THE PIER SHOPPING CENTER: CAIRNS, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA
Michael Taylor's Commentary:
(User submitted March 4, 2025)
When I went to Australia from December 2019 to January 2020 with my family we visited Cairns (lovely city by the way) and stumbled on a mall (they are called Shopping Centres in Australia) that seems to be dead due to a combination of overmalling, some poor tenant decisions, and competition from a local night market. Eeally the whole mall is full of bizzare choices.
For starters it seems this mall opened sometime in 1989 and looks alive and well on the outside, there are multiple resturaunts lining the waterfront part of the mall that are doing well at least in 2020 when I visited, seeing more recent quips from netizens it seems this situation has not changed either
But the deceptively lively facade isn't where the oddities end. This mall has one anchor, and it is a strange one. The Pier is anchored by a hotel called the Shangri La.
Another oddity (and perhaps a big reason this mall is failing) is from what I've heard (and seen when I went to a very much alive mall elsewhere in Cairns) is they usually have a supermarket inside their malls themselves, and not as an anchor which makes people go in and draw them to other stores.
In the malls state on my visit just before COVID shut the world down it was also clear that at one point they had stores on two floors, these second floors have now been converted to offices, and a decent amount of stores on the ground floor are empty.
This is a small mall as well, meaning not very many store spaces available to start with.
I made a video on this mall shortly after my visit as once I realized this was my first dead mall I just had to record it.
As for how this mall got this way, my guess is the spiral started due to competition from a vastly larger mall nearby that opened in the 90's (which is the one I went to that had the grocery store) with further pressure from the Cairns Night Market, and another large mall called The Orchid which I passed by a few times.
Attached will be a link to the video on my YouTube channel of my stroll through this dead mall.
https://youtu.be/gZODiyxck8M?si=N6WtcuamdjWd3czv.
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