Shoppers park smart at Mall of America

Minneapolis — Hunting for a parking space at the Mall of America? Think digital.

The Bloomington, Minn., mall — the nation’s largest shopping mecca — is trying to minimize the hassle by offering parking updates on its website, Twitter feed and interactive road signs.

In fact, you can download to your smartphone a color-coded map that shows the congestion levels of the mall’s parking lots. The information is collected by electronically counting vehicles as they enter and leave the lots, followed by visual updates from parking employees who watch the flow of traffic.

The Mall of America’s parking strategy is aligned with a national trend for shopping malls, which see shoppers’ parking experiences as one of the key ingredients in attracting customers.

«People are more accustomed to having information at their fingertips to move them on to the next thing in their day,» said Rachael Marret, president of the Campbell Mithun advertising agency in Minneapolis. «The speed at which everything is happening continues to accelerate, and we probably don’t have as much patience as we used to. «

Meanwhile, the Mall of America is in its third year of using Twitter messages to inform visitors about mall parking conditions.

«I believe the Twitter feed is the most popular parking-related service, because we have a fair number of people talking about our updates, referring their friends to our Twitter posts, and a lot of retweets of our updates,» said Bridget Jewell, a mall spokeswoman.

The effort seems to have struck a chord with local consumers, who tweet about deciding whether to shop at the mall based on the traffic situation. In response to a mall tweet urging shoppers to come as early as 8 a.m. to avoid crowds and traffic, one woman tweeted: «Maybe I will. Had to abort plans (Sunday. Too many cars!»

The concern about parking is clearly an effort to reduce the cost for consumers to shop at a particular location, said Akshay Rao, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. «While most people think of cost in monetary terms, there’s also a cost in the amount of time you spend looking for something,» he said. Providing parking information via the Internet makes sense, Rao said. After all, if consumers sour on mall shopping because of the parking hassles, they may decide to use the Internet to shop.

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