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Show 5,000 Shopping Centers Now Have Annua! Sales of 5 5 Billion Shopping centers have increased in-creased from about 100 to around 5000 in the past decade and now do an estimated volume of 55 billion dollars a year about one out of every four dollars spent in retail trade. Part circus, part civic center, mainly parking lot, the modern shopping center provides maximum maxi-mum come-on with minimum traffic congestion, writes Don Wharton in a May Reader's Digest Di-gest article, "Those Amazing Shopping Centers." Garden State Plaza in New Jersey is probably the nation's largest shopping center in terms of retail-selling space: 1,350,000 square feet. Nearly as large and the most successful of all shopping shop-ping centers, writes Wharton, is Northland, near Detroit. Northland, with 110 stores, 85 acres of parking lots, an 18-man police force and more than 4000 employes, does an annual business busi-ness in excess of 100 million dollars. It has a mile and a quarter quar-ter of storefronts through which 16 million people pass annually. Almost everything imaginable takes place in shopping centers. There have been cases of car theft, fatal accidents, murder, suicide. Every center's most common com-mon problem is the shopper who can't remember where she parked her car. The usual solution: solu-tion: put her in a shopping center police car, drive her up and down until she spots her vehicle. Keys locked in cars are another problem prob-lem and police cars carry door-opening door-opening tools. The article is condensed from the Plymouth Traveler, publication publica-tion of Chrysler's Plymouth Division. |
