One of the most often asked questions I get around the future of retail is whether today’s shopping malls will still be around in the near to mid future?

The answer is emphatically YES.

In 2014, 40 cents out of every one (1) retail dollar  in Australia was spent in a shopping mall (approx. $110 billion per annum), 9 million Australians owned shares in shopping centres and Australia’s largest 9 shopping centres had billions of dollars of refurbishment underway.

Add to this that the mall’s very existence is hard-wired into our DNA, we are herd animals, we love to get together and the local village square, shuk and market have for millenniums offered this little oasis, a place to shop, meet, greet, catch up on the gossip and take time out of from our usual routine and chores.

With all of this pent-up consumer demand, shopping centre investment and societal need colliding together, the future picture isn’t so bad.

Shopping centres, like every other industry on the planet, are being disrupted. There are new players, new brands, new forms of engagement, digital and physical opportunities and a global reach and transparency the likes of which consumers and retailers have never had before.

These can be both threats and opportunities and again like every industry and throughout mankind the wise and profitable do as they have always done, see lemons and make lemonade and the remainder choose to blame, become sour and wither.

There is no doubt that retail and shopping centres are going through upheaval, but put into context shopping malls have only been in Australia for 50 years and to bring them online the strip shopping centre suffered.

Our centres are not as straightforward as we think. We often think of the large retail brands as being the majority of shopping centre tenants, but in fact in terms of sales volumes it’s closer to 41% supermarkets, 37% specialty stores (small businesses often franchisees), 13% discount department stores (Kmart, Harrison Scarfe, Big W etc.), 7% mini majors (JB Hi Fi etc.) and then 2% department stores.

We also have to take into account the new global retailers that have entered our centres – Uniqlo, H&M, TopShop, Zara (a prediction I made on TV in 2009), the changes to stocking, merchandising and customer service they have brought with them and the many international retailers, including Chinese, that we have not yet seen will also greatly influence the future of our malls.

Yes we’re in for an evolution. There is change ahead. We will come out of it very different, but in the end we will still have physical shopping centres and malls, but what we have them for and how we use them is up to us to decide as we evolve our way into the future of shopping.

In my semi regular chat with Rod Quinn of Overnights on radio ABC local we explored the past, present and future of the shopping mall; queried whether a shopping centre, mall and arcade are the same thing, looked around the world at good and bad examples of malls and took lots of listeners calls on their thoughts and experiences of the shopping mall.

Have a listen now (45 minutes)…