Malls look for new anchors in storm

Fun uses for tech

Mosaic Shanghai Mall recently broke ground on the Shanghai Dungeon, a local version of Madame Tussaud operator Merlin Entertainment's London Dungeon, to help its retail center pull in more crowds.

The Kunming Aegean Sea Shopping Park in Yunnan province has an equestrian school where patrons can ride, feed and groom horses.

The Beijing Mall on Wangfujing Street offers a Boeing 737 flight simulator experience for about $450.

Displays containing scannable "boyfriends" attracted crowds of shoppers in Haikou in December, hkwb.net reported. Photos from the Friendship Shopping Mall show six tall men in suits standing in doll-like boxes, each with a scannable code.

For 1 yuan, the paid escorts snap photos and keep their clients company for an hour, but physical contact is not permitted, signs read.

"I escorted four women on Christmas Eve. They were all in their 20s," said an escort surnamed Zhuang.

According to a recent report by US consulting firm AT Kearney, young consumers prefer experiences to purchases. The firm predicts that by 2030, young people in the US will allocate only half of their shopping spending on products; the rest will go to experiences or experiential products.

"Instead of a retailer, the anchor here is a compelling social experience－perhaps an indoor ski slope, rollercoaster, concert space or museum providing immersive, experience-based entertainment," the report said.

"Normal restaurants and cinemas will no longer guarantee their traffic and business success," said Yu of Kantar Worldpanel. "They have to identify some star tenant to draw consumers' attention, either those celebrity/KOL (key opinion leader-) endorsed stores, pop-up stores, popular exhibitions or popular milk tea shops (like Heytea). In short, they have to offer consumers a reason to visit them time after time."

Yu said shopping in China is "extremely competitive", and 900-plus more malls will open in 2018.

"I believe the revenue will increase, especially driven by the growth in the lower-tier cities. However, the new ones will gain at the expense of outdated malls," he said. "There will be more closure and transformation of the old ones, and revenue per mall is likely to fall due to oversupply.

"The malls will have to diversify …offering distinctive features to shoppers, otherwise they won't be able to survive in an oversupply world," Yu said.

Reuters, Bloomberg and Xinhua contributed to this story.