North Charlotte Today

The brick-and-mortar shopping option has been losing its luster for years, as online outlets take a bigger bite out of retail spending.

Now, a marketing professor is predicting a wave of closures as stores shutter their unprofitable outlets or malls are repurposed.

"Of the thousand malls (in America), there could be a third of them gone within the next couple of years,” Steven Cox, a marketing professor at Queens University in Charlotte, told WCNC Charlotte. 

The trend is not new. In 1998, the U.S. boasted about 40,000 malls, a number that has dwindled to only 1,000 now. Cox says that number will be getting smaller, as anchor stores like Macy’s are closing in many malls.

Charlotte-area malls are doing what they can to stall what seems to be an inevitable fate. The goal is to come up with ways to increase foot traffic, so the malls can not only survive -- but thrive. 

SouthPark Mall’s Marketing Director Holly Van Cleave said her mall's business is "looking great" and looking forward to the future, but that optimism doesn’t hold for malls across the board.

When anchor stores pull out, that makes economic survival more of a challenge, Cox said.

"Now what you have left are smaller stores that don’t drive enough traffic to support the mall, so the issue becomes, can these malls survive?” he told WCNC Charlotte. “No, they can’t. Can they be repurposed? Possibly. Some malls are shifting to housing or even turning into medical facilities; some are turning into offices.”

Malls that are in small towns, where they are the only shopping option for miles, are the ones that have a better prospect for survival, according to Nate Berg, a journalist who covers real estate trends for Fast Company.

"A lot of people are saying these places are dying, and yet there are some -- even within a city there may be one or two -- finding their niche and able to make it,” Berg told WCNC Charlotte.