With Chick-Fil-A, Victoria’s Secret Closing, Is Illinois’ SouthPark Mall Dead?
When one of the most popular restaurants in the Quad-Cities shuts down a location, how poorly does that location have to be?
Chick-Fil-A, which generates around-the-block lines at its Davenport and Moline John Deere Road locations, announced today it’s closing up its location at Moline’s South Park Mall on Feb. 26. The spot had been open there since 1983.
Yesterday, at the same mall, Victoria’s Secret posted that Valentine’s Day (appropriately enough) was going to be its last day open, and that it was closing up shop at SouthPark.
How many more stores need to close up at SouthPark before SouthPark itself closes? When is the tipping point?
At this point, the mall is a ghost town, and it’s not just because of the ubiquitous excuses for the close of most malls, online shopping and covid. SouthPark has been circling the drain for a decade, since it changed ownership and the new owners decided to jerk up the rent on all of the tenants in a mall that was already seeing declining traffic and revenue.
As a result, the only stores that seem to be able to survive there are huge anchors like Dick’s, VonMaur, and Ashley, which are magnet stores that could do just as well elsewhere on the Illinois side.
Scattered smaller shops seem to be just barely hanging on.
The question is, how much longer until the mall cannot afford to keep itself open given the shortage of rent-paying tenants? It’s not as if there are tons of businesses clamoring to get into a mall that’s charging huge rent for declining traffic.
It’s a sad state of affairs for a mall which was once bustling. Even back in the 2010s, SouthPark still saw big traffic, especially on the weekends and around the holidays.
But if you can’t even get a Chick-Fil-A — arguably one of the most popular restaurants in the area — to succeed and thrive there, what does that say?
Nothing good.
