page_title: Shopping
section_title: Shopping hubs
hierarchical_section_title: Shopping / Shopping venues / Shopping hubs
caption_attribution_description: English: Pedestrians window-shopping at Ritts, a women's clothing store, at 97 Rideau Street, Ottawa, Canada. Français&#160;: La façade de la boutique de mode féminine «Ritts», située au 97, rue Rideau à Ottawa, avec des mannequins en vitrines revêtus des nouveautés de la maison.
context_page_description: Shopping is an activity in which a customer browses the available goods or services presented by one or more retailers with the potential intent to purchase a suitable selection of them. A typology of shopper types has been developed by scholars which identifies one group of shoppers as recreational shoppers, that is, those who enjoy shopping and view it as a leisure activity.
  Online shopping has become a major disruptor in the retail industry as consumers can now search for product information and place product orders across different regions. Online retailers deliver their products directly to the consumers' home, offices or wherever they want. The B2C process has made it easy for consumers to select any product online from a retailer's website and to have it delivered relatively quickly. Using online shopping methods, consumers do not need to consume energy by physically visiting physical stores. This way they save time and the cost of travelling. A retailer or a shop is a business that presents a selection of goods and offers to trade or sell them to customers for money or other goods.
  Shoppers' shopping experiences may vary.
context_section_description: A larger commercial zone can be found in many cities, more formally called a central business district, but more commonly called "downtown" in the United States, or the "high street" in Britain, and souks in Arabic speaking areas. 
  Shopping hubs, or shopping centers, are collections of stores; that is a grouping of several businesses in a compact geographic area. It consists of a collection of retail, entertainment and service stores designed to serve products and services to the surrounding region.
  Typical examples include shopping malls, town squares, flea markets and bazaars.
  Traditionally, shopping hubs were called bazaars or marketplaces; an assortment of stalls lining streets selling a large variety of goods.
  The modern shopping centre is now different from its antecedents, the stores are commonly in individual buildings or compressed into one large structure (usually called Mall in the USA).
  The first modern shopping mall in the US was The Country Club Plaza in Kansas City which opened in 1922, from there the first enclosed mall was designed by Victor Gruen and opened in 1956 as Southdale Centre in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. 
  Malls peaked in America in the 1980s-1990s when many larger malls (more than 37,000 sq m in size) were built, attracting consumers from within a 32 km radius with their luxurious department stores.
  Different types of malls can be found around the world. Superregional malls are very large malls that contain at least five department stores and 300 shops. This type of mall attracts consumers from a broad radius (up to a 160-km). A regional mall can contain at least two department stores or "anchor stores". One of the biggest malls in the world is the one near Miami, called "Sawgrass Mills Mall": it has 2,370,610 square feet (220,237 m2) of retail selling space, with over 329 retail outlets and name brand discounters.
  The smaller malls are often called open-air strip centres or mini-marts and are typically attached to a grocery store or supermarket. 
  The smaller malls are less likely to include the same features of a large mall such as an indoor concourse, but are beginning to evolve to become enclosed to comply with all weather and customer preferences.
caption: Window shopping in Ottawa, 1938
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