Biz View: Modernizing the Palouse Mall is a project well overdue

To drive foot traffic inside, shopping malls have been engineered carefully since the 1950s to look ho-hum on the outside and lively on the inside.

Come in, and the world of comfort and fantasy, not to mention safety, awaits you.

But as terrible as most exterior suburban malls look, very few express the same sickly spectacle as the Palouse Mall. A hodge-podge of tacky fake facades, each protruding above the main frame of the mall’s box, and each more banal than the one before, it exudes an air of lifelessness.

Inside, things aren’t that much better. The eager shopper looks for something to captivate but finds more of the same. Between dull lighting and a generic material palette, the mall suffers from a deep sense of blah.

That half the mall looks and feels empty doesn’t help matters. Walls travel for a while before anything special happens.

“Complementary retailers are somewhat dispersed,” says a 2008 economic strategy plan by the city of Moscow, “and there are gaps in the mall with blank walls, or uses with limited or no activity relating to the mall corridor.”

The point of this critique is not to beat a dead horse but to look ahead and map out a strategy to modernize it, make it “the place to be” that at least Moscow has said it wishes it would be.

Indeed, this is a good time to do so as malls across the world are searching their souls for a new identity. With e-commerce, among other demographic factors, reshaping our collective retail subconscious, malls are wondering how to stay relevant. 

According to the National Retail Federation, for instance, “Online and other nonstore sales increased nearly 13 percent year-over-year in November and December 2016, while sales at department stores fell 7 percent.”

Yes, malls may be dying but they are not dead yet. The clever ones have tapped into an important change in consumer expectations, namely that in a world overrun by cyber everything, including shopping, they yearn not only for something tangible, but also for something more than a practical and direct access to physical space. He or she yearns for a special experience. Having compared 10 different shoes and five different car models within minutes of each other online, he or she is particularly ready for a similarly diverse encounter with material things but this time with real people and real walls and windows.

Amazon’s decision to erect brick and mortar bookstores, not to mention its recent purchase of Whole Foods, comes at the end of a series of studies proving that while people have come to treasure the expediency of online shopping, most still crave tactile encounters. We need them to validate and galvanize our membership in the human community. And there is plenty of money in that, too.

What this may mean for the Palouse Mall is a change in the way the consumer is considered, less as one who is car-obsessed and more as one who is here to explore a special event. He or she hasn’t necessarily left the car behind, but he or she isn’t here for convenience only. All that asphalt operating as a binary opposite to the interior of mall must be rethought. It must be replaced with one- or two-story buildings — some of which are already there — and choreographed to reflect the principles of a small urban center.

What used to be a soulless and soul killing trek between car and shop is now a well knit weave of relations between path and space, space and shop, shop and garden. Slowly but surely the “consumer” loses his or her label, as such, in favor of another one far more meaningful: a “citizen” whose need to buy isn’t a product of a mindless desire to acquire but a function of his or her role in a democracy.

Buying is only in one sense about satisfying a need. In another sense, it is a form of duty we unselfconsciously uphold to watch and know people, make them part of our comprehensive understanding of the whole.

The Palouse Mall could make this happen but not without first picking up on some of the better trends in 21st century retail developments.

Ayad Rahmani has been with Washington State University since 1997 and is an associate professor in the School of Design and Construction.