Miscellaneous Definitions — accessories, trims, tools and general fashion terms from Apparel Search
A strip mall is an open-air shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front, face major traffic arterials, and tend to be self-contained with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods. They are also occasionally referenced as a shopping plaza, shopping center, mini-mall or shopping parade, and with their individual storefront doors opening to the sidewalk they are a common, convenient setting for everyday apparel, footwear and neighborhood retail shopping trips.
No, this is not a place for people to take off their closes (the noun "strip" means the act of undressing).
A strip mall is an open-air shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front. They face major traffic arterials and tend to be self-contained with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods.
Strip malls are also occassionally referenced as a shopping plaza, shopping center, mini-mall, or shopping parade.
The strip mall is the simplest shopping center form: a single row of stores, built as one development, fronted by a sidewalk and a large parking lot. There is no enclosed concourse, no interior corridor and no anchor atrium. Each shop has its own door opening directly to the outside, its own sign facing the road, and its parking directly in front. That arrangement explains the format's economics. Developed as a unit, a strip can be built in one phase on a single parcel, leased shop by shop, and extended or re-tenanted without redesigning a whole mall. For tenants - the small apparel boutiques, shoe stores, dry cleaners, salons and food outlets that fill most strips - the draw is visibility and convenience: a driver passing on the road can read every sign, pull in, park steps from the door, shop and leave without entering a parking structure or walking an enclosed mall.
Location follows from that design. Strip malls face major traffic arterials, the wide, heavily traveled roads where passing cars are the customer base. They tend to be self-contained, with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods: the site plan assumes arrival by automobile, so sidewalks run along the storefronts rather than reaching outward to homes behind the center. The name itself needs one clarification for apparel readers: a strip mall has nothing to do with undressing. The strip is the long, narrow strip of land and building, not the act of taking off clothes; the stores are simply arranged in a strip.
Strip malls are also occasionally referenced as a shopping plaza, shopping center, mini-mall or shopping parade. The shifting names reflect region and scale more than any difference in form: call it a plaza in one town or a parade in another, and you will still find the same row, the same front parking and the same arterial frontage. What distinguishes the strip from an enclosed mall is exposure and scale. An enclosed mall turns inward, gathering shoppers into a controlled interior and asking them to park and walk; a strip turns outward, showing every storefront to the street and letting each visit be as short as a single errand. That makes strips especially suited to repeat, everyday retail - alterations, basics, footwear repair, value apparel - where customers return weekly and prize speed over spectacle.
For clothing retail, the strip mall is therefore a working landscape rather than a destination. Independent apparel stores gain road frontage they could never afford inside a regional mall, chains gain a standardized small box they can repeat along every arterial, and shoppers gain a predictable pattern: drive, park in front, walk the sidewalk, and visit several small stores in one stop. Developed as a unit yet divided into individually signed shops, self-contained yet entirely open to the road, the strip mall remains the most common open-air form in American retail - a row of stores whose plain layout is precisely what makes it easy to build, easy to lease and easy to shop.
A strip mall is an open-air shopping center where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front.
Strip malls face major traffic arterials. They tend to be self-contained, with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods, so most visitors arrive by car and park in front.
Strip malls are also occasionally referenced as a shopping plaza, shopping center, mini-mall or shopping parade. The names vary by region, but the row format is the same.