Category: Uncategorized

I was reading through the latest issue of Retail Traffic yesterday and spotted an interesting article about site selection strategies, and how many of the most successful chains are opening fewer locations and accepting slower but more stable growth patterns. What really leapt out at me, however, was this nugget:

“…Alternately, [Eileen F.] Mitchell (Executive Vice President of RCS Real Estate Advisors, a real estate consulting firm) says Chico’s FAS, Inc. and Coldwater Creek, two apparel chains that serve middle-age women, have been suffering lately because both built their expansion models on locating in lifestyle centers, which don’t get the same level of foot traffic as do regional malls or street locations, especially in a down economy.”

Now, we don’t cheerlead failure around here, but this validates something we’ve said for some time. Many of these inexpensively-produced, rapidly rolled-out lifestyle centers were little more than strip malls with a few gazebos and more pretentious names. They’re not working as replacements for classic indoor shopping malls OR the downtowns they emulate, and part of the reason why is because they generate less foot traffic. Why is this? Because the developers of most–not all, mind you–of these centers stopped paying attention to developing a true sense of place and a destinational feel for these centers, focusing too heavily on convenient parking and lower operating costs. It ignores the commercial value of a streetscape (even an indoor “streetscape” at a mall) and how much consumers regard shopping as a social experience. Victor Gruen, who always fancied himself an urban planner above merely a mall architect, would feel vindicated.

File under: Obvious Things We Should’ve Done Awhile Ago

Just today I started an official Flickr group for Labelscar members. Tons of you have photos sitting around that you want to upload somewhere. At the same time, I’m always finding tons of great stuff on Flickr. It (finally!) occurred to me that it would be really nifty to give you guys an official place to get together and share what you have without having to go directly through us. Similarly, we may occasionally dig through this group to look for content to actually feature on the blog (but don’t worry, we’ll always ask first). We won’t be using Flickr to replace any functions on Labelscar; this is really meant as a playground for all of you!

Currently, there are no photos in our Labelscar pool 🙁 You can add some pretty easily; just:

• Upload photos with your own Flickr Account
• Join the Labelscar group on Flickr
• Go to the “group pool” on the Labelscar group and click “add to pool” and choose the photos that you think are relevant

Similarly, I’ll try and make a point of asking non-readers to add some photos to the pool, just to keep things interesting.

Whoops.

After one day on the site, it became apparent pretty fast that the region-specific open discussion pages made almost no one happy. They added a ton of clutter and they’d be impossible to follow. Everyone said they’d rather have a message board (just like the ones already in existence at Groceteria, AmesFanClub, and Remembering Retail) than that clunky piece of junk.

I agree.

I have been teetering between wanting more open discussion and not on Labelscar for some time. My main problem is that I think that it dilutes from the primary mission of the site–i.e., this isn’t really a retail-based social networking community, it’s a blog about a ton of stuff that we’ve visited, discovered, and researched, along with news. I’ve gotten a lot of flak recently because of what Labelscar isn’t, but what it IS is a hobby, and a place for the two of us to try and organize a lot of our research and travels and interest in this stuff in one place, hopefully for a bunch of other people to enjoy too. And clearly a lot of other people *do* enjoy it, which is awesome.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to have a different idea for what Labelscar should be, and where it should go, and honestly I have to follow my nose on the future development of the site and do what I think makes the most sense, and sadly those discussion pages weren’t it. Given that it’s hard enough to find the time to post great pages about malls, I need to use my (limited) time towards creating more content for Labelscar rather than lots of forums and things that really take away from the core purpose of the site while presenting a duplicate version of an offering that has been in existence–and thriving–on other sites for some time.

That said, I may change my mind and decide to add a real forum sometime in the future, but I have a fairly high bar for how such a thing would need to look and function, and I’m not a developer, so anything that requires a lot of database back-end to give me something of the appropriate quality isn’t going to work out.
The reason that I shut the pages off so quickly is because I didn’t want a bunch of you guys to devote time and effort in making really great, informative comments only to have them deleted. I value the input you’ve all had in the direction of this site, and it wouldn’t be nearly as successful or fun without the many thousands of comments that reside on all of our pages. I don’t want to dump all effort that into a medium that I just don’t think will work out long term. Since there were so few comments on those pages, I’ve tried to save/move some of the best comments that were left on them so they weren’t lost forever, and a few really good ones will be used in conjunction with some upcoming posts so that they’re in a more relevant and high-profile place.

