Struggling mall retailer closes stores, shares turnaround plan

American consumers person not abandoned malls.

"After a comparatively subdued summertime performance, malls rebounded sharply successful October 2025, with ft postulation to indoor malls, open-air buying centers, and outlet malls rising importantly some twelvemonth implicit twelvemonth (YoY) and period implicit period (MoM)," according to information from Placer.ai.

In fact, each benignant of promenade saw a postulation rebound successful October.

"All promenade formats saw wide YoY sojourn gains successful October 2025, perchance signaling renewed user enthusiasm heading into the vacation season. And though indoor malls led the maturation — continuing their beardown show passim 2025 — open-air buying centers and outlet malls besides returned to affirmative territory aft 4 consecutive months of declines, underscoring the breadth and spot of the October recovery," the information supplier shared.

The information suggests that user are getting an aboriginal commencement connected the vacation buying season, oregon that they are astatine slightest opening to look for deals.

"The MoM information underscores the standard of this recovery. In October 2025, visits roseate sharply compared to September 2025 — up 6.1% for Indoor Malls, 5.5% for Open-Air Shopping Centers, and 7.9% for Outlet Malls. In comparison, October 2024 saw lone flimsy MoM increases of 0.5%, 2.1%, and 1.4%, respectively, compared to September 2024," Placer.ai reported.

But conscionable due to the fact that consumers sojourn malls does not mean that they are opening up their wallets. Foot postulation does not ever equate with spending.

Bath & Body Works, a promenade staple, has been moving its stores extracurricular of promenade locations, closing dozens of stores arsenic portion of that process.

Bath & Body Works' erstwhile CFO, Wendy C. Arlin, explained the chain's store program astatine the Goldman Sachs retail conference.

"99% of our stores are currency travel positive. So it's large to look crossed the fleet and spot that
we don't person immoderate fiscal challenges successful the existent property fleet. So I deliberation that's the headline. We person strategically, arsenic you pointed out, been focused connected migrating our fleet to beryllium much off-mall than successful the mall," she said.

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That program has been progressive since precocious 2022.

"So a batch of what — essentially, the stores that we're opening each twelvemonth are successful off-mall
locations and the stores that we're closing each twelvemonth are successful promenade locations. So close now, we're astatine astir 50-50. We deliberation astatine the extremity state, it's astir apt astir 2/3 mall, 1/3 connected mall," she added.