Fingerlakes Mall starts ‘Buy Local’ program as it seeks to boost occupancy rate

AURELIUS – Strolling through Fingerlakes Mall near Auburn on a recent Tuesday afternoon, a reporter sees only 15 of the 61 store spaces are open. Music echoes off empty walls and lonely storefronts. Still, Vin Gleason, the mall’s marketing director, is confident that a new initiative is starting to turn things around. 

The mall’s occupancy rate is currently about 55 percent, Gleason says in an interview in the shopping center’s food court, down from about 65 percent in 2013 and 2014 as the mall lost a series of national anchor tenants. Like other malls across America, the boom in online shopping and competition with high-end shopping centers has squeezed Fingerlakes Mall, which first opened in 1980. It also faces demographic challenges owing to the Auburn area’s small population.

“Corporate businesses are leaving demographics like this all over the country. If you don’t have an area with 50,000 people in it, they’re pulling out,” says Gleason, who has been the mall’s marketing director for three years. That’s why in early December, Gleason decided to make a drastic shift in how the mall leases its storefronts. In the middle of a craft fair, he went up to the local businesses and asked them, “If I was to throw together a program that would put you in a storefront what would you say?” Three businesses signed up that very day, Dec. 13, before Gleason had even drawn up the paperwork. Today, 13 local businesses have applied and been accepted into Fingerlakes Mall’s Buy Local program. 

Buy Local
The program allows small businesses to set up short-term leases where the owners determine how many days they can afford to stay open. Local stores start with two to three days per week and slowly work toward a full-time lease, say Gleason. Business owners applying must have their business certificate and insurance to qualify. 

Besides getting charged part-time rent, benefits for these small businesses include free use or half-off the original price for any of the event rooms in the mall, depending on if the businesses are full-time or part-time tenants. Just having a storefront in the mall helps with advertising and marketing for these local businesses, says Gleason. 

For Mike Soper, owner of Bradford Heights Delights, a bakery, catering, and custom cakes business, and the first Buy Local tenant at Fingerlakes, the storefront has helped boost revenue eightfold. “More people know about him who do special orders; he used to run it out of his house,” Gleason says. “Just the normal foot traffic that he wouldn’t have at his house is a benefit for him.”

Soper was so busy with Valentine’s Day that he was working 18-hour days to fill orders, he says. “800 cupcakes for [one day] alone,” Soper wrote in a message. 

At Teddy Mountain, a stuff-your-own-teddy-bear franchise business, the storefront attracts an entirely new clientele, says franchise owner Tina Casbarro. Opening in early January, Casbarro says the second location offers more space for birthday parties, as its first location in Weedsport only fits 15 people while the new store fits twice that number. Casbarro and her husband Jim Casbarro are the sole employees and continue to juggle staffing the two stores with hopes of hiring more people in the future, says Tina Casbarro. Teddy Mountain is open from Thursday through Saturday and in a few months will also be open on Tuesdays and Sundays.

“The [Buy Local] program is set up for short-term leases to help them grow,” says Gleason.

At the end of the year, Gleason says he wants to see 70 percent to 80 percent of the stores become full-time tenants. Two Buy Local stores have already pledged to be full-time: Heaven Sent Creations and Twissted R/C Racetrack. Without the 13 signed local stores, Gleason estimates the mall’s occupancy would currently be only 20 percent. Local stores that will open this month are Twissted R/C Racetrack, Seasons Under Glass, and Powers Images. There are no national businesses opening in the near future, Gleason says. But the mall is “in talks with about a dozen,” Fingerlakes Mall General Manager Rene Patterson says.

Industry trends/new vision
Fingerlakes Mall’s efforts are in response to a series of blows it has suffered in a changing retail landscape.

“Retail is not what it used to be,” says Gleason. “We’ve lost every corporate company except for Bass Pro [Shops], JCPenney, and GNC.” Stores that have left include Claire’s, GameStop, Gertrude Hawk Chocolates, Kay Jewelers, and Sears. 

Patterson agrees that malls are facing tough times. In the 2013 to 2015 period, Fingerlakes Mall attracted about 2.5 million to 3 million visitors each year. “I’d want much higher,” Patterson says. “We should easily double that.” 

To put the numbers into context, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, boasts 40 million visitors annually and Destiny USA in Syracuse says it sees almost 30 million visitors annually according to its website. By the end of 2016, Patterson wants increase foot traffic at Fingerlakes by half a million.

To grow its foot traffic, Fingerlakes Mall is reinventing itself and becoming a community destination, says Patterson. To combat the strong threat of online shopping, Gleason and Patterson are looking into giving shoppers a unique experience that they cannot find on the web.

The mall is seeking to attract a more diverse tenant base beyond typical retail shops. “The future of the mall that we’re looking at is more like a village,” says Gleason. 

Fingerlakes Mall is interested in attracting medical centers, restaurants, doctor’s offices, lawyer’s offices, grocery stores, and even residential housing or hotels for the property, says Gleason. This vision is years in the making, but he believes it is the future of malls. 

