About six or seven years ago, I noticed that my local shopping mall added an Amapola Mexican meat market to the mix, which felt weird after being used to the usual JC Penney and Vans stores all my life. The market sold some pretty bomb tacos, so I stopped questioning it and accepted that I could shop for groceries and buy meat at the mall now.
If your local mall has a supermarket, as my local one does, there's a very good reason for it. With the prime-time clothing stores at the mall like Macy's, Sears, and Nordstrom losing its walk-in traffic to online shoppers, malls have had to bring in businesses that haven't yet been dominated by online shopping, like, you got it — supermarkets.
According to the Wall Street Journal, supermarkets not only pay higher rent than department stores, they do a good job of bringing customers to the mall.
There is more evidence of these markets opening up around the country, like The Natick Mall in Boston, which will open a Wegmans supermarket in 2018, as well as an Ohio Kroger that will take over a Macy’s at the Kingsdale Shopping Center.
The only downside is that just because customers are going to the supermarket, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll explore the rest of the mall.
So if there's a Kroger at your mall, and you go in to grab some chips and dip, just know they're banking that you'll want to head over to Forever 21 after.
