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CENTERS VIE TO SCORE SALES AT WINTER GAMES

By Maura K. Ammenheuser

The Gateway faces the plaza where Olympic medals will be presented.

With the 2002 Winter Olympics opening this month, this is Salt Lake City’s golden moment. But there is less certainty about how much green the games will generate for the state’s shopping centers.

Atlanta’s retail establishments report that while the 1996 Olympic Games brought thousands of visitors to the area, many locals stayed home to avoid the traffic and crowds.

But for all that, shopping center owners are pulling out all the stops to mark the occasion. The games, opening here Feb. 8, are expected to bring multitudes of people to this mountainous playground for a 17-day international extravaganza — The Salt Lake City Olympic Committee predicts 70,000 to 80,000 people a day — and owners are bending over backward to attract this once-in-a-lifetime crowd.

“We’re trying to [provide] an appropriate welcome to tourists,” said G. Rex Frazier, president of J.P. Realty, which owns four Utah malls, including the 757,000-square-foot Cottonwood Mall in Salt Lake City, where the company is headquartered.

“The major objective is to make an impression while people are here,” echoed Melissa Wayment, marketing director at downtown’s ZCMI Center Mall (which stands for Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institute; it’s owned by the Mormon church).

A sampler of the preparations:
ZCMI and the mall across the street, Crossroads Plaza, with which it has a joint marketing program, helped sponsor the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team.

Crossroads — which has an Olympic merchandise store and the only U.S. Ski Team shop — will get extra help from its management company, Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties, which is sending employees skilled in grand openings and other big events to Salt Lake City this month. At press time managers also were considering extending the center’s nighttime hours.

Cottonwood Mall and J.P. Realty’s Provo Town Center will also be welcoming foreign visitors. The latter, in Provo, a city of about 105,000 people 40 miles away from Salt Lake City, is a stop on the shuttle route between Olympic venues.

The Olympics will figure prominently at The Gateway, a 2.5 million-square-foot, mixed-use project with 700,000 square feet of retail that opened in November in the downtown. The center is right next to a plaza where medals will be handed out, and it is heralding the games with a Wall of Honor lauding Olympic volunteers and contributors, and an Olympic-themed statue and fountain.

“In February, Salt Lake City will be the focus of everybody in the world,” said Jake Boyer, project manager.

The games also boosted ZCMI’s temporary tenant roster. “Smaller [operators] think, ‘maybe this is my chance,’” Wayment said.

Even centers far away from the games are joining in. For instance, the Olympic torch will stop at Red Cliffs Mall, another J.P. Realty center, in St. George, 300 miles from Salt Lake, on Feb. 4. The center will host an all-day party culminating in fireworks, Frazier said. He expects a turnout of 30,000 people at the 306,000-square-foot mall.

However, there is a less festive side to the preparations: Malls are taking measures to tighten security, given that the games are a tempting target for terrorists drawn to high-profile international events. The last time the Olympics came to the United States, in July 1996, a bomb killed one person and injured more than 100 people in Atlanta’s Centennial Park. Last fall’s terrorism attacks have only increased jitters.

Officials at all the malls said they have worked with Olympic and city security staffs as well as the U.S. Secret Service.

Meanwhile, mall owners are grappling with the other big issue: How will the Olympics affect sales? Will those hordes of visitors go shopping? Crossroads Plaza expects 24,000 to 80,000 people in the city daily during the games, while ZCMI’s Wayment said she expects 60,000 to 120,000 to congregate near the recently named Olympics Medals Plaza each night. Yet, as Sarah Darke, Crossroad’s marketing director, pointed out, “It’s hard for us to predict how those 17 days will actually affect us.”

There are mixed reports about the impact of the 1996 games on Atlanta’s retail, according to several Salt Lake retail experts who said they spoke with counterparts in Atlanta. Some cited moderate sales gains during the 1996 games; others recalled drops. Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle found that retail sales (not including autos) in the greater metro Atlanta area spiked to $2.2 billion in July 1996, a 5.2 percent jump over the prior month’s levels and a 9.5 percent increase over the previous July.

But not everyone benefited.

“We really didn’t see significant swings either way,” said Michele Rothstein, vice president of marketing for Chelsea GCA, Roseland, N.J. Chelsea opened Georgia Premium Outlets 40 minutes north of Atlanta just months before the 1996 games.

Some Atlantans recalled that the city’s normally clogged highways emptied during the games, probably because locals stayed home or left town, intimidated by horrific traffic predictions.

Downtown centers will almost certainly benefit, and “they’ll do well at hotels, gift shops and restaurants,” said John Jones, vice president with CB Richard Ellis in Salt Lake City. Shops farther from hotels and athletic venues will probably see no boom, he predicted, and their traffic may actually drop as locals leave town to avoid crowds.

But others are less sure. As Wayment said, “It’s nothing we’ve ever experienced before.”

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