The industry is increasingly building multi-faceted centers for all of a consumer’s needs. Township 5 in Camillus is adopting this idea by describing itself as a “super regional, mixed-use center including housing, office, retail, food and entertainment destinations,” according to Cameron Group LLC, a DeWitt–based leasing and management company, that oversees Township 5.

Instead of anchoring with a major upscale fashion retailer, Township 5 is anchored with the first Costco in upstate New York. 

Mall failure is a growing trend, according to a report from Congress for the New Urbanism, which says it is “an international nonprofit organization working to build vibrant communities where people have diverse choices for how they live, work, and get around.” These decaying malls “will be a perpetual problem associated with the contemporary practice of retail mall management,” according to the report. 

Saving malls will require redevelopment, and at Fingerlakes Mall, Gleason expects a full redevelopment within the next six years. 

Event-based marketing
Responding to the mall’s foot-traffic difficulties, Gleason realized he needed to add events to draw in the community.

“I saw how retail was going across the country and how it was leaving everywhere, so I created centers for birthday parties, nightly events, businesses,” says Gleason. 

Last year, Fingerlakes Mall hosted 270 events and expects to increase that number in 2016. Gleason created four event spaces for the community to rent out. One of the spaces, the community room, is already booked a year in advance. Events are typically booked for Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts troops, birthday parties, and bridal showers.

One event that led to the idea of the Buy Local program was the craft fair. Before Gleason, the mall attempted a craft fair in 2007 but didn’t attract enough interest, he says. In his first year, 2013, Gleason signed 20 business vendors and four to five nonprofits for the craft fair. This past year, nearly 50 vendors each came to the craft fair and the “Midnight Madness” event, a pre-Christmas affair where the mall encourages stores to stay open until midnight while also showcasing vendors at tables in the mall concourse.

These vendors bring in crucial revenue on the weekends to help make up for revenue shortfalls resulting from fewer stores being open on the weekdays. “It’s real tough to get any dollars these days,” says Gleason. “The way I’m making it up is with weekend revenue.”

In his first year, Gleason created Toddler Tuesdays, an event where families with children under the age of 6 could hang out and play in a bounce house. Thursdays have become Karaoke Night and Fridays are Family Game Night. These events are free for the community.

After conducting surveys on how people were finding out about his weekly events, Gleason learned 96 percent of respondents discovered them through Facebook. 

“You get a big block of money to spend on advertising, newspapers, radio,” Gleason says. “After seeing the surveys, I said, ‘why in this given year am I spending $40,000 on radio and nothing on events?’ So I reversed the two.” 

Gleason took all the money from his advertising budget and reinvested it into community events, hoping to attract more visitors to the stores left standing.

Outreach to charities
Gleason is no stranger to the nonprofit world. Before joining the mall, Gleason was CEO and president of Run For Life Inc., a national nonprofit children’s health organization. The organization created and designed races all across the state to promote physically healthy lifestyles for children. 

Though he enjoyed his charity work, Gleason says his work put a strain on his family’s finances. “I was helping hundreds of thousands of kids, but at the end of the day I wasn’t feeding my own,” Gleason says. Run For Life dissolved in 2013.

In an effort to continue his philanthropic mantra, Gleason opened the community room at Fingerlakes Mall for nonprofits to hold events free of charge. “My policy is always to be tax free and rent free for 501(c)(3) nonprofits; that’s the background I came from,” Gleason says. “People always nickel and dimed me to death.” 

In just two years, the mall has gone from helping five charities to more than 60. Even if these charities are not paying for the community room, they are helping bring in foot traffic. Drawing people in is half the battle, Gleason notes.

Next steps
Free events and local businesses are just the beginning for Fingerlakes Mall. By 2020, Gleason and Patterson expect a mixed-use facility that will draw in the Finger Lakes population. Both men say they are talking to a national grocery store chain about a potential anchor spot and also speaking to a dozen national businesses that they hope to close on deals with in the upcoming years. 

“All the malls are going through a tough time; we want to be different,” Patterson says. “We are in the conceptual stage but want to possibly be a high residential area or a senior service mixed-use facility.” Incorporating doctors’ offices, residential areas, and a grocery store are all in the plan and will guide the mall toward a comprehensive center. 

Another development that will hopefully increase foot traffic at Fingerlakes Mall and sales at its retailers is the Lago Resort & Casino under construction nearby. The Lago Resort & Casino, just 14 miles away in Tyre, is on track to open in the first half of 2017, according to its website. Patterson says Fingerlakes Mall should benefit. “The casino will bring new people,” Patterson says. “They will drive right by us and have to stop.”

The $425 million casino will host a “207-room hotel, spa, multiple restaurants and lounges featuring local fare” according to its website. With a new attraction coming to the Finger Lakes region, Patterson is positive it can only be good news for the mall.

Reinventing the Fingerlakes Mall will take time, but that’s fine with Gleason. “I have a drive probably that no one else has in the world. Other people see issues as roadblocks; I see them as opportunities.”