A floor below the hubbub of retail and rides at Bloomington's Mall of America, Maureen Bausch sits in her basement office and points to a pile of papers on her desk. Each week she makes a half-dozen pitches to try to lure new businesses, events and attractions to the mall.
Her current stack includes a treatment for a reality television show and a pitch to Whole Foods Market to open an organic cooking school.
"I'm sure we could book tours to that culinary center to take classes," said Bausch, executive vice president of business development at the Mall of America. "They'll probably turn me down, but what the heck? We get about a 25 percent return on these things. You learn to live with the rejection."
As the recession grinds on, malls across the country are struggling to bring in traffic. Against that backdrop, the Mall of America is standing relatively strong against the economic headwinds.
"We're not recession-proof -- no one is," Bausch said. "We like to say we're recession-resistant."
While total sales at Mall of America stores have grown 3 to 5 percent a year overall, Bausch said sales last year grew 2 percent. She expects sales to be flat or up 2 percent in 2009, too. Nationwide, sales at mall stores fell 6.5 percent last year, according to Green Street Advisors.
In the Twin Cities, no mall seems to come close to Mall of America's sales per square foot, a key indicator of the health and demographic draw of a mall, as well as the rents it can charge. The national average is about $380 to $390 per square foot. The mall reports sales per square foot of $625, compared with $580 at Galleria in Edina and $445 at Rosedale Center in Roseville, according to the 2009 Directory of Major Malls Inc.
But Bausch and her staff work hard -- and ever more creatively -- to keep tourists visiting and locals shopping. They're traveling to book expos, meeting with Hollywood producers and planning back-to-school promotions for Facebook and Twitter.