Discovery HD Theater Channel is currently running a piece called Mall Mania: American Style Shopping Goes Global, which highlights how the modern shopping mall evolved from its invention in the 1950s in the United States to spread across the world.  Each segment highlights a different country, most of which are in the developing world, and there is also a segment about how malls in America aren’t necessarily being constructed anew anymore but instead how the older ones are being reinvigorated,  highlighting Cherry Hill Mall, Mall of America, and Natick Collection.  It’s a really neat piece, especially if you have any interest in seeing how retailing has taken shape outside of North America, and how it relates to what we started. 

I’m a bit late to report this due to the holidays, but Labelscar received a very high-profile mention in the last issue of The Economist, which just leapt off of newsstands. Sorry about that one!

It’s a pretty great article about America’s shifting love affair with the enclosed shopping mall and touches quite a bit on mall godfather Victor Gruen, whose biography, Mall Maker, I just finished. (I might wager to say that the author of this piece even read the same biography…). Anyway, there’s a passing mention of both us and DeadMalls buried deep in the article, and we had no idea this was even going to appear, so it was a nice little late Christmas present. Check it out:

“So many malls have died or are dying that a new hobby has appeared: amateur shopping-mall history. Like many esoteric pursuits, this has been facilitated by the internet. Websites such as Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com collect pictures of weedy car parks and empty food courts and try to explain how once-thriving shopping centres began to spiral downward. Some of the recollections are faintly ironic or gloating. Yet the strongest note is anguish. Implausibly, these online histories reveal the deep emotional connections that people can establish with malls.”

I hate to be *that guy,* but if you don’t mind indulging us for a second, we have a bit of an announcement to share. Labelscar is now one year old! It’s shocking to think that it’s been so long already, and perhaps even more shocking to think of how far we’ve come in just one short year, so we wanted to take a time to briefly stop, reflect, and–most importantly–thank each and every one of you for help making this venture such a success in its inaugural year! If it wasn’t for all of your email submissions, comments, readership, and general support, this wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun as it has.

I figured that I might use this space to share some information that you might not otherwise know about us. In addition to being our birthday, this exact post (really, this very one!) is the 200th one on the site. In that time, we’ve garnered 2,297 non-spam comments on our posts, and we’ve managed to post at least one mall or news item from 38 states, three Canadian provinces, and Mexico. We hope to bring those numbers even higher in the next year!

To date, we’ve even received some attention in the mainstream media, including a feature in Retail Traffic Magazine and quotes in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times. We also are slotted for upcoming pieces in The Weekly Dig of Boston, Mass. (tomorrow, we’re told) We’re also featured very prominently in a huge spread in today’s issue of The Weekly Dig of Boston, Mass., and are slotted for an upcoming piece in Boston Magazine. Stay tuned–we’ll try and let you know when it appears.

Despite our humble beginnings, we now have between 1,000 and 1,500 unique visitors a day, which we take as a BIG sign that there are a lot of people–way, WAY more than we would’ve thought–who find this to be as cool as we do! We’re glad to be a part of helping to shape the debate on it, and to join a great, active community of similar sites, including MallsofAmerica, BigMallRat, LiveMalls, DeadMalls, Georgia Retail Memories, AmesFanClub, Retail Traffic Court, Groceteria, and The Caldor Rainbow.

There’s still a lot of work to do. With an estimated 1,100 enclosed shopping malls in the United States (according to ICSC, and that no doubt ignores the hundreds to already die) there’s a lot of ground to cover. If you have something–especially old photos–that you’d like to contribute, then drop us a line at the email addresses listed on this page. And, because I believe we can always improve, I’d like to invite all of you to use the comment feature to this post to give me your “Labelscar wishlist:” What would you really like to see us do? Would you like to see more of certain types of articles, or would you like to see some sort of functionality on the site that we don’t currently have? Do you feel there’s something we don’t currently do, but should? Or, maybe there’s something we CURRENTLY do that you think is really great, and want more of. Due to our limited resources, I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to do all of it, but I’m interested to know what you’d all really *like* to see.

Thanks again, everyone.

For the past 11 years, Fountains of Wayne have been a consistent soundtrack for an awful lot of the trips that generated the material for Labelscar. That’s why I’m so excited to urge everyone to run out and buy their fourth proper album (fifth if you count their 2005 B-sides comp), Traffic and Weather, when it comes out April 3. I got a chance to take a listen and I think it’s their best yet.
Awhile back (a long while back), I mentioned that I wanted Labelscar to talk not only about shopping malls themselves, but also to dissect bits and pieces of associated art and pop culture. That hasn’t really happened, in large part because not much exists (and really, I missed the boat on telling you guys about “Robin Sparkles'” hilarious “Let’s Go to the Mall” video from “How I Met Your Mother”–and now I have, so if you even vaguely remember the late ’80s, go watch it).

