The shopping center is a statistic in a struggling industry.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Topline: A Georgia shopping center, better known as Starcourt Mall from season three of Netflix’s Stranger Things, is up for sale after sitting mostly empty during an overall tough time for retailers.
- Gwinnett Place’s owners, Moonbeam Capital Partners hasn’t yet set a list price.
- Moonbeam announced redevelopment plans for the Duluth, GA mall in 2017 (which never came to fruition, frustrating locals) and it’s marketing the property as a redevelopment opportunity.
- Netflix scooped up a vacant part of the property and transformed it into Starcourt Mall, the scene of pivotal Stranger Things season three showdowns, complete with 40 stores like the Gap and Sam Goody, along with an accurate mall directory.
- According to the Gwinnett Daily Post, the mall struggled in recent years as competing shopping centers opened nearby and the retail industry changed.
- Retailers across the country—including the Gap—closed at least 6,000 stores this year, outpacing 2018’s total closures, and hundreds of malls have shuttered in the past 20 years.
- Some dead malls are being repurposed into industrial centers, like Amazon warehouses, and a $6 billion investment is being proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang to further revitalize them.
Key background: Netflix reportedly considered turning the Starcourt Mall set into a tourist attraction to promote Stranger Things. The streamer decided against it and the set was dismantled in July, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. One worker taking down the set told the newspaper that the Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor was kept intact for a possible future theme park attraction.
Surprising fact: A dead body in the mall’s food court went unnoticed for two weeks in 2017.
Tangent: One developer interested in Gwinnett Place proposed turning it into a cricket stadium, but nothing ever came of it..