Allen Smith never has acted like a guy on the ropes. Not when Filene’s closed its doors a couple of years ago. Or when the mammoth Providence Place opened its doors last August. Smith, the general manager of the Rhode Island Mall, has always seemed to carry with him a sense of confidence – even on the days when his mall’s parking lot is mostly empty. Now, maybe we know why.
If the Rhode Island Mall were a basketball team, Smith would be cheered for just signing the biggest free agent out there.
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”You want to be able to go out and get the number one player and build a team around that,” he said.
The Rhode Island Mall will build itself around Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer. Wal-Mart will build a 136,000-square-foot store on the site of the former Filene’s. It is expected to open next spring.
”This will be the foundation on which we build the rest of the mall,” said Smith, who has run Rhode Island Mall since February of 1993 and through several ownership changes.
Smith is a Rhode Islander who said the quest to bring Rhode Island Mall back to prominence has become personal. He grew up and went to school in the area. He has friends and family here.
”The challenge for me has always been to get this property redeveloped,” he said. Over the past several years, the regional battle among malls and shopping plazas for consumer dollars has heightened.
A decade in the making, the $450 million Providence Place is finally inching toward completion. Garden City Shopping Center in Cranston continues to shine. And millions of dollars is currently being invested into reshaping virtually every other major mall facility in the state, including Warwick Mall, where there are plans for new restaurants and movie theaters.
But all along it has been Rhode Island Mall, the first indoor mall in the state, but now that “other mall” in Warwick, which the naysayers had pegged as the likely odd mall out. While business at the nearby Warwick Mall continued to grow, business at Rhode Island Mall dwindled.
But while Nordstrom was settling into its new home in Providence, Rhode Island Mall was busy with a makeover of its own. The state Registry of Motor Vehicles set up an office inside. Chuck -E- Cheese has arrived in the parking lot, as has a Wendy’s.
Smith kept talking about reaching out to middle-class Rhode Islanders, by far the largest segment of the state’s population. And then last week, Smith and the mall’s owners, Zamias Services Inc., unveiled the key to their plan for long-term survival – Wal-Mart.
The Rhode Island Mall Wal-Mart will be the eighth Wal-Mart store in Rhode Island and second in Warwick. The Arkansas-based retail giant is embarking on a similar move in Swansea, where it will replace the former Caldor at Swansea Mall.
Wal-Mart, in the midst of a profitable growth spurt, expects to open 200 new stores in the United States in 2000. In addition, many existing stores are scheduled to be transformed into Wal-Mart Supercenters,
The company is coming off one of the most successful years in its history. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., which includes Sam’s Clubs enjoyed sales of $137.6 billion for the most recent fiscal year – a 17 percent increase over the previous year. There are nearly 2,500 Wal-Mart stores worldwide and nearly 500 Sam’s Clubs. The stores employ more than a million workers.
For the month of August 1999 sales were $13 billion – a 26.9 percent increase over the same period last year.
In Rhode Island, alone, Wal-Mart paid $3.4 million in total state and local taxes last year. An additional $9.8 million in sales taxes was collected and remitted. The company contracts with 256 in-state suppliers and vendors.
Aram Garabedian, a vice president at Bliss Properties, the company that operates Warwick Mall, sees the arrival of Wal-Mart as a positive move because it helps to reinforce the niches that each mall is carving.
Garabedian said that Warwick Mall has definitely lost some business to Providence Place, but is not sure how much. But at the same time, he said, they have picked up some of the business Rhode Island Mall has lost in recent years. He see Rhode Island Mall going after the middle class business and the niche below that, while Warwick Mall will continue to go after middle class business and the niche above it.
“The market is changing,” he said.
Garabedian sees Warwick Mall’s strength in its anchors.
“When you have a Filene’s and a Macy’s – that has broad appeal to a lot of shoppers,” he said.
Less than a mile down the road, at Rhode Island Mall, Smith is staying off the ropes. Help is on the way – big time help. Smith is more determined than ever to turn Rhode Island Mall around.
“I’m not going to stop until we get that done,” Smith said.
And just maybe these “mall wars” won’t produce the casualties so many had expected.
