are growing fast, government filings show merchants there aren’t grossing any more per square foot than their counterparts at other large malls owned by the Mills Corp., the Virginia company that developed and co-owns the Block.
“Shopping center developers and managers always have to walk a fine line in regard to teens,” said Malachy Kavanagh, spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers. “You want to attract them, on the one hand, but you want them to use the shopping center for what it’s really designed for.” Consider 15-year-old Michael McGlynn. He was at the Block on a recent Friday night. But he wasn’t buying anything. He was killing time at the indoor skateboard park, but he wasn’t paying to skate.
Instead, McGlynn was upstairs in the gallery break dancing, spinning across the smooth concrete floor to the music in his head, pulling off “flares” and “windmills” and “turtles” and working up a sweat.
“Every other mall that I ever [went break dancing] in, I got kicked out,” said the Santa Ana teenager, the suggestion of a beard sprouting from his chin. “This place, they don’t care.”
At other places, though, they do.
That’s what led the sprawling Mall of America in Minnesota, which became a teen magnet on weekends, to bar those under 16 on Friday and Saturday nights unless they are with an adult.
“We literally had thousands of unescorted teens here,” said Maureen Cahill, a Mall of America spokeswoman. She said the curfew interested mall managers across the country who have called and said they were exploring similar moves.
Not the Block.
While one kid might browse and buy at Mars Music, another might discover that he can climb up the side of the giant guitar propped up against the store’s entrance. That goes with the territory.
Postwar History of U.S. Shopping
The mall sits on a site where a retail archeologist, if there were such a thing, could unearth the postwar history of American shopping.
The Block replaced the City, which was built in the late 1960s with the intention of being just like every other regional mall. There were department stores, a Thom McAn shoe store, an Orange Julius, a Swiss Colony and lots of potted plants.
By the time Mills Corp. acquired the property in 1996, the City was a ghost town, the victim of intense competition, new retailing concepts and changing tastes.
At first, Mills planned to build another in its successful line of regional value and outlet malls, similar to Ontario Mills. However, after looking at the competition, the company decided to try something new, half the size of Ontario Mills. You can’t buy living room furniture at the Block, but you can purchase an inflatable couch.
“We knew that the concept of the Block was going to be different than your normal shopping mall,” said Capt. Art Romo of the Orange Police Department. “We knew it was going to create a different set of challenges than your normal mall.”
Namely, lots of young people.
Security at the Block is highly visible but may be beefed up more, say police, who have yet to make an arrest in the killing this month.
On weekends, eight officers from a substation inside the mall patrol the place. They’re joined by private, uniformed guards who are backed up by 80 video cameras that monitor the complex around the clock.
A “Code of Conduct” is posted at entrances, and its 18 points prohibit an encyclopedia of bad behavior--from fighting and panhandling to “unnecessary staring” and “bringing onto the Block at Orange’s property any animals, living or dead.”
On average, malls the size of the Block spent more than $800,000 on security last year, says the International Council of Shopping Centers. Mance, the Block’s general manager, won’t say how much is spent there or how many guards are employed.
Mance, like many merchants, is highly sensitive about the killing. That’s because when people feel at risk, they sometimes drastically alter their shopping patterns, changing the times or days they shop or switching malls. “One out of five customers that changed their shopping patterns never came back,” said David Silver, whose Michigan consulting firm studied safety and shopping.
Last year, more than 12 million people visited the Block, and reports of crime were relatively rare: 31 fights, 40 stolen cars and 429 thefts. So far this year, there have been 50 reported assaults, although only seven of them involved teenagers.
“What happened is a tragedy,” Mance said of the killing. But he added: “It could have happened across the street. The perception is that we have problems. But we don’t have a problem.”
But managing the perception of safety may be trickier than ensuring safety itself. The same way that the rare airplane crash sends jitters through the flying public, a random high-profile crime at a mall can create doubt in the minds of shoppers. Or their parents.
“My 17-year-old said last week that he wanted to meet some kids at the mall,” said Lynn Guthridge, an Anaheim Hills mother of four who was shopping at the Block two days after the slaying. “Now, I don’t know if I should let him hang out here. It scares me. He’s a good kid. But what if he walks by and bumps the wrong kid on the shoulder?”
