Do You Have What It Takes To Save The American Mall? Tell Us How (So We Can Stop Playing)
For years landlords and brokers have struggled to save America's dying shopping malls. Now, anyone can play through the difficulty in Bloomberg's new strategy game The American Mall Game: A 2018 Retail Challenge. Players are tasked with cleaning up trash, kicking out vagrants and keeping their mall operating in the face of rapidly declining rents and sudden closures.
The game is a creative representation of one of America's struggling industries. A CBRE study found, on average, department stores fill nearly half of malls' gross leasable area with apparel, while accessories typically occupy another 29%. These two categories are experiencing the slowest growth in the retail sector. Analysts estimate that by 2022, one out of every four malls in the U.S. could be out of business, victims of changing tastes and online shopping.
Mall owners have tried to counter those trends by making visits to the mall center more around experiences or even repurposing retail space as office or other mixed-use approaches.
Do you have the solution? To the game, that is. Tell us how, because we're sick of pixelated Jeff Bezos laughing at us.
