InvestigationFaced with a drastic drop in their attendance since the start of the health crisis and the shift of consumers to online shopping, they are exploring other models.
The shopping center model, which had once weakened independent city center stores, is in turn being attacked by digital platforms, a competition that has been palpable in recent years but amplified by the health crisis. With Amazon or Alibaba, « the consumer now has the largest shopping centers in the world in his pocket”, quips Antoine Frey, president of the Frey real estate group. A real nightmare for places whose strength was to bring together under one roof all the goods and services of daily life. Their owners, from Unibail (URW) to Altarea via Klépierre, can only wonder: how to convince the brands to continue to rent spaces and the French to still make the trip?
It is no longer excluded to see the positions reversed between these temples of abundance steeped in the imagination of the “glorious thirty” and the limitless multi-brand spaces of cyberspace. If the composite patchwork formed by the eight hundred shopping centers in France claims 25% of retail trade, online sales professionals predict “reasonably” that the Web will capture 20% of this same cake by 2030. One peril for another, their detractors will no doubt think, who see the same symbol of overconsumption in these two generations of marketplaces.
In his book The platformization of consumption (Gallimard, 2021), the economist Philippe Moati returns to the difference in dynamics at work, which has emerged even more blatantly since the health crisis. Shopping centers are “established for more than ten years in a trajectory of contraction of their attendance”, he writes. Penalized by lockdowns and restrictions, they saw their visitor numbers plunge by 28.1% in 2020 compared to 2019 and once more by 0.8% last year, according to data from the National Council of Tourism. shopping centers (CNCC). While online merchants, open around the clock, gained four years of growth in the meantime.
Pleasure purchase
Salvatore Perri, the director and shareholder of the Vapiano restaurant chain in France, found himself at the forefront of this retail revolution: twenty of his thirty-three Italian restaurants are located in large regional complexes such as Les Quatre -Time. “In the Paris-La Défense office district, footfall has plunged by 40% in two years and everything has come together at the height of the crisis, he testifies. Telecommuting has deprived Vapiano of a large part of its lunchtime clientele, the cinema, in competition with Netflix, no longer brought evening traffic and the rise of e-commerce has caused store traffic to collapse. . »
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