America's Most Visited Shopping Malls

By Joe Yogerst
TravelandLeisure.com

For most Americans, it’s just not the holidays without a mall visit. Chicago-area Woodfield prepped weeks before the Black Friday shopping blitz, debuting an Ice Palace with a light show and Santa photo-ops.

After all, its parking lots are crowded whatever the season. Woodfield gets 27 million annual visitors—more than any other Illinois attraction (only 8.69 million make it to Chicago’s Navy Pier). A heady mix of shopping, eating, and entertainment options has turned malls across the U.S. into similar tourism magnets and coined the phrase “destination malls.”

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'Tis the Season for Shopping Local: Mom-and-Pop Retailers Hopeful About Holiday Sales

A positive outlook on the upcoming holiday season...
  
New Manta Survey Reveals Half of Small Retailers Are More Optimistic About Holiday Sales This Year Compared to Last Year...
 

 'Tis the Season for Shopping Local: Mom-and-Pop Retailers Hopeful About Holiday Sales

Manta Launches SMB Wellness Index, Reveals New Business Activity on the Rise in Q2

COLUMBUS, Ohio--November 1, 2011--As big-box retailers like Wal-Mart reinstate layaway payment plans to combat an expected drop in holidays sales, nearly half of small retailers (49 percent) say they are more optimistic about holiday sales this year versus 2010, according to a new survey from Manta, the largest online SMB community. The survey of nearly 800 small retailers, most with fewer than 10 employees, also revealed that four in 10 are heading into the busiest shopping season of the year with better sales than they had last year.   Click to read the entire article ... 

DMM helps See's Candies Take a Bigger Bite Out of their Tasty Market!

DMM and See's Candies - A Sweet Relationship!

See's Candies knows quite a bit about smart expansion. Founded in 1921, and purchased by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway in 1972, See's Candies operates over 200 stores in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington (with a Wisconsin store set to open in Spring 2011). Seasonally - primarily during the year-end holiday shopping season - See's offers its products in select markets in kiosks and pop up stores at malls and other shopping centers in an even larger geographic range, bringing the number of states covered to almost all 50! There are also shops outside the U.S. in Hong Kong, Japan and Macau.

They've been using Directory of Major Malls data for many years to help make location decisions.

Real Estate Manager, Kathleen Pelzman, explains: "I have been with See's since 1979 and Directory of Major Malls is certainly an excellent tool for our research of Shopping Centers throughout the country.  It is a huge resource for me and one I think could benefit those just starting out in retail and shopping center leasing.  I have used it for many years - first the printed directory and now online - for our continual expansion throughout the country. DMM is my #1 tool, for the majority of our research.  It provides the detail I need and the ease of navigating the website is really appreciated."

Tama J. Shor, Publisher of Directory of Major Malls couldn't be happier.

"Providing the data for great retailers like See's Candies to make the best possible permanent and specialty retail location decisions year-after-year is really gratifying to us," she says.

Visit www.shoppingcenters.com/smart,  for special money-saving offers exclusively for readers of this blog.

For the most delicious chocolates and treats in the world, visit www.sees.com!

More about DMM...
For over 30 years, Directory of Major Malls has provided the most accurate, detailed and timely development and contact information on the major open-air shopping centers and malls that are approximately 200k and above in size. Our listings cover the spectrum of center types including: open-air community, power, value-retail, lifestyle/specialty/mixed-use and enclosed malls.

Directory of Major Malls data is available in a suite of formats including Online access, CD-Rom, Print directory, Custom databases and reports, and Licensed datasets for GIS integration and analysis.

DMM Shopping Center Lists featured in WestFair Business Magazines!

September 26, 2011                      Special Offers - Click Here!

Each year, WestFair's three magazines include DMM's list of major shopping centers in New York's northern suburbs and Fairfield County, CT.
Their readers in commercial real estate, insurance, finance, construction,
maintenance and more use it to market their products and services to centers.
What can DMM data (online, CD & print) do for YOU?

Review the lists published by WestFair:

Westchester page 1  

Westchester page 2

Hudson Valley page 1

Hudson Valley page 2

More about DMM...

For over 30 years, Directory of Major
Malls has provided the most accurate, detailed and timely development and
contact information on the major open-air shopping centers and malls that are
approximately 200k and above in size. Our listings cover the spectrum of center
types including: open-air community, power, value-retail,
lifestyle/specialty/mixed-use and enclosed malls.

Directory of Major Malls data is available in a suite of formats including Online access, CD-Rom, Print directory, Custom databases and reports, and Licensed datasets for GIS integration and analysis.

