In what can only be called an early, very bizarre holiday present to us, viewers throughout North America caught a glimpse of Labelscar tonight (12/23/09) on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. 

Yes, that Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson. 

???!!?

The bizarre sequence of events unfolded completely randomly and with perfect timing.  Read on and you’ll see what a strange and random occurrence it actually was.

Earlier today, I came home for the holidays to the house I grew up in, in Janesville, Wisconsin.  The night was less than remarkable, and considering we’re having an ice storm I had little plans other than a date with the TV.  However, my mom recently removed the analog TV from my room; it was hooked up to rabbit ears and wasn’t much use after the DTV transition earlier this year.  So, I hooked up the DTV tuner on my laptop to the same rabbit ears, and presto – I had basic TV again. 

I kept the TV on in the background all night while I goofed around on the computer, and around 11:30 I tuned in to The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson on CBS.  It’s a pretty good show – I like the guy’s sense of humor, personality, and delivery.  Plus, he’s Scottish, and so am I, so I decided to sort of pay attention and leave it on in the background, and maybe catch a laugh or two.

About halfway through the show, a segment appeared featuring the show’s resident comic field reporter and SNL alum Tim Meadows.  The setup had something to do with last minute holiday shopping, and Craig mentioned that Tim was on location at the Mall of America.  At that point, they cut to Tim, in front of a green screen, and behind him was – sure enough – a scene from a typical mall. 

Of course, I naturally perked up as soon as I heard “Mall of America” and watched a little more intently.  They bantered about last-minute holiday shopping and were making some predictable jokes, and just when I was about to pull away I noticed something about the mall behind Tim that I couldn’t quite place.  It didn’t look like the Mall of America to me at all, and I’ve been there many times.  I figured he could be in a different part of the mall, or it could be a different mall altogether, but something about it really got my attention and looked very familiar.

Then it struck me.  I noticed an obvious Sbarro on the right side of the frame, which they covered up in Photoshop, and I immediately thought of the Sbarro in the Janesville Mall.  I knew that a Regis hair salon was to the left of the Sbarro in the Janesville Mall, and when they cut to Tim again I noticed that the Regis was there too, and the floor looked very similar as well.   Because I was watching the show on my laptop using a DTV tuner and software, I snapped a couple stills of the segment, still unaware of what I was about to discover next.

Could it be possible that this very same setup exists in a different mall other than the one here in Janesville?  Maybe, but something still seemed very eerie to me.  If this was the Janesville Mall, appearing on national television in this strange comedy segment, how did they get this specific photo?  Why would a random photo like this exist for the Janesville Mall?

…unless I took it.

That’s when I went directly to the Labelscar post for the Janesville Mall.  I still figured that there was no way that CBS would just yank a picture off my site and use it on a popular, nationally-aired program, when the page finished loading and there…it…was.  The exact same photo I took in 2008 was staring at me in both my web browser and on CBS.  It was almost unreal.

So what gives, CBS?  Why’d you use my photo?  Is someone on the Late Late Show staff a fan of the site?  If not, how did you even find it?  Also, why did this happen while I was sitting in Janesville, where I can actually see the mall out the window?  On top of that, it’s not often that I sit and watch TV using my laptop’s DTV tuner, let alone that I’m even up this late.

Really, really weird.

Hope you guys get as much of a kick out of it as I did.  It was a really neat coincidence and I’d like to thank all the forces of randomness, kismet, Santa Claus or otherwise that brought it to my attention. 

Oh, and happy holidays.

One of the most disturbing retail trends over the past few years has been the virtual disappearance of old-line department stores. Even if shopping trends aren’t exactly favoring them anymore (and I would argue that there’s not all that many people in the under 30 set who shop at Macy’s very often), there’s still a question of what to do with the real estate they leave behind: huge, hulking, bunker-like stores that serve as almost every anchor to almost every mall in the country. These centers are troubled enough without having to worry about the string of mergers and bankruptcies and shifting shopping patterns that have taken away their lifeblood.

One place to look to for guidance is Canada, which is a country that has long thrived with only two real national department stores (The Hudson’s Bay Company and Sears, which was formerly Eaton’s) along with a few discounters (Zellers). Many Canadian malls have filled out their anchor roster with other tenants, such as big box stores (electronics retailers, sporting goods stores, and bookstores) as well as supermarkets.

