10-Year-Old Mall of America Discounts Doubters

Speaking in the hushed tones common to medical waiting rooms, receptionist Juli Velebir was struggling to sum up just what it is that makes the Mall of America such a dumbfounding and fascinating quirk of modern culture. Then she smiled and nodded.

“Well,” Velebir whispered, “you can get homemade apple pie, a vasectomy, and get married, all in the mall. And all in a short afternoon.”

Ten years after it opened--and after almost everyone predicted it would perish swiftly in an ugly retail wreck--the largest, strangest mall in the United States has not only succeeded, it has boomed.

You can indeed get a little outpatient surgery taken care of at the Quello Clinic while the kids are riding the Pepsi Ripsaw Roller Coaster at Camp Snoopy amusement park, perhaps, and your spouse is studying accounting at National American University.

Assuming the surgery goes well, you might all be up for a bite at one of 50 restaurants, some shopping at the 520 stores, perhaps topping off the day with a visit to the largest turtle collection in the world. And if that’s all just too much post-surgical fun, the clinic will still be there, right across from the FAO Schwartz toy store--handy for shoppers and workers alike.

“What’s up, Dale?” Velebir asked a young man who works at the Brookstone store one recent day, as he walked into the doctors’ office.

“Ah, I pulled a muscle lifting something.”

“Oh. Come on back to a room.”

There are about 46,000 shopping centers in the United States, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. The Mall of America stands alone, however, as the temple to modern American consumerism, in all its glory and gaudiness, ingenuity and excess, with all its piles and stacks and storerooms of stuff.

Seven Yankee Stadiums would fit inside the 4.2-million-square-foot behemoth. Theme park visitors had eaten 14,991,360 funnel cakes as of earlier this year. The mall has gone through 96 million feet of toilet paper and 5 1/2 million trash bags.

With 43 million visitors a year, annual sales of about $900 million and an occupancy rate of 99%, the Mall of America has dramatically changed how malls are conceived and built in the U.S. and abroad.

It was the first major mall to include high-end anchor stores, such as Nordstrom, and discounters such as Marshall’s, sometimes just a few doors away from each other. It provided incubation for upstart retailers, helping them with everything from floor-plan design to marketing, and organized tour packages for out-of-towners.

Most notably, however, the mall’s developers bet early on that shoppers did not necessarily want only to shop when they went to the mall. They would, the developers predicted, come for entertainment as well.

With Camp Snoopy and its 30 rides as the entertainment anchor, developers added several nightclubs, the Lego Imagination Center--from which 156,000 Lego blocks have vanished--and a neon-blue-hued bowling alley. Over the years they offered live concerts by such performers as ‘N Sync and Aerosmith, built NASCAR Silicon Motor Speedway, and installed a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium containing 65 sharks and 2,900 other creatures.

“We opened a mall,” said spokeswoman Monica Davis, “but we grew into an attraction.”

Today, Mall of America lures more visitors annually than the Grand Canyon, Graceland and Disney World combined. And about 40% of those people are considered tourists, meaning they have traveled more than 150 miles to get here. About 6% of those have come from other countries.

Now the mall is planning to expand, more than doubling in size, by adding what officials hope will be complementary rather than competitive projects, such as hotels and office space. Plans call for a 5.7-million-square-foot development on 44 acres just north of the mall, with groundbreaking slated for 2003 or 2004.

“I never thought it would make it, never,” recalled Murray Forseter, editor and publisher of Chain Store Age. Forseter was certainly not alone.

In 1985, this suburb about 10 miles south of downtown Minneapolis found itself with a giant parking lot and an empty Metropolitan Stadium after baseball’s Minnesota Twins and football’s Minnesota Vikings headed to the new Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. A study vaguely suggested that the property, just four miles from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, be developed as a mixed-use site.

Then a company named Triple Five invited city officials to visit its West Edmonton Mall in Canada, with 5.3 million square feet the largest mall in the world, though not nearly so famous as its younger sister would become. Officials were impressed and gave the company, run by four Canadian brothers named Ghermezian, the go-ahead to develop a 10-million-square-foot mega-mall.

That size would decrease over the years of planning, but the developers pushed ahead toward a gargantuan indoor everything-center despite the scoffs of critics.

Why in the world would you build any “attraction” in Bloomington, Minn., naysayers snickered? Why would you put a theme park, complete with log ride, in a mall? How many Upper Midwesterners were really going to flock to a Nordstrom in the suburbs for a $1,500 suit?

