Mall Still Kicking

Today I noticed that another place in the food court at my local mall had closed--a big place. The food court had seemed to have few closings relative to the rest of the mall, but on closer inspection we saw that in addition to the big salad place and, oh yeah, the burger place and, oh right, the cinnamon roll place we had already noticed, the other burger place and the ice cream place and smoothie place have also closed.

We were wondering just what percentage of stores are open, so we counted. We decided to count a store as open even if it had big "store closing" signs on it (I remember two of these). We also counted one place as closed even though it was open for gaming for a few hours on Saturdays. We counted related adjacent stores as a single store if one was an optometrist and one was selling eyeglasses or if there was an obvious doorway between the two but otherwise not (3 pairs qualified as a single store; 1 did not). And we decided to exclude the carts from the count because it was impossible to guess how many carts had closed (remains were rare). We decided to classify the train rides (now open only on weekends) as a "cart" and thus did not have to decide whether it was open or closed.

I was wondering if half the stores were closed yet. The answer is no. We counted 88 open stores and 54 closed stores. This surprises me because a June 2009 article on America's Most Endangered Malls shows our mall with a 61% occupancy rate, our findings show an occupancy rate of 62%, and we've noticed a lot more stores closing than opening since then.

Best stores still open:
* Godiva
* Hot Topic
* the sushi place (has the best chicken samples, anyway)

Most common survivors:
* shoe stores (as one shoe store proclaimed: better than chocolate and lasts longer, too)
* stores with X or Z in the name
* smelly stores (perfumes or soap)

So, if you want a good chance to survive in our mall, you might want to look into opening a shop called Xtreme Candle Shooz.