Millbury mall rings up sales - and traffic
Tenants and owners of the Shoppes at Blackstone Valley credit the "hybrid" center's unique mix of large chain retailers and smaller lifestyle stores with its success in drawing plenty of shoppers despite traffic snags.
Most every day, the Kohl's in the Shoppes at Blackstone Valley shopping center in Millbury beats its planned sales figures by thousand of dollars, according to Bill Coffey, assistant store manager. The Petsmart nearby is one of the chain’s faster growing stores due to the center’s "fantastic location" and great mix of stores, says General Manager Michael Duclos.
Despite irksome traffic problems at peak times, the open-air, 820,000-square-foot Shoppes at Blackstone Valley is a ringing success with developers, retailers and shoppers as its third holiday season gets underway. Even the town of Millbury, struggling to address traffic congestion complaints by neighboring residents as a steady stream of cars inundate their once rural back roads, considers the mall a "very good citizen."
"Traffic is the only real complaint," says Selectman Joseph Coggans Jr., noting that the Shoppes has delivered on its promise of $922,000 a year in real estate taxes as well as putting his town on the map.
That one problem, however, is a stubborn one that Coggans and state highway officials are skeptical will be resolved soon. Shoppes officials are more optimistic that a solution planned to be put in place after the holiday rush will alleviate the jams. Meanwhile they, and most retail experts, downplay the impact of the traffic crunch on the mall’s success.
"The test is, are people not coming back?" says Dick Marks, a partner in Shoppes’ developer W-S Development Associates LLC. He claims that’s not the case; shoppers do return. The tenants and his company are very happy with the mall’s performance, for which he declines to give figures. "I can’t say that there’s anything we would have done differently," Marks says.
Hindsight on traffic tangle
Okay, maybe another accessway to the 70-acre shopping center might have been nice, admits Louis Masiello, project manager for W-S Development. But, he says, when the center was on the drawing board six or seven years ago, state highway officials wouldn’t allow another access onto Route 146 because it is a limited-access highway. The difficult terrain of the site, which required a 100+-foot stone wall to be built along 146, was another barrier. Barry Lorion, district operations engineer for Mass. Highway in Worcester, now says the state would consider allowing a second access onto the highway to solve the confounding traffic problem at the intersection for the current single access. But Masiello says the mall’s construction around a single access makes terrain even more of a barrier and it just isn’t feasible.
Lorion and Coggans, however, have reservations about the one-way option as a permanent solution. Lorion says McCracken Road is a public roadway heavily used by residents on the west side of Millbury and restricting its use permanently is a political dilemma. On the other hand, those who live on McCracken Road oppose the long-term option of widening and upgrading to make it safely handle the estimated 8,000 cars a day it sometimes serves. "I don’t ever see a permanent solution to it at all, ever," says Coggans, who explains that the one-way measure can’t be tried until intersecting Greenwood Street, now closed to sewer repairs, is reopened.
W-S Development has voluntarily spent some $25,000 thus far on traffic studies to address the problem, has made changes to the mall’s internal road system and has authorized the town to supply as many police officers as needed to control traffic at peak times. It is also offering to supply funds for engineering to upgrade McCracken Road and Greenwood Street, which Lorion says his department would push to get state funding to upgrade.
Not all the mall
Traffic congestion on McCracken Road and Greenwood Street isn’t all due to the Shoppes at Blackstone Valley. In fact, Lorion says the shopping center only accounts for 3,000 to 4,000 of the 5,000 to 6,000 daily vehicle trips on those roads. While that is more than W-S Development had anticipated at the outset of the project, the number of cars using those side roads to access the Route 146 interchange is more than the state had expected as well.
Masiello says his company was somewhat handicapped in forecasting mall traffic at the outset of the project because the state had not yet constructed the 146 interchange and bridge which serve the mall. Nonetheless, he says, the amount of traffic coming from the mall is still at least 10 percent lower than his company’s conservative models estimated. It is the pattern of the traffic that was not foreseen. While rumors about that many more patrons are coming to the mall than projections forecasted, Masiello says that isn’t the case.
Traffic jams notwithstanding, the Shoppes gets glowing reviews from retail experts as well as tenants. Marks attributes the success to the fact that the area was not being served by a good selection of big-box and lifestyle retailers. The Shoppes, he says, is a unique hybrid between the shopping "power centers" that feature bigger retail chains likes Kohl’s and Targets, and the lifestyle centers, that feature smaller boutique retailers.
A developer of competing malls, Andrew LaGrega, a partner at the Wilder Companies now developing the Loop open-air center in Northboro, agrees that W/S Development did a great job on the Shoppes at Blackstone Valley. And Petsmart’s Duclos, a 25-year retail veteran, says the center has the best variety of stores he’s seen. "This isn’t a cookie-cutter plaza; it really appeals to everyone."
LaGrega says a key concept of the lifestyle center is convenience and traffic snarls can undermine that. But William Beckman, president and CEO of Linear Retail Properties LLC, which specializes in retail properties, says traffic back-ups are common at malls the size of the Shoppes and consumers tend to work around it. "My guess is that people are going to be more than willing to put up with the traffic," he says.
In the end, those in the mall experts conclude that it is better to have too much traffic than too little. "Retail is retail; in any area where there’s lots of stores, there’s going to be traffic," says Duclos. "If people want to shop bad enough, they’ll sit in traffic and they’ll come and shop."
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