By Dr. Tony Hernandez, Brian Lorch, and Paul Du

This article examines the strategies being employed by Canadian shopping mall management in response to the widespread development and growing popularity of big box retail.  It reports preliminary findings from a study of twenty Canadian shopping malls over the period 1996 to 2006 that found that mall management is increasingly incorporating larger format retailers within and surrounding the mall.  This has included accommodating the space demands of large format retailers by combining existing units within the mall, adding new internal space to malls (i.e., entire new wings), and developing former parking lot space.  Integration of larger format retailers in the tenant mix has also become an important strategy for back-filling space vacated by traditional department store anchor tenants.  The full research findings, based on a larger sample of Canadian malls (including over forty major malls) will be made available to CSCA members in late spring 2009.