Reports of the death of malls continue to be greatly exaggerated (with apologies to Mark Twain). Post-pandemic we’ve seen a remarkable resurgence in consumers heading out to malls and anyone who thought this was just a momentary knee-jerk reaction to being confined during Covid needs to see this is a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
And more interestingly, the return of mall shopping has spread to all of the major formats: indoor regional malls, outdoor “lifestyle” and strip centers and outlet/off-price locations.
There are several big takeaways from the latest research from Placer.ai, which tracks in-person shopping patterns. The biggie is that year-over-year visits to indoor malls, open-air shopping centers and outlet malls continue to grow. Just as interesting, Placer says, “fewer visitors across all three formats are treating malls as a one-stop-shop – which may actually serve as a positive indicator of malls’ resilience in 2024.”
These latest numbers go up through March and they show that mall visits increased year-over-year (YoY) in February 2024 and rose even higher in March: traffic to indoor malls, open-air shopping centers and outlet malls was up 9.7%, 10.1% and 10.7% respectively, compared to March 2023.
“The positive visitation trends along with the rising consumer sentiment numbers capping off the first quarter of 2024 bode well for retail in general and discretionary categories in particular and may signal the end of the retail challenges that plagued much of 2022 and 2023,” the company said.
Placer said that even as mall visit numbers may be returning to pre-pandemic levels, analyzing the visitor journey for malls in Q1 2019 and Q1 2023 – which looks at where mall visitors were directly before and after their mall visit – indicates that some mall-based shopping habits have shifted.
Between Q1 2019 and Q1 2024, the share of shoppers coming to a mall directly from home or returning home directly following the mall visit decreased. “And during the same period, the share of mall visitors coming from or going to dining venues or other retail locations before or after a mall visit generally increased across mall formats. The change in visitor journey between 2019 and 2024 indicates that more consumers are now visiting malls as one of multiple stops within a larger outing.”
Placer concludes that “Consumers still want malls. Despite the years of mall apocalypse predictions, consumer behavior continues to showcase the central role that malls play in the U.S. retail landscape.”
The Mall Index analyzes data from 100 top-tier indoor malls, 100 open-air shopping centers (not including outlet malls) and 100 outlet malls across the country, in both urban and suburban areas. Placer.ai uses de-identified location information from a panel of tens of million devices and processes the data using industry-leading AI and machine learning capabilities to make estimations about overall visits to specific locations.