Malls don’t work. First they destroy the local downtown area and then they suffocate themselves.
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My opinion is online commerce is one cause but some malls were dead since the opening.
My observation are linked to the local situation
They are killing themselves, because there are too many malls and commercial areas available, especially areas built up on the idea that people will go there by car an are near a motorway exit. If somebody has to take a car to go in a shop, and the other one is at the next exit and in these malls one will find the same things, what will happen is that customers will split.
Malls are a byproduct of the urban sprawl, and making residential-only areas. There are strip malls near houses that are thriving, provided that they’re not at walking distance for other malls.
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I’m fairly certain that @beschizza was making a joke about turning a fulfillment center back into a mall and not serious.
What I suggested wouldn’t be a general store or a Service Merchandise. In both of those, people shopped for stuff. I was suggesting something more like a UPS distribution hub where you can pick up held packages. No shopping, no browsing, no ordering. Just a counter to get your package that you had held at the center instead of delivered to the house. No other function.
Amazon already has locker delivery locations. The UPS hub isn’t really designed to hold and pick up packages, that’s always a horrible experience when it happens. It wouldn’t take much to make that a better experience.
Clearly they’re trying to leverage smaller more local distribution hubs to reduce the last mile delivery time. But, that also means people are closer to them than to the huge warehouses. Which should be a better locker location than the local 7-11, which also isn’t designed for larger items. If they manage the building, they don’t have to use actual lockers for a locker drop off.
It’s not like someone would pick the order when you show up. They would just carve out a few thousand square feet to deliver too and hold a package.
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Even ignoring the workers, I’d hope Amazon is climate controlling their warehouses simply for the sake that there are a lot of things for sale on the site that are sensitive to extremes of either heat or cold.
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I think most of these replies are jokes. I don’t know if this was 100% intentional, but my understanding is that general stores used to be a desk and a sales clerk that would fetch the item from the back–similar to a warehouse. Woolworths (est 1879) was the first to put merchandise out for the public to select.
Online order with warehouse pickup would look a lot more like the old general store model than retail today.
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I’m going to do a better job from now on.
Yeah, we had a small Argos store in a shopping precinct in town, which shut at the beginning of the pandemic, and won’t reopen; which is a huge disadvantage to many people who live within walking distance of the town centre, but who now have to drive out to the big Sainsbury’s store on the edge of town and find a parking space etc. I could walk there from where I live, but it’s in exactly the opposite direction from town, where I do most of my shopping for bits and pieces I don’t need the car for. Anything I might have got from Argos, I might as well order from Amazon…
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