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IN HIS NOVEL
Au Bonheur des Dames
, detailing the rise of a fictional department store in nineteenth-century Paris, Emile Zola painstakingly describes the mostly female clientele swooning over the store’s luxurious settings: “all the velvets, black, white, colored, interwoven with silk or satin, scooping out with their shifting marks a motionless lake on which reflections of sky and landscape seemed to dance.” Few if any shopping centers today can boast of velvet lakes, but many strive to offer at least the impression of luxury: soaring atriums, fashion shows, valet parking, a jazz band or high school choir performing on Sunday afternoon. The purpose of this embellishment is to seduce clients, to lure them in and set them up for the sale. Similar efforts stretch back half a century to the work of Victor Gruen, the undisputed father of the modern shopping mall.

Gruen’s mark on America’s shopping landscape is as indelible as it was unexpected. Born and bred in the fabled elegance of turn-of-the-century Vienna, Gruen was a talented student destined for a life in the arts. An intellectual and aesthetic, he graduated from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the venerable institution that rejected fledgling painter Adolf Hitler twice. Gruen, whose real name was Grunbaum, wisely fled Austria in 1938, chauffeured to the airport by an actor friend disguised as a Nazi storm trooper. He stopped briefly in Switzerland and the United Kingdom before boarding a ship for New York. With his partner and second wife, Elsie Krummeck, he founded an architectural and design firm that developed a reputation for, among other things, fitting Fifth Avenue boutiques with lavish marble-covered entrance vestibules. This may seem a trivial matter to us today, but at the time it was a revelation. In the words of culture critic Lewis Mumford, Gruen’s lobbies lured customers like “a pitcher plant captures flies” and eliminated what he called the “phobia of entering a store.” Anyone who has paced nervously outside the entrance of a swanky boutique waiting to be “buzzed in” knows that this is not always true, but it was true enough at the time to make Gruen a star in the cloistered world of retail architecture.

Gruen’s ambitions went well beyond designing dashing entrances. A visionary and social theorist, for him shopping was but one thread in the rich fabric of human experience, and he argued that merchants would achieve greater success if they integrated commercial activities more seam lessly into cultural and community life. To that end he envisioned what he called “shopping towns,” where both retail and nonretail functions would coexist symbiotically. In 1954 he was able to manifest this vision with Northland, an open-air center situated just outside of Detroit, with nearly a hundred shops and ten thousand parking spaces. Northland was indeed a triumph, featuring a post office, “club rooms,” auditoriums, and lavishly landscaped plazas, all sprawled over an astonishing sixty-three acres. Critics raved, and throngs strolled the manicured grounds even on Sundays when all the stores were closed. Northland was every bit the community resource Gruen envisioned, and it was also a commercial juggernaut: Sales figures soared well beyond projections to an unheard-of $10 million over five years.

Gruen was at the top of his game when he began work on his second shopping center, Southdale, near Minneapolis. This project was even more ambitious, a feat no one had ever attempted. Faced with broiling summers and frigid winters, Gruen calculated that in Minneapolis an open mall could realistically sustain only 126 shopping days a year. So he built the world’s first fully enclosed shopping center: a $20-million retail Xanadu. American shopping centers of the time were what architects call “extro verted”; their store windows and entrances faced outward, toward the parking lot and exterior pedestrian walkways, in an effort to make them expansive, to bring the exterior in. Southdale, by contrast, was introverted and cocoon-like; its sight lines lead to the interior, climate-controlled to a comfortable 72 degrees thanks to air-conditioning and an elaborate heating system. To lessen the distance that customers had to walk, Gruen arranged seventy-two stores on two levels serviced by zigzagging escalators, plunging elevators, and a two-tier parking lot. The centerpiece was what Gruen called “town square,” a sky-lit atrium with balconies, flower arrangements, fountains, trees, and a twenty-one-foot cage alive with brightly colored birds. More than a wonder of its time, Southdale was the archetype upon which future malls would be modeled and are still.

Gruen was at heart a socialist, a utopian who envisioned his shopping centers as idealized European-style villages, with schools, offices, hospitals, housing: a “crystallization point(s) for suburbia’s community life.” He hoped the shopping center would become a lively and lovely alternative to urban squalor and suburban sprawl, the perfect balance of community and commerce. But between Gruen’s first triumph in Detroit and the shopping mall boom of the 1960s, consumer attitudes had shifted; consumerism was no longer just one among many forces driving change; it was
the
driving force. Gruen’s rosy optimism gradually soured as he watched his dream towns co-opted into symbols of suburban isolation and commercial manipulation. He returned to Austria in 1967, not heart-broken, exactly, but chastened and eager to redeem his legacy. He founded the Victor Gruen Foundation for Environmental Planning, based in Los Angeles, and its sister organization, Zentrum für Umweltplanung, in Vienna to promote environmental education for the improvement and protection of natural resources in urban areas.

Gruen’s mark on the retail landscape was indelible. With their soaring atriums and sculpted gardens and cafés, his generous spaces tempted visitors to linger, and that was the point. A psychological state known as the “Gruen transfer” has come to signify when a “destination buyer” shopping for a specific purchase loses focus and starts wandering in a sort of daze, aimless and vulnerable to the siren call of come-ons of every sort. Developers today strive to motivate this state by doing everything possible to anticipate and stimulate desire. How they do this varies, but as one prominent mall developer observed, “The more needs you fulfill, the longer people will stay.” It is unlikely that many mall prowlers would claim they need to be entertained, but they may sense that need when a fashion show or promotion is announced through the mall’s loudspeaker system. The show captures attention and entices shoppers to forget their promise to themselves not to linger or, worse yet, overspend. Thanks in part to such innovations, the typical visit to a mall extended from twenty minutes in 1960 to nearly three hours in 1979.

