Great Northern Mall looking for revived life, opportunities | News

“Our biggest thing is the community,” said Crandall, who joined the company just over a year ago. He previously worked at Crocker Park before being let go due to reductions at the beginning of COVID-19 closures. “Great Northern has been around for 45 years and has been a hub for so long. We’re a stone’s throw from the airport and have amazing community support.”

Crandall said the mall was able to bring back many popular events last year and will continue adding more this year. He added people constantly call to lease spaces and give brick and mortar a chance.

“We had a great year and honestly we were challenged to do more,” Crandall said.

The city itself is intricately tied to the success of the mall and the administration is looking to partner with Great Northern in the future to bring the public into the partnership. Crandall noted empty storefronts that will be filled before the end of the year, including the mall’s community room, which will be rented to a new tenant, with the community center moving over to the adjacent storefront.

Crandall is working hard to raise the mall’s presence, making it come to mind as much as online shopping comes to mind.

“People really like being back in person, our traffic numbers are just back to ‘normal’ and it’s where we wanted it plus growing daily,” he said. The mall’s usual traffic amounts to 6 million visitors annually.

“Two years ago the mall wasn’t even open this week because of the pandemic,” Crandall said. “The numbers dipped everywhere, but the end of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 have been fantastic so far.”

Crandall said that so far five new tenants have been added to the kiosk cart program and three more new tenants that have yet to be announced will arrive later this year. The new kiosk tenants are JoJo’s Arcade, B Pretty Cosmetics, RC Toys, Charging Cables and More and Alice’s Candy, which opened last weekend.

He said he gets phone calls every day from people who want to join the mall and be part of its programming. This is following a national trend of store openings outpacing store closures, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).

In an NRF podcast titled “Retail Gets Real,” Anjee Solanki, the U.S. national director of retail for Colliers, says that new store formats have been key to inviting customers.

Colliers manages over 2 billion square feet of retail establishments across the United States.

She said that nontraditional retail such as wellness centers and new pet store concepts are changing traditional retail space.

“Retail that sparks the five senses — touch, hearing, sight, taste and smell — creates a memorable moment and connection as the sixth sense of retail experience,” Solanki said.

In the January report, Colliers broke down how consumers interact with in-person stores with a surge in digital shopping.

“Ambiance matters more now than in the past. E-commerce gained momentum during the pandemic, but brick-and-mortar retail remains a consumer cornerstone,” according to the January report. “The surge of digital retail has impacted how people engage with physical stores, something we’ve witnessed over the past five years as consumers use the convenience of online for more functional shopping activities.”

According to the report, which can be found at https://bit.ly/jan_report, consumers visit stores in person to get ideas, up 7.2%, or to seek advice or service, up 4.9%. Since 2015, basic purchase needs have dropped by 6.4%.

“We’re at the point where we can look at ‘What does the mall need to fill? What needs are we missing?’” Crandall said. “We’re in a really good place where our traffic is where we want to be, the retailers are happy and our events have been really well attended.”

Crandall added that creativity has been key to these events drawing crowds such as the Princess Party on Presidents Day and the Superhero Party on Saturday, which drew nearly 300 people.

He said the dinosaur event held earlier this year was so popular the mall is bringing it back three more times.

“One of my goals was to do more marketing and more events to drive traffic and we’re doing just that,” Crandall said. “The goal is real community engagement and getting people back to the mall.”

Crandall said there are five strong anchoring retailers in the mall: Dick’s Sporting Goods, Regal cinemas, Macy’s, JCPenney and Dillard’s.

North Olmsted Director of Economic and Community Development Max Upton said four of the city’s top seven employers are located within the mall including Dillard’s with an estimated 275 employees, JCPenney with an estimated 250 workers and Macy’s with about 175 employees, according to a city report.

“As a city, we’re intimately interested in the health of the mall,” Upton said. “We spend three times as much as the state, local and national averages in terms of retail spending per capita.”

Upton said he meets with mall leadership on a regular basis since he was appointed and noticed progress the mall is making in terms of occupancy and how the nature of the mall is changing.

“The nature of retail as a whole is changing right now,” he said. “People are going for experiences and not necessarily just to shop, which means the mall is going to change its strategy. National brands are not expanding the way they used to, so I think malls and shopping centers, the ones that are going to survive, are going to become increasingly local and have their own identity to them.”

Upton said the city is looking to partner with the mall for programming, but the plans are not fully formed yet.

“We, as an administration, view economic development as a public-private partnership and it’s important for the public sector to be involved in economic development,” Upton said.

He added that the city has helped businesses by passing legislation such as the small business grant program funded by the CARES Act and the extension of the outdoor dining allowance for restaurants.

“The mayor, when she was president of City Council, led a lot of these efforts and that is a credit to those on the council who have seen the value in reauthorizing those pandemic-level measures through the end of the year,” Upton said.

Upton pointed out that Great Northern is doing better than most as he compared it to Midway Mall in Elyria and Randall Park Mall which all opened the same year. Of the three only Great Northern is still functioning as a mall west of downtown Cleveland. Great Lakes Mall in Mentor, Beachwood Place mall in Beachwood and South Park Mall in Strongsville also are open.

“In my conversations with mall leadership, not just here locally but nationally, they are seeing the trends and are understanding that the landscape is changing and they’re forward-thinking in the ways in which they want to continue being a shopping center,” he said.

The economic development strategic plan being created by the city will be vital for brands across the nation to look into the North Olmsted market, Upton said.

“Part of that plan is understanding the ‘niche’ which drills down to drive times, rooftops in the radius, the amount of disposable income and the amount of money spent on goods and services,” he said. “It drives down into having a unique X amount of dollars per square foot to make the businesses profitable and we have Y square footage of that business, either enough or not enough. A lot of this helps dictate our business attraction strategy.”

Crandall said another avenue the mall is exploring is art installations. There were five installations last year and more coming in the next few months.

“Great Northern has always done events,” he said. “We’re just bringing in different ones and finding what works.”

Mayor Nicole Dailey Jones said she could never imagine the city without the mall.

“For many people when they think of North Olmsted the very first thing that comes to mind is Great Northern Mall,” Jones said. “It’s vital that the mall continues to do well because it’s an integral part of the city and surrounding communities.”