As the title itself explains the subject of this article is going to be about the condition of the malls. Large retailers who used to rule the market at a time. Presently, getting dominated by the rise of e-commerce. In the 1970-1980’s we couldn’t shop through our phone, but with the beginning of early 1990’s witnessed e-commerce extending its arms to such important areas like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), data warehousing, etc, In 1994 e-commerce expanded its area with the introduction of security protocols and high-speed internet for faster online transaction capability.
The birth of Amazon and E-bay showed the way of e-commerce. Nowadays we can see empty storefronts with ‘for lease’ sign which is an effect of “retail meltdown” as termed by Bruce Clark associate professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University. Question is raised that many large malls that we see now will cease to exist? Well, the answer is, no weak malls with weak stores would not be able to stay in the race in the future. The malls who have the capacity to compete with the rise of e-commerce would continue because as Amazon hasn’t driven all the independent bookstores out of business either.
Malls will need to diversify themselves to and incorporate new technologies to stay in the business. Malls are coming up with brainy ideas to bounce back against e-commerce like for example, The mall of America the largest mall present there focusing on entertainment, which attracts people. Another thing is to be considered that malls provide a large variety of products to the customers to try and check the quality of a product. This assures about the originality of the product this is an aspect where in my opinion online market falls a little bit behind from malls. Apart from that largest malls are coming up with more restaurants like concepts where consumers can enjoy food and rest after shopping.
So at the end, it can be concluded that may be smaller malls are getting out of the race of Malls versus E-commerce but the larger one is still really tough to beat and are likely to run well in coming years.
Sarthak Sinha