Retail is dying. What about the mall?

The collapse of Sears is just the (very large) tip of the iceberg.

Once a sturdy shopping staple, where you could pick up anything from a fridge to a baby gift, bankruptcy-plagued Sears Canada is now emptying out hundreds of stores it owns.

That story is echoing across North America. Macy’s and JCPenney are closing stores that once anchored shopping malls. Eaton’s and Zellers are long gone. Even the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company, started in 1670, is looking at deflated sales figures. This week, the Bay announced it would sell a Lord & Taylor flagship store it owns in New York City to a startup company.

Accordingly, the shopping malls that these stores used to anchor are also facing transformation.

For decades, the large department store brought in high volumes of customers who then would wander down the hallways to find the smaller stores selling shoes, jewelry, clothes or cosmetics. Without the big draw of the big store, those specialty stores are now in trouble as well.

“The mall is no longer a popular destination for people to spend their leisure time,” said Martin Qiu, professor of marketing in the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University. “They have other ways to kill time.”

No prizes for guessing that people in their 30s and 40s would rather be on their cellphones or at home watching Netflix than in a shopping mall.

People are also becoming more interested in experiences than things, so they’re spending less money on stuff and more on trips or restaurant meals with friends.

When they do buy things, they’re more often buying online for lower prices. In 2016, total retailing sales in Canada were $576 billion, of which eight to nine per cent were online purchases. That share of online purchases will only go up, Qiu said.

The one-stop convenience of the department store has been replaced by the even more convenient grocery-store-with-benefits, which now sells not only food but also dishes, drugs, small appliances, electronics and clothing — all for low prices. Think of Walmart, or Loblaws.

The other types of stores that will succeed in the future will offer not only shopping but also an experience, Qiu said.

For example, the Loblaws store in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens gives visitors the opportunity to explore the building’s hockey history, sample the food in a café-like setting, and enjoy the charmingly designed displays.

Or Tesla, the maker of electric cars, has stores that let you “interact with the product,” in much the same way Apple stores present their merchandise.

That’s more about the experience and less about making a sale right there.

And what about the malls themselves? They’ve been so important in our culture for so long that the new light rail line in Kitchener and Waterloo will start at one mall, and end at another.

“The buildings will stay, just the stores will be gone,” Qiu said.

Instead of stores, malls could become the home of karate and dance studios, medical offices, churches and schools, Qiu said.

Or perhaps — as is currently proposed for Cambridge — an empty department store could be transformed into a city-owned sports and recreation complex.

Shopping malls are well-situated. They have lots of parking, are often close to highways, and are also transit hubs.

For all these reasons, they’re still attractive places to locate. Ten years from now they probably won’t look too different from the outside. But inside, they’ll be unrecognizable.