shopping centers

Westfield Corporation

Uber, Mall Team Up To Offer Dedicated Pickup Spots, Human Customer Service Reps

In a move designed to lure shoppers back to brick-and-mortar stores, mall giant Westfield is patterning up with Uber to offer dedicated drop-off and pick-up spots in 33 shopping centers — and some will feature real live humans to help with customer service. [More]

(tjean314)

Mall Puts Up Its Own Parking Meters Of ‘Questionable Legality’, Issues Tickets

A shopping center in Yonkers, N.Y. (yep, Consumerist’s global headquarters) didn’t think that it was doing anything wrong when it set up its own parking meters along the private streets on its property. Customers fed them. You park next to a meter, you feed it, right? Park Ridge has collected money and even issued its own parking tickets since the spring of 2011. The problem, of course, is that the city of Yonkers is the only entity with the authority to issue parking tickets and run meters. According to city officials, the shopping center’s developer kept collecting meter money and ticketing non-payers even after the City Council asked them to stop. [More]

Around One Out Of Every 10 Mall Stores Now Vacant

Around One Out Of Every 10 Mall Stores Now Vacant

The malls of America have seen better days. In the wake of the still-lingering economic downturn, vacancy rates at shopping centers — of both the “classic mall” and “strip mall” varieties — are at their highest levels since the twentieth century. [More]

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This past Saturday, police spent four hours booking 210 people for trespassing at a shopping center in York, Pennsylvania, where they’ve been gathering for over a year to engage in illegal drag racing after-hours. One of the drag racers got away in his car. [York Daily Record]

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A small plane carrying four passengers clipped a pole, skipped across several cars—including one that had people in it—and crashed into an empty car Wednesday night in a Tennessee shopping center parking lot. All four airplane passengers survived. [CNN]