The Great Shopping Mall Rebirth Has Begun
Malls were drastically overbuilt even before Covid-19 surfaced, but the pandemic forced a long-overdue shakeout into effect
Epic Games, best known as the developer of megahit game Fortnite, recently revealed that its new global headquarters will be… a mall. Specifically, the company is buying a 980,000-square-foot mall in its hometown of Cary, North Carolina, with plans to convert it into “offices and recreation space,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week.
That sounds like a fable invented to illustrate the economic shift from the physical to the digital. Or maybe it just sounds like a joke at the expense of mall cops and Orange Julius employees across the United States. But actually, it’s welcome news — and hopefully, it’s a sign of things to come.
Malls were drastically overbuilt even before Covid-19 surfaced, but the pandemic dealt a body blow to the sector. The wave of retail closures forced some mall landlords to declare bankruptcy and underscored the declining prospects of weaker, aging shopping centers with less-convenient locations, second-tier tenants, and few amenities. By some estimates, a whopping 25% of all malls operating today could fail. So the time has come for a boom in former malls.
