Walk into any suburban shopping mall on a Tuesday, and it’s easy to adopt a widespread belief that the American mall is dead.
However, behind the closed storefronts and half-empty parking lots lies a different narrative: retail splitting
Industry data reveals a massive visitor gap between tiers. While smaller malls lose leading retailers, the largest show resilience. According to a Cushman & Wakefield report citing Green Street data, Class A properties sit just 4% below pre-pandemic traffic benchmarks, while B malls lag with a 9% drop.
Occupancy follows a similar trend, boasting 95% at the top tier, 89% in the middle, and plunging to 72% for C-rated malls and below. It’s a trajectory that The Wall Street Journal retail reporter Kate King warned of, noting that “hundreds of low-end malls across the U.S. have either closed or are slowly dying” as department stores pull their anchors. Legacy chains like Macy’s, JCPenney, and Forever 21 have undergone massive footprint downsizings, fracturing traditional mall-tenant dynamics.