San Francisco’s Westfield Center Mall, Re-Opening Greatly Welcome

July 11, 2020,

Should we be holding our breath or be out of breath with hyped excitement and great anticipation.

Re-openings of businesses can be a source of great celebration.

Especially these days.

As reported by sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com, “San Francisco’s once vibrant retail scene took a major step toward reawakening Monday as the large downtown mall — the Westfield San Francisco Centre — was preparing to open to shoppers for the first time since the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak.”

We wish them fantastic success.

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The Westfield San Francisco Centre is an upscale shopping mall located in San Francisco, California, managed by the Westfield Group and co-owned by Westfield and Brookfield Asset Management.

It is anchored by Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's, and includes a Century Theatres multiplex and a branch of San Francisco State University. It connects directly to the Powell Street transit station via an underground entrance.

After a slow start, it soon became one of the top performing shopping centers not only in San Francisco but in the country as well.

Many of our family memories have wonderfully taken place there.

Shopping malls are the source of endless wonderful memories for teens and adults alike.

What better place to just hang out and spend the day essentially doing whatever you want, when you are ready, away from the hot sun or frozen air.

It helps if you have money.

The malls across America can sure use that.

As reported by the global news and information source msn.com, “The world’s biggest shopping malls have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and while many are now opening their doors once more, shopping now looks drastically different.”

How hard have they been impacted by the global pandemic?

The team at fastcompany.com add, “The COVID-19 economic crisis has already curtailed consumer spending, with department stores among the most devastated—the goal is simply to stay solvent, as Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus are all reportedly on the edge of bankruptcy.”

It is no mystery. If the major retailers who anchor malls begin to permanently fail, it could spell the end of the shopping mall as we know it.

It wasn’t always that way.

Shopping centers in general, may have their origins in public markets and, in the Middle East, covered bazaars. In 1798 the first covered shopping passage was built in Paris, the Passage du Caire . The Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island was the first shopping arcade in the United States in 1828.

In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the term "shopping mall" was first used, but in the original sense of the word "mall", that is, a pedestrian promenade.

The enclosed shopping center, which would eventually be known as the shopping mall, did not appear until the mid-1950s. One of the earliest examples was the Valley Fair Shopping Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, which opened in March 1955.

With approximately 2,400,000 square feet, the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu, Hawaii was one of the largest malls in the United States when it opened for business in August 1959. The most visited shopping mall in the world and third-largest mall in the United States is the Mall of America, located near the Twin Cities in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Those were the go, go years.

“As a kid growing up, I really hated being alone. I was always that kid that was like, 'Do you want to hang out? Let's go to the mall. Let's go to the movies. Let's go to the park.' I would call people and call people and call people. If I was alone when I wasn't at school, then there was something wrong.”…Jonathan Van Ness

In the United States, in the mid-1990s, malls were still being constructed at a rate of 140 a year. But in 2001, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that underperforming and vacant malls, known as "greyfield" and "dead mall" estates, were an emerging problem.

In 2007, a year before the Great Recession, no new malls were built in America, for the first time in 50 years.

City Creek Center Mall in Salt Lake City, which opened in March 2012, was the first to be built since the recession.

In recent years, the number of dead malls increased significantly in the early twenty first century because the economic health of malls across the United States has been in decline, with high vacancy rates in these malls.

From 2006 to 2010, the percentage of malls that are considered to be "dying" by real estate experts (have a vacancy rate of at least 40%), unhealthy (20–40%), or in trouble (10–20%) all increased greatly, and these high vacancy rates only partially decreased from 2010 to 2014.

This is substantiated by Forbes Magazine who posts, “From the smallest villages to major urban centers and big out-of-town shopping malls, the story is pretty much the same. Beset by a perfect storm of high rents, rising local businesses taxes and online competition, retailers are cutting their losses and pulling down the shutters for the final time.”

The question becomes, what can malls across the United States do to turn this trend around?

The answer appears to be yes.

In America, owners are making drastic moves to convert struggling malls. This includes converting malls into apartments, offices and industrial space. Other owners have taken the approach to turning large chunks of malls into parks and playgrounds. In Austin, Texas, the 600,000 square foot Highland Mall will be a campus for Austin Community College.

Sounds very innovative.

We hope that shopping malls continue to think outside of the box and re-invent themselves.

Yes we know we can shop online but that is missing the point of some of the reasons why we go to malls in the first place.

The shopping mall is an experience.

Sometimes a once a lifetime one.

Before we started wearing these darn masks, it was a place to see and be seen by beautiful people. Put on your best threads, go down to the mall and people watch while you dine with a loved one. You could casually stroll and sample this and sample that while you contemplate your big purchase.

So many precious family and dating memories blossomed at the mall.

We hope the malls continue to innovate, re-invent and blossom once again.