Black Friday Shopping Center Index

When it comes to Black Friday, we love to discuss retailers. But what about the shopping centers and malls that house them? With Black Friday 2019 behind us, and the holidays just around the corner, we dove into some of the top-performing shopping centers to see who came out on top during Black Friday and whether the lessons from retail applied to the centers as well.

Black Friday Declines

Of the ten centers analyzed, only three experienced Black Friday traffic growth year-over-year, Ontario Mills, The Market Place, and Gateway Center. The average for the group was a drop in year-over-year traffic of 4.1%. Last year, on the other hand, only three malls experienced a traffic drop, while the average year-over-year change was 4.7% growth. These results, once again, point at the fact that Black Friday may be losing some of its offline appeal. Or, at the very least, the shopping patterns that brands and shopping centers have come to expect are changing.

Diving into the Winners

We looked further into Ontario Mills, one of the three upward trending shopping centers with a 2% year-over-year increase this past Black Friday. Located near Victoria Gardens, which experienced a 0.8% year-over-year decline, the neighboring malls show significant traffic overlap. In fact, Ontario Mills’ True Trade Area covers the entirety of Victoria Gardens’. The direct competition also counts into the factors that define success, can different centers identify ways to live harmoniously beside each other thus driving greater levels of overall traffic.

And this can be seen in the traffic trends from 2017 leading up to Black Friday 2019. The two malls experience very similar growth trends and parallel dips, yet Ontario Mall has consistently higher traffic.

Interestingly, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, CA experienced a 14% year-over-year drop during this year’s Black Friday, after a 15.8% year-over-year growth the previous year. This was the highest year-over-year drop out of the ten malls analyzed, potentially the result of the two hour power outage that took place.