The last item–supermarkets–have been the bugaboo here in the United States. Few malls are anchored by them, presumably because shopping carts filled with food don’t exactly mesh with ladies in feathered hats buying Manolo Blancs. But no more! Faced with unfillable anchor store vacancies, some malls in the U.S. have begun experimenting with grocery anchors, most notably Westfield, who is adding a supermarket at their North County Mall in Escondido, California, outside San Diego.

What’s good about this for malls is that supermarkets generate many more visits per month than your typical roster of apparel retailers–an average supermarket may draw a consumer in a few times a week, rather than once or twice a month. That also opens up the center to appeal to different kinds of stores that thrive on more foot traffic:

It is a change that an industry analyst calls “mall-morphosis,” aimed at building miniature town centers where consumers can shop for a week’s worth of food, play with their children and maybe feel relaxed enough to wander over to a jeans shop and spend some money.

“Malls will become more of community center, destination locations,” said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at the NPD Group.

“They are adding restaurants, community centers, playhouses, splitting big stores into slightly smaller stores,” he said. “Some are looking at warehouse clubs, fitness clubs, converting a big store into an indoor skate park (in Los Angeles).”

I think this is great, because it’s playing precisely on why malls should be fun–they’re places to gather, not just shop for clothing.

Also, you can open up a lot of possibilities. For example, Whole Foods, a chain that has a large prepared food section and typically has cafes in store, could face the interior portion of the mall with this offering–which appeals to hungry casual shoppers–while facing the regular registers out towards the parking lot for people running in just for groceries.

Another trend I’m seeing more of with vacant retail spaces is “pop up” stores, which typically are temporary shops intended to promote a specific brand or product. This isn’t a new idea–Trendwatching did a piece on them way back in 2004, and here’s another from 2006 by Retail Traffic. But Apple’s wildly successful retail store venture has proven that tactile brand experience stores can translate to improved sales, and given the ability to buy practically anything on the internet, the retail experience could double more as a showroom. This has been tried in a few ways with less success (Sony’s failed Metreon Mall in San Francisco, or the never-opened “Epicenter Collection” internet showroom concept) but these pop up stores have been generating some excitement in empty storefronts in hip urban neighborhoods, or in temporary installations in big cities.

Here’s a few new ones:

San Francisco may be getting a “mall” of temporary pop up stores in several structures along Octavia Boulevard in the city’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, an area with a burgeoning high-fashion shopping district that draws on the same type of culture and products commonly associated with Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Octavia Boulevard replaced an elevated freeway that was removed, and there are still vacant lots dotting the boulevard; the plan here is to fill the space with a series of structures intended to last a few years, showcasing a variety of goods and services.

And in the less conceptual plane, there’s a Puma brand pop-up store (pictured top of post) on the waterfront in South Boston, made of a bunch of old shipping containers and filled with excited consumers:

]]> http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/well-be-the-future-of-retail-blog-for-a-minute/feed 45 http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/reburbia-sanctimonious-cankles http://www.labelscar.com/uncategorized/reburbia-sanctimonious-cankles#comments Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:41:21 +0000 Caldor http://www.labelscar.com/?p=6685

This has popped up in a few places already, but Dwell and Inhabitat have been sponsoring this series called “Reburbia” that’s targeted at coming up with ideas to “fix” America’s broken suburban landscapes.

It’s pretty neat, because the finalists are full of really kooky sanctimonious ideas like “suburban people need AIRSHIPS to commute into the culture-rich city centre without creating a huge carbon footprint.” Seriously. With no shred of irony, these supposed ‘thought leaders’ think some sort of futuristic idea from “The Navigator” twenty-some years ago is actually going to solve the problem of suburban sprawl?

Concepts like these come off as preachy to the people who have consciously chosen a suburban lifestyle–they don’t need to be exposed to the wonders of farm-share in the husk of an abandoned Wal-Mart, they want a nice house and a patch of lawn and a place to raise a family and perhaps a convenient commute. So if we want to create a sustainable future for suburbia, what are we really offering *these* people with a plan like the ones outlined in the Reburbia competition? Nothing, actually.

