Shopping Centre

A shopping mall, shopping centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct or simply mall is one or more buildings forming a complex of shops representing merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a parking area — a modern, indoor version of the traditional marketplace.

Modern "car-friendly" strip malls developed from the 1920s, and shopping malls corresponded with the rise of suburban living in many parts of the Western World, especially the United States, after World War II. From early on, the design tended to be inward-facing, with malls following theories of how customers could best be enticed in a controlled environment. Similar, the concept of a mall having one or more "anchor" or "big box" stores was pioneered early, with individual stores or smaller-scale chain stores intended to benefit from the shoppers attracted by the big stores.

Components

Food court
Main article: Food court

A common feature of shopping malls is a food court: this typically consists of a number of fast food vendors of various types, surrounding a shared seating area.[citation needed]

Department stores
Main articles: Department store and Anchor store

When the shopping mall format was developed by Victor Gruen in the mid-1950s, signing larger department stores was necessary for the financial stability of the projects, and to draw retail traffic that would result in visits to the smaller stores in the mall as well. These larger stores are termed anchor store or draw tenant. In physical configuration, anchor stores are normally located as far from each other as possible to maximize the amount of traffic from one anchor to another.

Stand-alone stores

Frequently, a shopping mall or shopping center will have satellite buildings located either on the same tract of land or on one abutting it, on which will be located stand-alone stores, which may or may not be legally connected to the central facility through contract or ownership. These stores may have their own parking lots, or their lots may interconnect with those of the mall or center. The existence of the stand-alone store may have been planned by the mall's developer, or may have come about through opportunistic actions by others, but visually the central facility – the mall or shopping center – and the satellite buildings will often be perceived as being a single "unit", even in circumstances where the outlying buildings are not officially or legally connected to the mall in any way.