Then, not long before its August 1992 opening, Federated Department Stores--the parent of two of the mall’s four anchor stores, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s--filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

When 11,000 workers showed up on the first day, the mall was only 71% leased. Two years later, however, that figure was up to 90%, and growing. What many early critics perceived as weaknesses in the plan became selling points.

“We’re here a lot in the summer but all the time in the winter,” said Jodi Shafer as her two young daughters and their friend dug through a pile of shiny rocks at a gem stand on recent day. “What else are you going to do? This is Minnesota.”

As with other malls, the winter holidays are a high season here. Unlike other malls, however, Mall of America also enjoys large summertime crowds--just like other theme parks.

Over the years, Simon Property Group--one of the original co-developers, and which now runs the mall--has worked to increase the number of reasons to come, and to stay.

Management was irked at first by the hundreds of “mall walkers,” people in sensible shoes who cruised the half-mile circumference of the mall for exercise but didn’t buy a whole lot. After the grumbling caused a minor public relations crisis, mall operators began encouraging locals to come for exercise, and giving them more things to buy, like bottled water, shoes and shorts. Now, several hundred walkers show up on an average morning, and 3,000 are registered so they can swipe a magnetized card and log their mileage.

The mall now contains a bank, a Northwest Airlines travel center and the only full-service post office in a mall. There is the medical clinic, a dental clinic and the Sage Clinic, which screens uninsured and underinsured women for breast and cervical cancer.

More than 3,500 couples have been married in the Chapel of Love. When they opened it in 1994, the owners expected “a lot of Elvises, a lot of zany people,” said manager Sue Mills. An overwhelming majority of the ceremonies have been traditional, however. People preparing to tie the knot love the fact that they can buy their tuxedos and wedding dresses, their cake and their photographs, all in the mall, and have the reception in one of the restaurants.

Despite the mall’s unexpected success, it remains an anomaly. A developer in Syracuse, N.Y., is planning one that would be bigger--despite widespread predictions of failure--but that project would be built in stages and include considerable office space.

Another project in the Mall of America mold is nowhere on the horizon, and may never be, analysts say.

“The Mall of America took the concept of a closed mall and made it everything people wanted it to be,” said Patrice Duker of the International Council of Shopping Centers. “It was unique in its time, but others don’t necessarily want to replicate it. They only want to replicate its success. People wanted a change then. Now they want another change--and they want options.”

The latest trend, so-called lifestyle malls, are well-groomed outdoor affairs that bring together mid-size retailers, including home furnishing stores such as Pottery Barn, apparel outlets such as Ann Taylor and Banana Republic, and book and music stores. There are about 30 such malls nationwide, from Palm Desert to Germantown, Tenn.

For all their valet parking and park benches and fancy custom shopping bags, the new malls, like all those that came before, seem mostly like another, updated place to shop.

Then there’s the Mall of America, with 4.3 miles of store frontage, 17,750 parking spots, a place where visitors have taken 75 million amusement park rides and the janitors have turned gum removal into a science.

LeeAnn Loyd has helped pry up her fair share of the 72,000 wads of gum found since opening day. She knows how to handle each type, from the bubble-gum squashed into the carpet to the Dentyne on the underbelly of a dining table.

“You have to hit them all first with the can of gum freeze,” Loyd said. “Then you come back, each day, and scrape up a little bit more. Sometimes it takes weeks. For the really tough ones, especially in the carpet, we have a special liquid. But we get them up eventually.

“And every now and then, somebody says thanks, maybe somebody from another country. I’m still amazed by this place.”

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Mall of America

Opened: Aug. 11, 1992

Cost to build: More than $650 million

Stores: More than 520

Restaurants: 49

Specialty food stores: 34

Nightclubs: 8

Theater screens: 14

Employees: 11,000 year-round, 13,000 summers and holidays

Parking spaces: 17,750

Walking distance: 0.57 mile

Total store frontage: 4.3 miles

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Unique Mall Tenants

Chapel of Love: First-of-its-kind wedding facility in a mall.

National American University: First college campus in a mall.

Camp Snoopy: Amusement area that includes a roller coaster, 74-foot Ferris wheel and log ride.

Off-site campus for high school students in five Minneapolis-area school districts.

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Source: Simon Property Group