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By Newsweek Editors
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You can tell just by looking at it that this is not your typical suburban mall. The exterior is covered with a bland brick. There are no windows anywhere, and at both ends of the mall are desolate areas dotted with boarded-up storefronts. The stores that are open for business advertise their wares with handwritten signs, with all the design sense of garage sales. And the store names ... well, this is no Rodeo Drive. There's Cheapo Depot, Buck-A-Book, Take A Walk and the invitingly named Perspirations.
Laugh if you will, but this hard-times mall in Weymouth, Mass., just south of Boston, represents one small way retailers are trying to stay alive in recession-wracked New England. Like many suburban malls in this area, the Harborlight Mall had become a retail dinosaur. Except for its busy supermarket and four-screen movie cinema, the 15-year-old mall was growing increasingly empty as stores closed right and left. But last fall, Jerry Ellis, a local entrepreneur of some note (he owns the downscale Building #19 department stores), and two partners bought the mall out of foreclosure for the fire-sale price of about $4.2 million. Rather than try to fill it with fancier stores (which he probably couldn't lure anyway), Ellis is going after junkier merchants that need the low rent to survive. "I'm afraid if we had all the big chains we'd be just like all the other malls," says Ellis.
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Besides low rent, Ellis offers would-be shopkeepers a host of incentives. Mary-ellen Greenwood opened her Price Point women's clothing shop just 10 days after meeting with Ellis. "We were able to negotiate a lease in a matter of hours," she says. Ellis even helps bankroll merchants. He and Bruce Moyer co-own Buck-A-Book, which sells remainders, returns and damaged books for $1 each. Larry Bird's "Drive," originally $18.95, sold more than 50,000 copies at all four Buck-A-Book stores combined. Moyer understands enough psychology to know that at a dollar a book, consumers figure they are getting a steal. "It's made people feel good," he even suggests, "like they can afford to buy something."
No mall can in good conscience call itself a bargain mall without a store like Cheapo Depot. The department store offers everything from 89-cent bottles of shampoo and $19.99 halogen lamps to $20 ultrasonic humidifiers. Shopper Rhonda Callahan brags about the pair of Gitano jeans she bought for $6, the same ones she saw at Filene's for $45. The small rip in the jeans may account for the low price, of course, but what the heck. "I like the bargain stores," Callahan says. "They're fun to shop in."
So far Ellis has filled about half of the mall's 42 small-store lots. He still has a few traditional stores, like Radio Shack, Papa Gino's pizza and a CVS drugstore-and he has no intention of pushing them out. He would also like to get a K mart up and running, since the chain is already paying rent on an unopened space in the mall. But the mainstays of the mall are the independents, like Take A Walk, which sells dweeby-looking but well-made walking shoes. Or Perspirations, which sells college sweatshirts-thin ones for $9.99, thick ones for $11.99-and baseball caps for $4.99. Coming soon: Finsky's, where everything will cost $5, and Pound Goods, where sheets and blankets will sell by the pound. With names like those, it almost makes bad times feel good.
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