At the time, the shopping centre was a busy place that seemed to have a bright future. The strip mall was fading and its prospects looked even worse when the anchors at either end, a Canadian Tire store and hardware chain, pulled out.

These days, the enclosed shopping centre looks like a white elephant that's close to going on life support. There are empty stores sprinkled throughout. The anchors, Sears and The Bay, seem tired and uninspired. And without the teenage girls scurrying giddily from store to store, the place would be nearly empty most of the time.

The strip mall, meanwhile, has been revitalized. Two new anchors, Shopper's Drug Mart and Sobey's, along with several other service-oriented tenants ensure that the place is always busy.

The decline of the shopping centre has been hastened by another development. Two new power centres with big-box stores of every description have been built within its trading area over the past decade. The parking lots are congested most weekends, as well as during the long Christmas shopping season.

According to retail experts, what has happened in our neighbourhood is happening in many places across the country. Since 1990, there has only been one enclosed shopping centre built in Canada - the vast Vaughan Mills in a suburb north of Toronto. John Marino, president of The Marino Group, a retail leasing company, says many B- and C-class malls, which tend to be smaller and serve local communities, are being demolished and the land redeveloped.

"We were overbuilt," he says. "There will be a day, but it'll be 15 years from now, when people are building enclosed malls again."

Richard Talbot, president of Talbot Consultants International, agrees that developers and retailers went overboard building malls.

"Most should never have been built in the first place," he says. "We were all mesmerized by the enclosed mall. We were told it's cold and miserable in Canada for so many months of the year that it had to be enclosed. That's not how people shopped for 500 years. They shopped on the street."

Many malls are struggling with internal problems that threaten their survival. Heating, air conditioning, municipal taxes and marketing add to everyone's operating costs. Marino says the anchors are demanding breaks on these fixed expenses, which means the stores in between are forced to pick up a bigger part of the tab.

But many of those smaller retailers now have an attractive alternative - the power centre. The rent is generally cheaper and they pay to heat and air-condition their stores, and hundreds or even thousands of metres of climate-controlled corridors with cathedral ceilings that are a feature of most enclosed shopping centres.

Consolidation within the retail industry is also hurting the shopping centre, says Talbot. "A significant number of retailers are owned by a small number of companies," he says, "and the major shopping centres are owned by three groups, Rio-Can, Cadillac-Fairview and Ivanhoe Cambridge. They're concentrating on their prime projects and investments. They're dumping the losers."

Now there are two other emerging threats to the enclosed shopping mall - revitalized downtown cores and so called lifestyle centres, the latter an idea imported from the U.S. Talbot says lifestyle centres are under construction in Vancouver, Calgary, Barrie, Ont., and the Leaside neighbourhood in Toronto.

These centres comprise multiple retail outlets side by side with streetfront access, sometimes with residential space on the second floor. Some of the larger ones in the U.S. occupy four to eight city blocks and create the effect of a traditional downtown - something that appeals to an older demographic, says Marino.

"You have an aging population that is more affluent and more discerning," he says. "They want a more sophisticated environment. They don't want to shop in places where kids are hanging out like mall rats. They've been to Florida or California or London and Rome. They want to walk outdoors and enjoy the sun or the rain."

In other words, they're looking for a fresh experience and that's something most enclosed shopping malls just can't deliver.

(D'Arcy Jenish can be reached at jenish@businessedge.ca)