Business

Can Literal Mall Rats Save the Mall?

When Alia Mahmud visited the Westfield Annapolis Mall in February 2022, she didn’t shop for clothes, see a movie, or even meet her girlfriend. She was looking for mice.

A week earlier, Mahmud had seen a post online about a swarm of rodents at the SPCA in Anne Arundel County, which opened an outpost at a shopping mall in September 2020. Five-month-old sisters Snuffles, Algernon, and Ikit cheerily shove their pink noses into the crate to get a better look at Mahmood and her boyfriend.

Mahmud, 32, is a school therapist in Alexandria, Virginia.

However, it was during the encounter a few days later that Mr. Mahmoud finally decided to take them home.

“At that point, I thought, okay, they’ve made a choice,” Mahmud said.

Snoofles, Algernon, and Ikit are just a few of the thousands of pets adopted from animal shelters that have popped up in shopping malls across the country over the past three years. A growing number of shopping centers are offering vacant stores for free or at deep discounts to animal welfare groups. Shelters report increased intake, according to the Shelter Animals Count, a national database of animal welfare. 4 percent In 2022, Once hard to come by during quarantine.

With collaborations like SPCA and Westfield Annapolis growing in popularity, shopping malls and animal havens are seeking more pets to fill those struggling retail spaces even before the pandemic forced temporary closures. want to attract owners and customers of

Morgan McLoud, Marketing Director of Westfield Annapolis, came up with the idea of ​​leasing retail space to an animal shelter at a discounted rate in January 2020. She said after seeing dozens of people lining up to pay her $25 to visit a crowded cat cafe in Washington, D.C.

Within days, she reached out to Kelly Brown, president of the SPCA for Anne Arundel County. A new outpost, her Paws at the Mall, opened eight months after her. Since then, Paws has seen her number of adoptions increase from 131 in 2019 to 608 in 2021, with hundreds of cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters and even hedgehogs and hermit crabs finding homes. .

Alexandra Lange, author of “Meet Me by the Fountain,” which explores the history and future of America’s malls, said developers had been thinking about ways to reimagine malls long before the pandemic.

The mall had its golden age in the 1990s. There was also a building that recreated a quaint town with cobbled streets. Some offered photo ops with Santa Claus, carousel rides, and even life-sized dinosaur-themed exhibits. Teenagers often spent their leisure time lounging in their coats, riding escalators, or hanging out in Abercrombie & Fitch stores.

But in the early 2000s the Internet came along. With the rise of online shopping and the subsequent decline in demand for physical retail space, shopping malls struggled to redesign the shopping experience.

Moving animal shelters to empty stores is just the latest attempt by shopping centers to attract more customers, Lange said.

“Malls got so big, so commercial, they became nationally franchised, that they forgot about easily available fruit,” Lange said, referring to the more community-based experience. “So when you go back to being closer to your original community, the neighborhood spirit seems like a perfectly reasonable idea.”

For animal shelters, the move has been widely successful.

LA Love & Leashes picks up animals from six shelters in Los Angeles each morning, displays them in mall storefronts, and returns unclaimed pets in the evening. Since moving to the shopping center, we have found homes for over 3,000 pets. In 2021, the annual hiring rate will more than double his. Since Orphans of the Storm in Illinois opened in 2021, he has found homes for more than 200 cats and dogs from his two malls in Vernon Hills and Northbrook, tripling his annual adoption rate. I’m here. And at his Hop-on Home, one of two animal shelters on Wilton Mall in Saratoga Springs, New York, he has found 354 rabbit homes each year since opening the store in the shopping center in 2022. He has tripled the adoption rate of

“When people walk by and see a kitten through a window, they are automatically drawn to the store,” said Tammy Davis, executive director of the Johnson City Animal Shelter in Washington County, Tennessee. Shelter opened the outpost in February 2021 after Johnson City’s mall offered to lease the annex at a slightly reduced rate, she said. “Having off-site locations in her areas of the mall, especially high-traffic ones, has allowed us to reach people we couldn’t reach before,” she said.

Jonky Almon, 50, a customer service advisor in Round Lake, Illinois, said she found shelters “too depressing” and said she wouldn’t go to one without these new mall outposts. I was rushing to a hair appointment at Hawthorne Mall when Mr. Armon saw it. FurryA 10-year-old Pitbull and Mastiff mix at the storefront of Orphans of the Storm. She took him home a week later.

A socially active environment such as a window display provides an opportunity for temperamental animals to adapt to humans, increasing their chances of adoption. Shadowa black Pitbull mix, sat in Love & Leash’s Los Angeles City Shelter in Los Angeles for seven months before being adopted 10 days after being displayed at the mall location.

LA Love & Leashes Volunteer Coordinator Lauren Kay said:

Marketing director McLoud said the Westfield Annapolis mall has seen a 10% increase in foot traffic at the Paws wing since its opening, with more foot traffic and spending at other stores.

“The evolution of malls is changing,” McLeod said. “I think we all really know that. I think what makes us so unique and special is the fact that we’re really adapted to this evolution.”

In addition to providing opportunities to see animals, rescues like Hop on Home also host “Instagrammable” activities like rabbits and yoga.

Lange said he believes that despite the ease of online shopping, customers will continue to come to malls for experiences they can’t recreate at home.

Newly adopted rats Snuffles, Algernon and Ikit are now spending their days in the water. Frozen pea mini pool, snuggled up in a plush blue hammock and running around Mahmood’s one-bedroom apartment. But Mr. Mahmoud already knows that he will be returning to the mall soon.

“Sadly, rats live two to three years,” she said.

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