Opened in 1990, the North Star was once the commercial pride of the capital. It was the first mainland mall to have indoor elevators, and the first to offer nonstop shopping during the Lunar New Year.
"When I first moved here, there were many shoppers, and things were cheap. But later it started to sell pricey stuff, and there were fewer and fewer people," said Wang Tao, 55, who lives nearby.
And since May 2017, stores have been pulling out of Sogo, one of the largest malls in central Beijing.
In China, if anyone has a say about the future of bricks-and-mortar retail, it will be the e-commerce behemoths.
"Major e-commerce giants like Alibaba and Tencent are moving to the offline space to grab a bigger slice of the retail sales pie (as online represents less than 15 percent of total China retail sales)," Jason Yu, manager of market research firm Kantar Worldpanel, in Shanghai, told China Daily.
"Through further integration between offline facility/service and technology empowerment and big data-driven marketing, they hope to help to drive sales for the offline stores. … Most key retailers' position improved as they sought alliances and implemented O2O (online to offline) strategies," he said.
Competitors Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings, worth a combined $1 trillion, are on a retail-buying binge, making merchants choose sides in a fight for shoppers' digital wallets, Reuters reported.
On Monday, Tencent and JD announced they were teaming up to purchase a stake in China's Better Life Commercial. Better Life operates 592 stores in China.
Since early 2017, Alibaba and Tencent have spent more than $10 billion combined on retail-focused deals.
Cash-rich, the two are looking to win over consumers and store operators to their competing payment, logistics, social media and data services.
Alibaba's Ant Financial leads in mobile payments, which is a nearly $13 trillion battleground with Tencent. Ant operates the top mobile-payment platform, Alipay, while Tencent's system is on its popular Weixin chat app.
Tencent is strong in social media, digital payment and gaming. It also has a stake in JD, as does U.S. retail giant Walmart.
French grocer Carrefour has announced a potential investment from Tencent, which also has invested in Yonghui Superstores, retailers Vipshop Holdings and Heilan Home, mall operator Wanda Commercial and grocer Bubugao.
Alibaba has invested even more heavily in Suning.com, Intime Retail, Sanjiang Shopping Club, Lianhua Supermarket, Wanda Film and home-improvement store Easyhome.
Alibaba invested $486 million in a retail-focused big data firm, saying it could "help brick-and-mortar retailers succeed in the digital age".
"Tie-ups with Alibaba or Tencent can help some of those malls transform themselves faster, providing superior retail experiences," Yu said. "Some of those malls can host Alibaba's new retail experiment Hema Fresh, but in general both Alibaba and Tencent can equip those malls with retail solutions driven by big data and modern retail technology. (Hema Fresh features self-checkout and cashless payments.)
The Hema supermarket has opened 25 outlets in seven Chinese cities, where consumers can shop for groceries and have food cooked under one roof. JD opened its first offline fresh food supermarket in January.
"In the industry reshuffle, new retail, which integrates online with offline shopping and provides a refreshing shopping experience, is taking hold," said Cao Lei, head of China's E-Commerce Research Center.
Alibaba has created a Buy+ app that offers a virtual shopping mall that customers can browse through, clicking on products they like.
"As users continue to engage with the platform in more meaningful ways, we are fostering next-generation consumption features, such as virtual reality, to transcend the overall user experience," Alibaba Chief Marketing Officer Chris Tung said.
Buy+ provides 360-degree views using a VR headset. Shoppers can even have virtual models showcase apparel and accessories on a catwalk.
There are fun uses for tech, too.
Mosaic Shanghai Mall recently broke ground on the Shanghai Dungeon, a local version of Madame Tussaud operator Merlin Entertainment's London Dungeon, to help its retail center pull in more crowds.
The Kunming Aegean Sea Shopping Park in Yunnan province has an equestrian school where patrons can ride, feed and groom horses.
The Beijing Mall on Wangfujing Street offers a Boeing 737 flight simulator experience for about $450.
Displays containing scannable "boyfriends" attracted crowds of shoppers in Haikou in December, hkwb.net reported. Photos from the Friendship Shopping Mall show six tall men in suits standing in doll-like boxes, each with a scannable code.
For 1 yuan, the paid escorts snap photos and keep their clients company for an hour, but physical contact is not permitted, signs read.
"I escorted four women on Christmas Eve. They were all in their 20s," said an escort surnamed Zhuang.
According to a recent report by U.S. consulting firm AT Kearney, young consumers prefer experiences to purchases. The firm predicts that by 2030, young people in the U.S. will allocate only half of their shopping spending on products; the rest will go to experiences or experiential products.
"Instead of a retailer, the anchor here is a compelling social experience — perhaps an indoor ski slope, roller coaster, concert space or museum providing immersive, experience-based entertainment," the report said.
"Normal restaurants and cinemas will no longer guarantee their traffic and business success," said Yu of Kantar Worldpanel. "They have to identify some star tenant to draw consumers' attention, either those celebrity/KOL (key opinion leader-) endorsed stores, pop-up stores, popular exhibitions or popular milk tea shops (like Heytea). In short, they have to offer consumers a reason to visit them time after time."
Yu said shopping in China is "extremely competitive", and 900-plus more malls will open in 2018.
"I believe the revenue will increase, especially driven by the growth in the lower-tier cities. However, the new ones will gain at the expense of outdated malls," he said. "There will be more closure and transformation of the old ones, and revenue per mall is likely to fall due to oversupply.
"The malls will have to diversify … offering distinctive features to shoppers, otherwise they won't be able to survive in an oversupply world," Yu said.
