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Could the Echelon Mall be turning into a sort of hybrid, an enclosed mall with some kind of big-box store like a Lowe's Home Improvement Center grafted onto it?
Or could it become a retail theme park, with a multiscreen theater, an aquarium and maybe an archery range to draw people from far away?
The mall's owner, Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust, isn't ready to say. Robert Wahlquist, general manager of PREIT's South Jersey properties, says the company will announce its plans in the near future but has no timeline.
PREIT, however, has indicated to Voorhees officials that it intends to tear down the vacant JCPenney anchor store, which will not only cut its property tax bill but pave the way for a radical reconfiguration of the down-at-the-heels mall.
Such a strategy of "opening up" a vacant anchor space would be consistent with a trend that has succeeded in turning around other troubled, obsolescent malls.
Scenarios that have turned other malls around include what Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, calls "de-malling."
"Retail stores have grown tremendously in size. A Barnes & Noble Bookstore used to be 2,500 to 3,000 square feet in a mall. Now they are 65,000," Kavanagh said.
"De-malling is taking the roof off and opening up a mall to create bigger sizes," he said. "Also, some of these stores consider themselves destinations in themselves, and they want their own look and logo visible from the outside."
Larry Feldman, president and CEO of Feldman Equities Inc. of Manhasset, N.Y., which has carved out a niche turning around failing malls, said any strategy that fails to attract customers to the smaller, inline stores in the mall is doomed to failure.
"The anchor stores pay almost nothing for their space while the smaller stores are paying $25 a square foot," he said. "The profit for the landlord is in the smaller stores."
One of Feldman's success stories is the Harrisburg Mall, once the main retail draw in the Harrisburg, Pa., region. By the time Feldman Equities acquired it in 2001, it was in danger of being demolished. A JCPenney anchor had moved out and Lord & Taylor announced it would leave.
"We learned that people used to drive 45 minutes to this mall but the average drive had decreased to 10 minutes. It had become a neighborhood mall, and couldn't survive as such," Feldman said.
"We like to look for entertainment functions or shopping and entertainment combinations. In Tucson (Arizona) in the Foothills Mall, we put a 15-screen Loews theater smack in the middle of the mall," he said.
"In Harrisburg, we brought in a (@200,000-square-foot) Bass Pro Shops," Feldman said. "Bass Pro sells hunting, fishing and camping equipment but also is part entertainment. It has climbing walls, a 40,000-gallon aquarium, archery and shooting ranges, and waterfalls. We're putting a beaver dam and pond in the mall to continue the theme."
It's also critical to have stores that "sell stuff you can't get at Wal-Mart" because Wal-Mart, Target and similar discounters have so eroded the market share of mall anchor department stores, he says.
While it's tempting to allow a big-box store to set up on a mall parking lot with no entrance to the mall, it's short sighted in that it does nothing for the smaller inline mall stores, he says.
"They're your lifeblood, and drawing traffic to them is your duty as a landlord," he said.
But for some malls, it may be the only thing between them and the bulldozer - and the big-box retailer's best choice, too.
"If a big-box retailer can't find a space in a free-standing location but there's a mall known to be convenient, they might locate there if it's their only option," said Britt Beemer, founder of America's Research Group of Charleston, S.C., a consumer behavior survey research company.
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