What becomes of Main Street when all of its retail traffic is redirected to Dot-Com Avenue? El Centro knows.
El Centro is an example of how many retail hubs are evolving to keep pace – we mean literally, as in foot traffic – with a customer base that has grown accustomed to shopping everything online. The residential and retail complex, on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, has recently added Amoeba Music, the world’s largest independent record store, as an anchor tenant.
The choice is both untraditional and natural – meaning opportunistic. Amoeba has a long history in Hollywood, but it closed shop nearly a year earlier due to the Covid-19 pandemic. By courting Amoeba to open at El Centro, developer DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners brought the comfort of nostalgia and “normalcy” to a community holed up for a year.
After all, if there is one thing many of us can relate to, it’s browsing vinyl album covers in the bins.
In 2020, 8,741 stores closed, according to tracking by Coresight Research, and those closures are evident on Main Street as well as in the suburban malls.
Now these shopping districts, like traditional malls, are seeking tenants sexy enough to get shoppers away from their digital devices and the retail technologies introduced in 2020 to retain sales. To attract more foot traffic, these hubs are bringing in tenants that literally stop people in their tracks by combining retail with new forms of entertainment, professional spaces and civic centers.
Amoeba at El Centro is one such example. Looking across the country, here are others.
We’re still in the early stages of post-pandemic retail recovery, and some of these concepts may not hold up. What matters now, then, is how shoppers act as their worlds open back up. The ways they spend their time and money now provides valuable hints into how their preferences and tolerances will develop after the crisis.
Of course, shoppers change, and some tenant ideas may be ahead of their time. But if a 31-year-old record store can come back, retailers may not have to look so far ahead of their time. They just need to look as far as their customers can see.