We’ve espoused our love for Victor Gruen, the grandfather of the shopping mall, plenty of times on Labelscar. The reason why isn’t just because he birthed the development style we hold dear, but also because of Gruen’s original concept behind the mall.

Gruen was an Austrian who immigrated to the United States during the Nazi regime. Several years after his arrival, Gruen (then a successful architect and store designer) was horrified by the sprawl of post-1920s vintage “strips” in America’s burgeoning suburbs, and wanted to transplant the feel of a European town square to America’s rather placeless suburbs. He fancied himself more of an urban planner than a mall builder, and even his malls–which included impractically large courts and civic spaces like fountains and conversation pits–were designed more as places for socializing than commerce.

I realize that the American suburb is fading into its winter, that “one person, one automobile” will likely become impractically expensive soon and that trends are favoring urban living for more educated and affluent young people (exhibit A: I’m a suburb lover who lives in San Francisco). I do not, however, think that the solution for these spaces is to make them mirror the (increasingly faux-) bohemian utopia of the inner city affluent elite. Again, people did not move to the suburbs for backyard water treatment plants (in swimming pools!) or farm share from the shells of dead big box stores. They moved there for a certain quality of life and a certain style of living, and they’re likely going to keep doing it until it becomes impractically expensive to do so.

The death of malls and some ill-fated big box centers presents an almost unprecedented opportunity to have large parcels of land, ripe for redevelopment in mature, established areas. So what *do* these suburbanites want in these places? Here’s a few ideas:

• Take a page from cities and malls. Build a sense of “place” in these communities, whether its indoor or outdoor. Personally I’d like to see more mall-type structures include civic space (parks or park-like spaces, fountains, libraries, galleries, museums, event space) as well as different types of commercial activity (bars, entertainment, dining, food stores/supermarkets, farmer’s markets). Encourage (potentially via tax credits) a blend of local and national chain retail. Also, make sure big block development is surrounded by smaller parcels that can be more free form and develop organically to create a true neighborhood, not an overly planned mega-development. Whoever manages the development should try and leverage social media to pull in the community and create a sense of identification with the center.
• As part of the above, try and zone less for stand-alone big box, which is a terrible idea developmentally and economically. If the demographics are appropriate, most big box retailers will happily settle in a denser, more mixed development.
• Create effective, convenient, affordable, and comfortable mass transit. Transit oriented development around denser nodes isn’t a new idea, but it could be a great way to work in tandem with the above concept for a civic “center” (or mall) and give each suburb a unique identity, encouraging people to visit the communities around them.
• Eschew NIMBY-friendly planning ordinances disguised as preservation or environmentalism. Suburbs of major cities should not have minimum buidable lot sizes of an acre or more, for example. Instead, zone for dense nodes and preserve legitimate open space for the enjoyment of all.
• When focusing on infill for older (pre-1980s) suburbs, zone more densely and focus on trying to enhance existing walkability. Many of the suburbs of this area were built on grids rather than loops and lollipops, meaning that revitalized neighborhoods along arteries and mass transit corridors are more feasible.
• Build a mixture of housing styles targeted at different income and age levels. Again, not a new concept, but it’s shocking how frequently its implemented. Most new housing built in the United States is targeted at high earners, whether its urban condos or suburban McMansions. Create a way for people of all ages and incomes stay in their communities if they choose to do so, and use the civic space mentioned in the first bullet as a means of providing things to satisfy each group (i.e., bars and entertainment for people from their teens to thirties, family-friendly entertainment for people with kids, and dining and socializing options ideal for seniors. Don’t block anyone out).

This is really neat. You can vote on your favorite one.

Brian Ulrich's photo of Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois

I exchanged a few emails recently with photographer Brian Ulrich, who has been working on a Guggenheim scholarship to travel the United States and take pictures of vacant retail spaces and dead malls before they hit the wrecking ball.

He has a compelling sample of his work up at his website, Not If But When, which also contains sets from other projects exploring retail and pop culture. His photos are stark and dramatic, and although we’ve seen some of these very scenes before we were taken with the way Brian’s high-contrast photos capture the lonely misery of these sites.

