Once a quiet place used by only those in the know, NorthWest mall has become a shopping gauntlet that’s only getting more frantic. The reason? Bulk bargains.
You’d glide in off the Northwestern motorway, hang a left into the empty car park and be pretty much guaranteed a spot right by the front doors every time. Inside, there was room to swing a cat in every store you visited. Staff were so happy for your presence they’d act like personal assistants, catering to your every whim. In the food court, the sushi store made my kids all-they-could-eat tofu rice balls. The toilets were brand new and sparkling fresh.
Outside the mall was a whole other world. Banks, bistros, bars, restaurants and furniture stores all operated blissfully free of crowds. Te Manawa library offered the best public office space for freelancers with parking close by, plenty of tables, quiet nooks to work in, a great selection of magazines to browse if you got bored and up to 1gb of free wifi. The toilets? Even better than the mall’s.
A short drive down empty Maki Street would unveil all the homeware stores you could handle. Grab a park by the door and browse through Briscoes, Rebel Sport, Harvey Norman, Freedom Furniture, Nood, Warehouse Stationery, a rug store and seven – yes, seven – bed shops at your leisure. When a tomcat raided our house and caused $7,000 worth of damage we gratefully accepted an insurance payout and re-furnished it entirely from stores in this precinct.
When it opened at the end of 2015, the Northwest Shopping Centre was dubbed a “ghost mall”. People didn’t go. It lacked the lustre of the city’s Westfield Newmarket, the lure of the south’s Sylvia Park, or the amazing sprawl of Albany. It was too far to go, people claimed. It didn’t have the right shops, others said. Retailers were aghast at the lack of customers coming into the building, especially on weekdays. “It’s a ghost town,” one “financially desperate” store owner complained at the time.
During a news meeting at NZ Herald, where I worked back then, I told them about my new favourite empty mall and they turned “ghost mall” into a front page story. It was a tag that stuck through multiple follow-ups that covered NorthWest’s ongoing saga to gain customers, including spending $37 million on a neighbourhood expansion. Footpaths, bike paths, outdoor toilets and a brilliant playground were added but still the customers didn’t come.
I did. I was a regular. While everyone grimaced and groaned and ground it out at St Lukes and Sylvia Park, I’d swoop into NorthWest, tick off my shopping list, then take the kids to the park and enjoy the sun and the solitude. I loved my ghost mall. I went there all the time. Me and the ghosts got along just fine. It provided an Auckland mall experience like no other.
In recent weeks, all that has changed. What has for years been a pleasant place to enjoy hassle-free shopping has turned into a daunting destination, a hellishly busy place with little free parking, cars banked up at traffic lights, and drivers undertaking and overtaking each other at blocked intersections. In just a few short weeks, NorthWest has become just like any other mall. It sucks.
Why? Costco. The American superstore has bought thousands of new shoppers out West. They’re cluttering the place up, sucking up all the parks, clogging up all the roads. Costco’s bulk buying opportunities have been too good to pass up, and those customers are buying their $60 memberships and getting their hot dogs and pizza and 48-packs of toilet paper. I get it. Everyone loves a bargain.
But the traffic is getting dangerous. Across several recent weekend trips, I have watched stationary cars bank up at the many traffic lights surrounding NorthWest. I have seen drivers pull out of these queues to pull into empty gaps in the middle of intersections. (Probably unrelated but I also watched a man floor it out of the Pak’nSave carpark with about 20 staff chasing him on foot.)
The very worst part, the nadir of this fiasco, is the “shared space” between the mall and Te Manawa library. It’s envisioned as a utopian paradise where adults, kids, motorbikes, cyclists, courier vans, trucks and cars frolic together while peacefully enjoying the trees, grass and concrete zones. When no one was there, the ‘sharing’ went fine. Now, especially on weekends, it operates as a confusing logjam of frustrated drivers and pedestrians trying to work out who has right of way. An entire lane around Farmers being permanently closed off isn’t helping things. (Auckland Transport’s response is below this story.)
NorthWest’s businesses are, of course, overjoyed by this sudden turn of events. After years of inactivity, shoppers have arrived in droves. “The centre has experienced an increase in customer visitation since the opening of Costco,” a spokesperson for Stride Property, the owners of NorthWest, confirms. “The centre’s retailers confirm that many of their customers had not visited the area previously and they are pleased to be serving them for the first time.”
That spokesperson also told me traffic volumes on surrounding streets were “very challenging” when Costco first opened. But they claimed “this has been improving” as the weeks passed. On a recent Tuesday morning, I put this to the test. I headed up to NorthWest to see if I could recreate my ghost mall experience one final time. But the mall’s car park was nearly full and the front door was broken, so I had to park out on the street and use a different entrance. Inside, cafes were busy, sales signs promoting Black Friday discounts were on display and shops were heaving.
I walked down Maki St, past a woman piling stacks of giant blueberry muffins into the back seat of her car, and found the reason. Outside Costco, a queue full of shoppers clutching the handles of giant trollies wound its way down the footpath. It was buzzing with excitement, the smell of consumerism was thick in the air. A woman guiding people into the queue told me it would only take 20 minutes to get to the bargains but I politely declined and returned to my car.
As I left, I headed up through the shared zone. Bad idea. A courier driver leapt out of his van, right in front of me, causing a narrow miss. I headed to the motorway for my 10-minute trip home. Thanks to a major accident on State Highway 16, it took 45 minutes. Clearly, the ghost mall’s glory days are over. NorthWest just lost a customer, but it won’t care. Business is, finally, after seven years, booming.
Update: Auckland Transport says it has received a request for support from NorthWest but says there isn’t anything it can do to alleviate traffic congestion on streets surrounding the mall. A spokesperson says the network “does not appear to have been designed to cater for the demand” it is experiencing. “Having reviewed the network, there isn’t a lot we can do given the operating protocols established to protect the Shared Space section of Maki Street. This effectively reduces the ability of shoppers to exit out of the precinct efficiently.” The spokesperson says delays are likely to get “worse” in the weeks leading up to Christmas. “We have not even started implementing the signal timing changes to align with the desired operating protocols to protect the Shared Space section of Maki Street. Due to the lack of options and narrowness of the network, we are unlikely to implement any significant changes this side of Christmas. Our current response is to continue monitoring the network closely, particularly over the weekends.”