I love the concept of a mall. A destination where I can get a lot of my to-do’s done and have a little lunch too. Are they dependent on department stores? No. As much as I have always loved the department store (I cut my teeth at Federated so my heart and soul are there), times are changing.

I see mixed-use — lots of pop-ups, entertainment, food (fast and slow), comfortable places to sit and plug in my computer and get a little work done. You get the picture.

And that’s my 2 cents.

The mall at one time was the place to go for almost all your shopping needs and to socialize and dine with friends. That is no longer the case, as retail today is fragmented with online sales increasing and anchor stores leaving unprofitable malls across America. Our local mall is 75 percent empty. It has a Pretzel Time and a little sandwich place left in an empty food court. Rural malls have been hit hard by the bad economy, and even large cities are over-saturated with them.

There are new concepts of filling these spaces with micro-breweries and fun-themed restaurants and entertainment, but it takes the right place and investors with deep pockets who want to risk capital in their community. The only anchors left in our mall are Super Kmart and J.C. Penney, and Kmart shuts down next month, so it is gong to be tough to fill up these places. Yes, over time some will thrive with new concepts and others will become huge wastelands and be bulldozed for other development.

In reading previous comments, I find Peter and Tony Orlando’s comments offering up the two ends of a spectrum. Some malls are very successfully reinventing themselves as entertainment destinations with some shopping attached. Others are withering away to nothing. The question of the day — at least for me — is what distinguishes one from the other. Is it geo-demographics? The creativity and investment of the mall developer? Or something else? My instincts say population density is the driver. But I’d love to know if anyone has data.

As consumer tastes have changed, so have the driving forces of malls. Mixed use is definitely a draw, as are the most popular specialty stores that we can all name by brand. Malls are destinations and mall operators need to be far more flexible than they have typically been in the past to be able to evolve, as shopper tastes evolve faster than ever. Perhaps more pop-up-centric malls may be one way to have that flexibility.

No, but … if you look at a “typical” (1M gsf) mall, usually about 2/3 of that lies within the department stores, and while they aren’t — and never were — as productive as the in-line stores (in terms of sales), and in many cases they own their own properties or (otherwise) don’t pay rent, they still give the mall much of its identity. They’re called “anchors” for a reason.

And of course, one of the main reasons an anchor leaves a mall is because the mall itself is performing poorly … aging buildings in “transitioning” inner-ring suburbs probably have little future as retail properties.