Supermarkets are at home in Canadian malls

Interesting commentary on Canadian vs. US shopping center development by Jeff Green, CEO of Phoenix-based Jeff Green Partners.

Supermarkets are at home in Canadian malls

Gruskin Group™ Says Retailers Will Leverage the ‘4C’s’ to Keep Customers Engaged and Their Brand Relevant

Guest Blog post by Gruskin Group a leading retail design firm.

 

What’s Next for Retail Environments: Social Experience Retailing

Historically, conventional wisdom suggested that retail environments be updated every three to five years to remain “fresh” and plugged into the consumer marketplace.  Today, the cycle is more of an ongoing process, say experts at Gruskin Group™, one of the nation’s leading retail design firms, and “social experience retailing” where their virtual and real world strategies converge, is pivotal to how retailers will keep their customers engaged.

“The explosion of technology and the subsequent real-time access to thousands of petabytes of data through smart phones, tablets, and computers, coupled what we refer to as the four ‘C’s’—convergence, convenience, connection, and cost – are having a meaningful and collateral impact on retail.  This, in turn, has allowed fickle consumers in our ‘immediate gratification’ environment to flip the personalization promise on retailers from the very nice ‘have it your way’ offer to ‘provide it my way or it’s the highway,” explained Kenneth A. Gruskin, principal and founder of Gruskin Group.

“As a result, retailers are rolling out ‘experience store’ concepts, combining physical and virtual strategies with localization and individualization to keep customers engaged and their brand relevant to their physical and digital lives,” Gruskin noted. 

According to Gruskin Group, in order to offer this kind of social experience retailing, retailers will offer their own unique recipe of the 4Cs, which are defined as follows: 

Convergence: with the unification of social networking, commerce, and technology, augmented reality (AR) will become a key technology that will help to close the digital divide that separates our physical and virtual domains. Also, retailers will form brand sharing partnerships to provide compelling alignments that will attract customers and get them invited into their lives and communities through the integration of SER (social experience retailing) and CTR (convenience transaction retailing).

Convenience:  retail products, services, and virtual goods being provided through multiple physical and virtual channels will become ubiquitous to the end user. Localization will become “neighbor hooding” with virtual, smaller and better trained, localized brick-and-mortar facilities supporting a retailer’s embedded customer base while offering a global reach.  The supply chain distribution system will be updated to provide instant gratification by delivering goods and services immediately from anywhere to anywhere.  Further, technology and systems will empower customers to learn, explore, and make knowledgeable, informed purchasing decisions wherever they are.

Connection:  Successful retail brands must continuously establish deep, personal relationships with their customer and reflect their value and core beliefs with authenticity if the brand is to be seen as an extension of who “they” are. The brand and retail experience must be literally connected and accessible to the individual wherever they are through the web and local brick-and-mortar stores alike (which celebrate the community in which they are located).  As a result, the design of all of these retail touch points, both physical and virtual, will be more important than ever to keep a brand positioned to be visible, to maintain/improve its perceived value, and to help individuals identify and stay connected with retailers that align with their core beliefs and lifestyle.

Cost:  For the individual customer, cost will be based on their personal view of the perceived value of the product or service being offered. For the retailer, cost will primarily be a function of whether SER or CTR is the priority.  If CTR is paramount to the retailer, lowest cost and convenience will be the priority. For those with SER as the end goal, brand equity, alignment, and integration with their personal goals, lifestyle/life stage and community will be crucial.  For both SER and CTR, global/local manufacturing approaches and supply chain management will not only continue to have huge cost implications, but as customers demand personalization/ individualization of all of their goods and services, being able to manage the costs of customized, mass produced goods “on-demand” will prove to be the real challenge.

“Total convergence of the virtual and brick-and-mortar retail experience empowered by social networking concepts and technology is inevitable. And the relationship between brand equity and cost will be shaped to a large degree by how consistently retailers deploy their brand image.    For retailing, it means the next 10 years, the next 40 years, will be exciting times of experimentation and constant reinvention,” Gruskin added. 

About Gruskin Group™

Gruskin Group™ is an integrated design firm that builds unified brand experiences through architecture, brand development, visual communications, web/interactive, industrial design, interior design, strategic consulting, and sustainable design. 

Ranked by DDi magazine as one of the top 20 retail design firms in the U.S. for the past three years, Gruskin Group was named to the Inc. 5000 in 2009 and 2010.  The firm’s and its professionals’ award-winning work has been recognized by AIA, the Retail Design Institute, New York Ad Club, New Jersey Ad Club, ASID, Graphis, and the Association of Graphic Communications.  For additional information, visit www.gruskingroup.com.

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A helpful site with many links to "other" retail industry links.
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