 

 

 

A TEAM OF business scholars recently observed that “making efforts to improve patron satisfaction with mall attributes will improve the hedonic shopping value patrons believe they get from a mall visit and will increase the likelihood that they will visit again in the future.” Plainly put: Build it nice, treat them nice, and customers will stay longer and return more often. No quibbles there. But what these scholars failed to recognize—and what discounters know—is that customers staying longer or coming more frequently does not necessarily translate into their spending more money. The zombies in
Dawn of the Dead
wandered the mall for days in numb fascination, never once pulling out a credit card. The same is often true of real-life patrons for whom the mall has become a point of congregation but not necessarily commerce. You’ll recall that people flocked to Gruen’s Detroit mall on Sunday afternoons when the stores were closed. Today the stores are open on Sundays and most other days, but that doesn’t mean every visitor intends to spend money in them. Senior citizen “mall walkers” come for a brisk mid-morning stroll and then commune for hours over a cup of coffee in the food court. Teenage “mall rats” spend entire weekends roaming in packs. (Mall managers complain of becoming a “babysitting service” for too-young-to drive teens who are all but abandoned by their parents.) Stay-at-home parents use the mall as an escape hatch for restless toddlers.

The more enchanting, the more inviting, and the more comfortable the mall, the more powerful its draw as one giant living/play room. For this reason not all outlet malls subscribe to the Gruen doctrine and not all are overly concerned with the “hedonic impact” of their environments. Rather, many outlet developers follow what might be called the “Golden Arches” approach to social engineering. At McDonald’s and many other fast-food restaurants, the lighting tends to be unflattering fluorescents, and the seats are bolted to the floor at an awkward distance from the tables. The purpose of this is not to prevent theft of the chairs, as many think, but to discourage elders, teenagers, and other undesirables from getting comfortable and congregating for hours over a small coffee, or an order of fries. Discomfort does seem to keep the customers churning; on average, fast-food patrons spend only eleven minutes at their tables. (The optimal fast-food customer—as defined by the fast-food industry—takes no table time at all but does a quickie through the drive-through.)

Outlet malls, too, minimize amenities to discourage wasteful lingering. You are not likely to stumble on a fashion show, listen to a chamber orchestra, or enjoy a gourmet meal at an outlet center. But that doesn’t mean you won’t spend a lot of time dispersing your paycheck. On average, shoppers spend nearly 80 percent more money at a bare bones outlet mall than they would at a fully loaded regional mall. A popular rationale for this seeming paradox, in addition to the inconvenience hypothesis, is that outlet shoppers spend more to save more on things they really need. This theory certainly makes sense. What better place to stockpile staples such as underwear, T-shirts, sheets, and other basics than the outlets? Unfortunately, there is no actual evidence for this—no evidence, for example, that outlet mall shoppers are more likely than other shoppers to buy in bulk or to have a specific purchase in mind before getting in their cars to drive an average of 50 miles round trip. Outlet shoppers are pretty much like all shoppers, which is to say that while they might have an idea of what they are looking for, they are also very much open to suggestion. But unlike other shoppers and very much like gamblers, outlet shoppers believe they can “beat the house” by scoring great deals on expensive brand-name products. What these shoppers too often forget is that, just as in Vegas, the house almost always wins.

Outlet
is a mnemonic for
value;
the very word loosens inhibitions and purse strings. You will recall that the original factory outlet concept was defined by slightly defective but perfectly usable goods sold directly to consumers straight from the factory store. Today this is a rarity. Factory outlets now offer mostly what they claim are first-quality brand-name products, and this claim reduces worries that the merchandise at outlets might be second rate. The brand-name distinction is critically important, because many consumers perceive any discounted goods as less desirable unless given a reason to believe otherwise.

If a penny saved is truly a penny earned, outlet shoppers feel that they are “earning” plenty. As literary scholar Marianne Conroy wrote, “The lure and the rationale that draw customers to the factory outlet mall is price, not escape. . . . [The factory outlet] secures a pragmatic and instrumental vision of shopping over and against the recreational model of consumption.” For this reason we forgive the outlet mall many things. We don’t expect the service there to be fluid or the products necessarily top-notch. At the outlet mall, shopping is severed from its mooring in frivolity and might even be described as a Calvinistic enterprise; spending money is not play but work, sometimes very hard work. So, psychologically at least, the bargains aren’t gifts; they are earned.

Navigating Las Vegas Premium Outlets felt very much like work: 435,000 square feet of brand-name storefronts lined up in standard mall formation like so many dominos. The mall was of the open-air variety, scattered with scraggly palm trees and cooled with an astonishingly primitive system of what appeared to be canvas canopies and humidifiers. There were no fountains, no music, and no place to sit. Most customers looked exhausted and not what you’d call fashion forward. Though not all were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with slogans, enough were to make Prof. Naylor a true standout. She wore a Diane Von Furstenberg-style wrap dress accented with a stunning Plino Visona handbag. Probed for details, she described the bag as “high quality without the risk of dilution of the brand from knockoffs.”

A single mother of three, Naylor knows a thing or two about value. On our twenty-minute drive to the mall she mentioned that her youngest daughter, a high school senior, was mulling over her college choices. Naylor was less concerned about the status or emotional fit of the prospective colleges (just the right size, just the right mix of students, just the right location) than with the fiscal fit. She had constructed a spreadsheet of public universities offering the best value for the money and had given her daughter a choice of the top three.