Fountains of Wayne, who are named for a Wayne, New Jersey lawn ornament store near the Willowbrook Mall, have made a career out of documenting in minute detail the lives and tribulations of the ordinary people–carpet layers, office workers, salesmen, hippie burnouts–who occupy the between spaces within the the tangled mass of freeways and suburbs that sprawl for hundreds of miles around New York City. Each song is laid out in painstaking detail, delivered with distinct East Coast cynicism, and layered over a seemingly endless array of effortlessly melodic radio-friendly soundscapes. Fountains of Wayne’s sense of place–and that place, as mentioned in one of their songs, “The Valley of Malls,”–is so keenly defined that listening to a Fountains of Wayne record is like zipping up the Garden State Parkway and flipping through every station on the dial, hearing nothing but the good stuff.

Their new album is, of course, no exception. Traffic and Weather is a loosely themed concept album about travel, with song titles like “Seatbacks and Traytables,” “I-95,” and “Michael and Heather at the Baggage Claim.” Between the lovelorn Manhattan yuppies on “Someone to Love,” the drive-time TV news anchor lust of the chugging title track, or “92 Subaru,” a hard-rocking narrative of a guy who buys a beat old car with the intent of tastelessly souping it up, Fountains of Wayne again paint a set of 14 expertly written and arranged pop songs with lyrics that are humorously evocative of what much of suburbia is really like. And even better, it’ll be a great soundtrack to the summer of 2007.

Stream: Fountains of Wayne – “Someone to Love”

I’m pretty excited about something that I wanted to share with Labelscar readers. We were recently featured in Retail Traffic Magazine in Mike Janssen’s article about the phenomenon of mall fan blogs, along with some of our friends such as Keith Milford at MallsofAmerica and Scott Parsons at BIGMallRat. It’s our first–and hopefully not last!–bit of press.

And the icing on the cake is that Retail Traffic recently launched a blog of their own–“Retail Traffic Court,” penned by Retail Traffic editor-in-chief David Bodamer–and he links to the whole lot of us in the mall blogging community in his sidebar. It’s pretty cool to get such recognition from a mainstream publication targeted towards retailers and shopping center owners and developers across the country.

To those of you who’ve stumbled here as a result of the Retail Traffic Magazine article–welcome! We hope you’ll stay for awhile, and help contribute to the conversations that help piece together the history and future of North American retail. Labelscar is only six months old, but its continually-increasing-popularity (it says in the article that we have 400 unique visitors a day, but since I talked to Mike our numbers have increased to over 700 on many days) is a testament to just how much that people appreciate our country’s rich retail landscape. Oh, and Canada’s too.

You can read the full article here. For some reason I can’t find it on the actual Retail Traffic site at the moment.

I believe we’re both going off on vacation for the holiday weekend, so there might not be much in the way of updates over the next few days unless one of us gets a chance to toss something up from the road. Personally, I’m headed down for a long recon trip through the Mid-Atlantic, and with any luck will have visited hundreds of square miles of new, thickly-packed retail territory by the end of next week. This means I’m hoping to have enough material for dozens of new posts on malls around Baltimore and Washington. Given the flooding all over the news, however, it may not be so easy to get everywhere! Wish me luck, and a happy 4th of July to all of our readers!

A huge part of the mission of Labelscar is to catalog artistry in everyday things. In particular, we feel that most contemporary commercial architecture, especially suburban retail development of the late 20th century, is undervalued and underappreciated, and likely won't attract the attention it deserves until too late.

This whole championing-an-obscure-cause thing means that I know how to spot a kindred spirit when I see one, and photographer Andreas Gursky is one of my favorites. By and large, his photography isn't exactly retail-oriented, though his famous piece "99 Cent"–pictured above–certainly is. Most of what Gursky does tries to capture the beauty in modern (or post-modern) repetition, and in a scene like the one above captures it pretty marvelously.

I also enjoy Michael Wolf, a peer of Gursky's, who's taken this set of striking photos from Hong Kong, though something about Wolf's photography seems to push the envelope to a point where I wonder if Photoshop was somehow involved. The image below is actually my desktop wallpaper at work–Do you think my coworkers find me strange? Nah…