Best Buy coming to McKinley Mall
From Business First…
The McKinley Mall’s redevelopment effort has landed one of the biggest names in electronic retailing.
Best Buy has signed a long-term lease to occupy 30,000-square-feet in the town of Hamburg shopping center. The store is slated to open by June 2007.
“Best Buy is an important part of the redevelopment at McKinley,” said Mark Curcio, Stoltz Management Co. senior vice president of retail.
The deal comes on the heels on a series of renovations at the 800,000-square-foot mall.
Note to Best Buy – don’t go to the Bed Bath & Beyond school of design and layout.
AVOID SHOPPING at MCKINLEY MALL at all costs. The mall is slowly dying mainly in part to the new corrupt mall manager Jeff. He started as assistant manager dealing only with the kiosk’s and was just promoted when the previous manager left as Jeff is almost the only person in the run down mall office. Jeff has been accepting bribes for over 5 years now and kiosk’s offer Jeff bribes in order to pay lower rent fees. The mall is losing money that should go to marketing and other events and is going into Jeff’s pockets. Staff and events have also been cut as a result, and those who do stay have to double their efforts. Jeff will appear nice and make empty promises all day long. Even with bribing Jeff, the mall business is so bad now that almost all of the temporary kiosks are leaving (except for sunglasses and cellphone). Security agrees that the mall is worse than ever and all the salespeople who are required to make sales are just pushing sales to make you buy anything and screwing you over in the end. Even phone companies like cricket have went form a permanent location to a small push cart in the center. The stores are leaving as soon as their 5 or 10 year leases are up…but that takes time. Best Buy has added people going to Best Buy directly and usually not shopping the mall. Best Buy helps the mall but is not really helping the other store owners in terms of increased mall traffic. In closing, Avoid Mckinley Mall if you choose to have a better shopping experience and if you choose to not have your money partly go into Jeff’s slimy pockets.
I am sorry to hear that you have had a bad experience with this manager in your dealings with him. However, I believe they are trying to make McKinley Mall a better Mall. Currently there are 68 stores in operation, 7 of which are bigger names (Macy’s, Bon Ton, etc). They are redoing the food court, and so far it looks much nicer than it ever has. The food court currently houses 6 eateries and there are 4 more outside the food court itself. There is a theatre, which admittedly needs some renovating, but does show current movies at a decent price. While updating the mall, they also have included 5 future store sites many of which had not been there before. I have noticed a bit of restructuring here and there, but overall, the same stores that have been in the mall since I shopped there and worked there over ten years ago are still in the same spots as they always have been, or have moved to a more suitable location. As far as the bribery from the kiosks, I don’t know what to say. Many political organizations and businesses get into that dirty business. But I have not necessarily seen the mall going down a bad path because of it. There are 11 empty stores, however and hopefully these will be filled sooner rather than later. Again, I do think it sucks if you had a bad experience with this person, but I don’t think the mall is going down the toilet anytime soon.