We're seeing an evolution of malls: Former Saks chairman



Matt Shay, president and CEO of National Retail Federation, and Steve Sadove, former chairman of Saks Inc. and CEO and now a senior advisor for Mastercard, join “Squawk Box” to discuss what 2019 can tell investors about 2020.

Last year was instrumental in separating the retail winners from the losers. In the country’s most upscale malls, it seems like shoppers are doing everything but perusing apparel.

Consumers can play glow-in-the-dark mini golf at Simon Property Group’s Roosevelt Field in Garden City, New York, see a concert at the outdoor plaza at Macerich’s Tysons Corner Center in Virginia and go to the Equinox gym at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s Century City in Los Angeles.

That’s a far cry from the malls that bring in lower sales per square foot. For instance, retailers ranging from J.C. Penney to Sears have left Macon Mall in Macon, Georgia, in recent years, leaving the mall with few national apparel chains. Restaurant offerings are also limited: They include Chinese food, a deli and the Ole Times Country Buffet.

The past decade has spawned a division between the haves and have-nots of U.S. malls. In the last 10 years, more consumers shifted their purchasing to Amazon from brick-and-mortar retailers. RadioShack, Toys R Us and Sears went bankrupt. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of stores have gone dark as retailers seek to cut costs.

That has had a lasting and in some cases detrimental impact on America’s shopping malls. While the vacancy rate at regional and super regional malls, which typically have at minimum 400,000 square feet of gross leaseable area and two anchor tenants, recovered in the years following the financial crisis, it has been rising since 2017. The vacancy rate was 9.4% in the third quarter of this year, up from 8.3% two years ago, data from Moody’s Analytics Reis show.

“Over the past 10 years … we have seen the heightened value and improvement of the best centers, and a substantial deterioration of everything else,” mall owner Taubman COO Bill Taubman said. “What was good is even better, and what is not good has gotten much worse.”

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