Although I realize a superficial reading of features like these may focus on the disposability of American consumer culture, I think there’s something very genuinely sad about the loss of these important social spaces, which is a big part of why we created Labelscar in the first place. A more serious look at what we’ve lost is sometimes the first step towards realizing why we want to save it in the future, so it’s hard not to be excited about works like this or the release of the new documentary “Malls R Us” (which I plan to see when I can).

Brian’s also planning for the work to culminate in a book of his work some time in the near future. Check out what he has so far; I think most Labelscar readers will be impressed. There is also an upcoming exhibition of “Dark Stores, Ghostboxes, and Dead Malls” at San Francisco’s Robert Koch Gallery from September 10th-October 31st, for anyone on the west coast.

• Dark Stores, Ghostboxes, and Dead Malls

From Joel Fletcher.

I saw very big, very ambitious projects designed with an eye to ROI more than consumer need/enjoyment, including one from a Japanese architecture firm proposing four and a half acres consisting of ballpark, retail and dining along with an array of “extreme” attractions (exactly what was “extreme” about them was left to the imagination). A Turkish mall project mixed a stadium, tri-level sports lifestyle center, Olympic swimming pool and 25,000 square meters of retail. I was excited by an entry that seemed to propose a new purpose for abandoned big-box retail until I discovered the idea was merely to transform the store into a massive digital billboard — a mediocre solution for say, an abandoned store in Union Square, and a totally inappropriate one for an exurban mall.

Fitzgerald Associates Architects' Wilson Yard

The article does highlight some large format retail design concepts that the author thought were meritous, including Fitzgerald Associates’ Wilson Yard (pictured above), Retail to the People, and CommArts “Crossroads City.” While some of these ideas do relate to things we’ve seen awhile–large format retail turning back into town centers and away from spaces that are purely self-contained shopping palaces–others do touch on some interesting concepts that I think strike at the heart of why large-scale retail developments are increasingly challenged:

Malls will not only generate sales, they will “grow food, create crafts, manufacture products, generate energy, and provide education.” As an antidote to time spent online, argue the CommArts folks, the mall becomes a social center, a “spectacle of hands-on demos, lectures, performances, classes, tastings, parties, and shows.” Further, the national sameness we now experience (Gap? Check. Victoria’s Secret? Check.) will morph into something more one-off, more local, more cause-oriented.

Some of this reads a bit too much like a utopian ideal of where malls will go, but I think there’s a core truth here: if you can get all the crap you actually need online, why show up at a mall? For community, connectedness, to see your neighbors and experience your community. In some suburban areas, malls and shopping centers are the best places to do this and it’s something we’ve been losing with the rise of big box centers. If we can find ways to cycle in more uses like these that draw people in and excite them, then there may be a future for large format retail development after all.

If you can’t tell, this is the stuff that gets me really juiced up. I love malls primarily because I grew up with these types of feeling about them, and the thought of them dying makes me sad. I hope we’re able to update their function effectively enough to make them better than they ever were.

Image courtesy Wall Street Journal

Pretty exciting: Labelscar is featured prominently in a story about declining malls on page A1 of today’s Wall Street Journal:

The gradual fade-out of marginal malls has prompted a thriving Web culture dedicated to sharing information about dead or dying properties. Sites such as Flickr.com, Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com are drawing traffic from mall employees, shoppers and other mall mourners who swap stories, photos and predictions about the status of centers on their way out.

“So sad!” wrote Edith Schilla, 45 years old, of Independence, Ohio, in an April 3 posting on Labelscar.com following her visit to a Sears liquidation sale at the Randall Park Mall in North Randall, Ohio. “I was able to peek into the mall and was so overtaken by the vast emptiness,” she wrote, recalling it as previously “so busy.”

Journal readers, welcome aboard, and please do spend some time with the site and contribute to our community! If you’re looking specifically for posts about the “dead malls” mentioned in the article, we have a portion of our site devoted to just that.

Update 5/9/09, 5:07pm PST: I’ve started rolling out bits and pieces of the new look, though there are likely still a lot of bugs to be discovered. This is actually a much more sophisticated template than the old one, so you’ll notice some differences in how the site functions.