Downtowns are dying. Even some of the big malls are dying. Big-box plazas are dominating the retail scene these days. I wrote about this last week, and I've had some more thoughts about the transitions since then.
In the 1950s both plazas and large discount stores began to emerge. From a powerpoint slide that Jack sent me,
Given that plazas made such strong inroads into the retail business (I remember quite a few that emerged in the 1950s and 60s), what happened between then and now? Why did we embrace the enclosed mall concept so readily and then drift away from malls back to the plaza concept?
Malls are nice because they are enclosed and climate controlled. Also, the larger ones have a sufficient variety of establishments that there is rarely any reason to go anywhere else. And yet the big boom in retailing has been Big-Box Plazas.
One suggestion I made before has to do with shopper convenience. We often know which store we want to go to, and it is much quicker and easier to drive right up to that store than it is to park and walk through the mall to the store.
In the old days, plazas tended to have the shops lined up along one side of a parking lot. One important feature of big-box plazas is that the shops ring the parking or are located in lines in the middle of the large parking areas. There are more shops, but they take advantage of being able to locate all around the parking lots, not just along one side of them.
The big-box plaza I frequent most these days reminds me very much of the downtown I used to love wandering through as a child. There are all kinds of shops there: department stores, auto supply stores, electronics and appliance stores, tonnes of clothing and shoe stores, restaurants, and even the modern-day equivalent of dime stores -- Dollar Stores! I can readily imagine myself as a youngster, taking a bus to a big-box plaza, and wandering from store to store over an area only slightly larger than the main retail area that was the downtown where I grew up. The main difference is that the stores ring the parking, which is central, whereas in the old downtowns, the parking rings the downtown, requiring shoppers to walk farther even if they wish to go to only one store.
It looks to me as if the big-box plaza is the new downtown but without the bothersome office buildings (although many small professional buildings are beginning to crop up near the perimeters of those plazas).