Live from Siec (Paris) - What haven't we read or written about the shopping mall? That in the face of the web, this format no longer had any argument to seduce French consumers. That its merchandising mix of global retailers was no longer renewing itself. That its food locomotive had definitively lost its status and exhausted its visitors. That, in the end, the mall was simply a vestige of another era, that of mass consumption in the 1980s. Announced dead on several occasions (but not yet buried), the French-style shopping mall has finally proved to be an immortal object.
If you look hard enough, you'll come across shopping centers that have been planted, misplaced or even malnourished. But you won't find a single shopping center in French history that has simply fallen victim to the downtown core or the Internet. Resilient par excellence, the shopping center has - whatever people say - resources, lots of resources. Never before in the history of French shopping centers has the timing been so right for large-scale openings, extensions or facelifts. And above all, never has the genre been so renewed. Leisure, pleasure and, incidentally, shopping: there's no need to go into the revolutions that these temples to consumerism have undergone and won. The mutation is huge.
A stroll around the Forum des Halles reveals just how far the mall has come in opening up to the outside world, to the city and to others. Beyond the famous shopping experience marketed to the extreme by our majors, beyond the efforts of the chains to better survey and retain their customers, the shopping center - an ugly patronymic which, one day, we should think of getting rid of - has literally transformed itself into a living, breathing organism. And like all living things, it arouses emotions and provokes reactions.
Criticized, mocked, even hated, the shopping mall was too soon discarded. Challenged by Amazon and toasted by Waves, it was able to react - a little late, perhaps - to the incantations and blows of its time. The biggest challenge now is to win back whole swathes of consumers, some of whom have opted for downtown shopping, others for retail parks, and the latter for the Internet. Where to now?
