Threshold Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

champion of public housing and was named commissionerof the Federal Public Housing Authority by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. The opportunity to plan the model city of Park Forest, a suburb of Chicago, brought Philip to the Windy City after the war, where several Klutznick retail projects were developed in the 1950s. These centers were not enclosed. On a windy winter day in suburban Chicago, shopping at a Klutznick mall can be a physical challenge equal to reaching the North Pole. Later, Water Tower Place would be his crowning achievement. Again, he lived over the store (in this case Marshall Field, Lord & Taylor, and dozens of smaller shops), occupying one of the building’s luxury residential units on the upper floors.
    The character of these companies and the quality of the projects they developed were clearly influenced by the vocational roots of their founders—carpenters, builders, attorneys, engineers, leasing agents, supermarket managers—and the relationships they formed with major department store chains. The Simons hitched their star to Montgomery Ward, an uninspired retailer, to say the least. DeBartolo forged a great relationship with Sears, Klutznick with Marshall Field, and, again, Hahn with Broadway Stores. I was fortunate enough to earn the trust and respect of multiple national and regional department store chains, including Macy’s, Sears, Marshall Field, Lord & Taylor, J. L. Hudson, Allied Stores, Saks Fifth Avenue, and promising upstarts like Kohl’s and JCPenney. In fact, I built Penney’s first full-line store at Southland.
    Which brings me back to James O. York and our Macy’s discussion.
    Jim was open-minded enough to hear me out.
    Together, we considered the potential draw of a much larger project and a much larger store, in which Macy’s would be able to present its apparel lines and soft goods in depth, fulfilling the promise of its respected brand. We drove around in the market. Jim eventually agreed with my assessment that recently built and soon-to-be-built highways were changing everything. Old shopping patterns were meaningless. Trade areas of 50,000 to 60,000 peoplewere expanding overnight to 250,000. Without the freeways, our trade area would have encompassed a five-mile circle, in which shoppers would travel twenty minutes to the center. With the freeway, the circle expanded to ten miles, which meant three times as many people. The freeways around Sunvalley had the capacity to deliver in twenty minutes or less more than a quarter million people living within ten to fifteen miles of the center. (As we got more sophisticated, comprehensive drive-time studies and license plate surveys were conducted by our market research department to establish the size of our primary trade areas with scientific precision.)
    Even though Concord and the communities surrounding it were for the most part commuter towns, the market’s young families were not going to cross bridges to shop in downtown San Francisco with any regularity. And every day, more and more companies were shifting jobs out from San Francisco.
    Offering two hundred shops and three or more department stores would create the critical mass to establish Sunvalley as the dominant shopping destination for this growing market. I was planning the equivalent mall shop space of two department stores (approximately 400,000 square feet), offering the same categories of goods along with around 50,000 square feet of food and services. The specialty shops would compete head-to-head with the department stores. Customers would respond to the convenience of a one-stop comparison shopping opportunity, and the area would not be splintered by multiple smaller, poorly planned retail properties. At least that was my theory.
    Thank goodness Jim was convinced. And in the end, a compelling opportunity overcame entrenched threshold resistance to a new way of thinking. Jim made his positive recommendation to Macy’s corporate