call of the mall · 2004-03-07 00:56
I’ve just read Paco Underhill’s new book, The Call of The Mall – it was, ironically, the only thing worth buying in the constrained-mall-in-disguise Atlanta airport. It’s an easy read, very conversational, and I really enjoyed it. It concentrates on my favourite things, people watching (I am extremely nosy, especially when watching people use technology and products), man-made environments, shopping and its emergent culture. The book is tantalisingly subtitled ‘the geography of shopping’, which I don’t really think the book covers, but is an interesting subject to consider.
This came after spending a few days in the US. My hotel was near a mall (and only near a mall), and of course I got urges straight away to visit. When asking whether it was possible to walk there, the receptionist looked at me oddly and said we could take their shuttle bus. We ran out when they weren’t looking, and became the virgin users of the pedestrian crossings.
As a walker, I did several of the things Paco Underhill mentions doing (and forcing his clients to do) – going to the edge of the parking lot and trying to read the building (this photo is taken from quite a bit closer). It’s an impenetrable fortress, with no clues as to its depth or size. The only obvious entrances are through the anchor shops themselves.
The book takes the form of a trip to an unnamed mall. To start with, the mall is described, and it’s scarily similar to this, and every other US mall.
| This particular mall covers forty-six acres, including the parking lots. | 230 acres |
| It is bordered and nourished by a six-lane state highway and a four-lane country road. | check |
| We’re in a suburb that is a twenty-minute drive (baring bad traffic) from a major metropolitan area. | check |
| This is the largest mall in the immediate vicinity, although there is a slightly smaller one exactly four miles away. Ours is known for its high-end stores. The other is more solidly middle-class. | vice-versa |
| There’s a record store, a toy store, a video game store and nine stores selling sneakers. | check |
| There’s also a fourteen-screen cinema. | 17 screen |
| There’s a video arcade. | check |
| There’s a rock climbing wall. | check |
| There’s an Aqua Massage. | nope |
| There’s a funny little 1950s-style hamburger joint, Jonny Rockets. | check |
| There’s no bookstore, hardware store, home electronics store, computer store, sporting goods store, or office supply store. | bookstore and sporting goods are anchors |
There’s no scarcity of land round here, so everything sprawls. The mall 4 miles away, The Mall of Georgia, is only slightly bigger in terms of shopping area (1.7 vs. 1.2 million sq ft), but on a 500 acre plot, including an 87-acre nature park and residential and commercial facilities.
“Next time you’re at a mall, instead of going directly inside, stroll around the perimeter of the place. It will be one of the more joyless promenades you’ll ever make… with maybe a security guard or two to keep you company (They’ll be watching you closely, since someone who walks around a mall is, by definition, an odd character).”
The book does make it clear that malls are very different in the US from the rest of the world. The few drive-to malls we have in the UK are destinations. Weirdly they are less themed, but the stores are more of a pull. A blank canvas for commerce. Bluewater, Europe’s largest mall, has a catchment area of over an hour’s drive (the US average catchment is 20 minutes), and has a 300 acre plot, including 1.5 million sq ft of retail, and an additional 125,000 sq ft of food and leisure. We shop differently, we have a different concept of transport, and therefore we mall differently too. It’s a pity that we take most of our ideas from the smaller city centre shopping centres, rather than true malls from abroad.
One thing we don’t have are mall walkers – people (normally seniors) who get let into malls early, to get their exercise by walking around. After all, in America, the book points out, the only time you now walk is in the mall. There are books, clubs, maps and even special shoes. We also don’t quite have the leisure emphasis, with skate parks, video arcades, ice rinks and bowling alleys all part of the US mall mix. No shoppertainment.
The book has some sobering ideas about how transport influences the kinds of customers you get.
“They can almost never be easily reached by public transportation. If you can’t drive here, the mall seems to say, you can’t come… Are malls racist? It’s not such an outlandish question. It seems clear that malls hope by limiting public transportation they can control who may enter and who may not.”
It also points out that malls are hard to rob by design: there’s no fast getaway when you can’t remember where you parked your car.
The book considers everything about the end-to-end experience of the mall – parking lots, bathrooms, information desks, wayfinding, zoning, food courts, places to sit and people to watch. Basics. But all part of the customer experience that most mall developers are not considering. It’s also gratifying that different approaches for different customers, shopping situations, and brands are considered. A good designer always knows his target audience, and designs accordingly. Seemingly with retail, the segments are crudely men and women, and then different types of shopper emerge within these most distinct categories.
I think most designers (of anything) will enjoy this book – there’s lots of insight into the psychology of people, which is, after all, the thing we have to understand when designing.
Finally, there’s a conversation with a store designer that echoes web design, and points to a bleak future for UI and mobile design (we’ve never even had the distinctive creative UI design agency era):
“Back in the old days, in the 1960s and 1970s, you had big retail executives with big egos, and they sought out creative designers and hired them to come up with distinctive looks. The designers were like hired guns, and they went back and forth depending on who had hired them for what. Then, the trend shifted and the retail chains began hiring in-house design staff. It was a smart move for them because it took the best designers off the market and away from their competitors. Designers ended up being exposed to less, and they were influenced by less, too. As a result of that, the design world became stagnant and even a little stale – you had one client, you came up with something, and then you just worked on refining that. It took some of the edge away. That’s why the whole world of retail starts to look the same.”