Remember back in the Good Old Days when the Mall Of America in Bloomington, MN was the biggest mall in the world? That didn’t last long, as the race to build bigger and bigger malls took off in the 1990s. It’s still the biggest mall in the United States, but it’s all the way down to #18 on the list of the biggest shopping malls of the world.
Just like everything else about America, it has been surpassed far and away by the Chinese. The biggest shopping mall in the world today is the South China Mall in Dongguan, Guangdong Province. The mall occupies 9.6 million square feet, of which 7.1 million square feet are commercially usable space. That’s more than double the puny little Mall of America.
The only problem is that the South China Mall is almost completely empty (via). There are almost no tenants with open storefronts, and the interior of the mall is already crumbling from disuse and unfinished and shoddy construction. In the last few years, there have been nearly 500 shopping malls constructed all over China, each one striving to outdo the one before in terms of space and over-the-top decoration, but the swelling of the middle-class in China has yet to pay off in terms of sheer mindless consumerism.
It’s a lesson we might well pay attention to in this country as our credit-driven economy grinds to a screeching halt. Even as national retailers keep going out of business faster than you can say “Everything Must GO!”, an estimated 137 million square feet of all-new retail space (or, roughly the equivalent of 15 South China Malls or 33 Malls of America) will be built in the U.S. in 2008.
