Out of town retailing is arguably a more convenient experience which guarantees a better profit for the retailer. The Trafford Centre is ideally located along the M60 and is easily accessible from junctions 9 and 10 with bus links from Manchester and Stockport town centres. It guarantees lower traffic; free parking and various other attractions e.g. laser quest, cinema, dodgems, bowling, Lego land and an arcade. The indoor nature of the shopping centres also means that shoppers are not subject to the weather, which would more than likely effect sales on the high street. With access being this easy, The Trafford Centre has a much greater sphere of influence as a single retailer where it attracts 95% of people from within a 50 mile radius. The building of The Trafford Centre had a wider impact on surrounding areas like Altrincham. Altrincham’s high street lost its usual local consumer base of 212,000 residents as a result causing many of the shops to close. The Arndale centre, located in Manchester’s CBD also suffered as a result where it had to recover from the 1996 bombings as well as compete with the rapidly established Trafford Centre.
Out of town shopping centres do however have beneficial implications on the surrounding areas. They offer a mass-scale creation of jobs in both the retailing and the upkeep of a sizeable build - The Trafford centre currently employs 7,000 people from a local workforce and Merry Hill similarly employs 2,700 locals and has 21 million visitors per year. Also for example, The Mall in Cribbs Causeway was built within a suburban setting which means that it is the nearest source of large-scale employment for much of the surrounding population – offering slightly increased rates on employment and benefiting from an influx of workers. The inner city area also benefits from a reduction in the amount of traffic and consequently reduced congestion in the CBD and inner city areas.
However, as congestion lessens within the inner city area, increased road use is a common complaint often associated with out of town shopping centres. They can attract vast amounts of people in a single day; the Trafford Centre has 27 million visitors each year and this means that there is often heavy congestion on the M60’s Barton Bridge causing a negative impact for local people commuting and traveling from within the city outwards. Town centres, having public transport systems are accessible to virtually everyone but the out-of-town centres can be difficult and expensive to get to for those without cars. This means that the poor, the under 17’s who cannot drive or have willing access, single parent families etc. are among the people who get excluded from accessibility and the retailing experience.
The shopping centres also have an economic impact on their surrounding areas. Sometimes such centres can pose healthy competition to other areas which may then respond with their own developments. One example is that of the ‘Touchwood’ centre in Solihull; since the construction of Merry Hill, Solihull as a whole began struggling to compete with the modernity and popularity and the Touchwood centre was built as a gesture of healthy competition.
It combined with major corporations such as the Solihull Metropolitan council, the John Lewis Partnership and Jobcentreplus, as well as smaller local retailers to help modernise the area and inject a huge amount of capital in order to stimulate the local economy.
Overall, out of town retailing has both its benefits and its drawbacks; they bring wealth and job opportunities that provide easily accessible employment on a large scale in a sector that remains the fastest growing sector of all retailing formats. Impacts for consumers generally consist of positive ones; they get to walk around out of the weather in an area that’s easier to access than the CBD, benefit from lower cost parking because of the vast parking space and evidence shows that 24% of the Trafford Centre visitors visit once a week and just under 40% visiting once or twice a month. However, they can similarly take away wealth from an area (inner-city mostly) and provide even greater traffic congestion on a larger scale than the CBD but just on the outskirts of town and on Greenfield sites in the countryside. This often means pollution, loss of habitat, farmer’s land being split by new roads to support the shopping centre and damage to the countryside. The encouragement of such centers has had an effect urban sprawl and the eventual loss of large areas of open space and country side will inevitably result in the decline of ‘green suburbs’.
