“Can I go ho-ho-home now?”
Oh, yes. That’s Santa Claus sitting all alone — and not just for a little while — at the MetroCenter Mall in northwest Phoenix. MetroCenter is a super-regional mall, 1.4 million square feet of retail space, with five anchor stores, a huge food court and a multi-plex cinema. And it’s withering before your very eyes.
Behold the emptiness…
Perhaps 60% of the space is vacant, including two of the anchor stores, with many storefronts bearing this admonition of wishful thinking:
Two stories of spacious, modern retailing luxury and a clientele, on a weekday afternoon in the middle of the Christmas season, that wouldn’t fill a school bus.
Santa and his helpers are swarmed by nobody…
And the emptiness stretches on forever…
All action, no traction…
At Sears, where America doesn’t shop…
And doesn’t shop…
An doesn’t shop…
And here, where no one shops…
There are no book stores left inside MetroCenter, and even the pet store is a Potemkin Village, a rescued animal adoption center run by the county:
This is a mall that used to be mobbed at Christmas. It was murder to drive anywhere near it, and the county sheriff ran a posse of horse-mounted deputies in the outer parking lots to protect-and-serve people stuck walking a quarter-mile or more to get to the stores. Now the only significant police presence is a redundant City of Phoenix cop car parked in the mall as a 3-D recruiting poster.
The internet is the main culprit, of course, along with big-box stores like WalMart or Target. The mall was the one trip to buy everything all at once, but that’s done more easily — and more economically — in other ways by now. And the neighborhood surrounding MetroCenter moved downscale in the 40 years since the mall was built. And simple fashion — the fashion that keeps the Paradise Valley Mall across town crowded — left MetroCenter behind.
In the end, there’s nothing left for Santa to do but to noodle around on his iPhone.
What happened to the center-of-it-all-mall? A lot of stuff, none of them positive for brick-’n’-mortar retailers. But mainly it moved into Santa’s pocket…
