Back to the Bazaar: Destructuring the Data Mall

Shopping Malls are a focus point for the lives of the people. In a certain sense they have become the modern equivalent of a square. Along the years, this attraction center has followed a definite evolutionary path, becoming wider, bigger, looking to maximize the comfort of the customers: a better place, for better sales. In this paper, we analyze the shopping mall under a different perspective, and check if this evolutionary line is in fact the best possible one, or if instead the mall could be shaped differently. We propose enrichment of the mall with a smart structure that is lightweight and economic, turning two existing malls into Data Malls that allow to collect data relating to customers and analyze their relationship to the overall performance of the mall. We introduce a counterintuitive structural modification of the mall (narrowing) that somehow turns back the wheel of time, destructuring a mall by bringing it back to ancient Bazaar-like structures, and then analyze its impact. Surprisingly, we find that this structural modification leads to a significant increase in the overall mall performance, a result that impacts the recent evolution of the mall, and that suggests that maybe the malls as we know them are far from being the better ones, and that maybe ancient Bazaars and tiny old shopping streets in fact can and should play a primary role in the malls of the future.