Victor Gruen is credited with revolutionising the way retail suburban malls were built in America. Up till that point, most shopping centres were ‘extroverted’ in nature with an entrance facing the parking lot and big windows with displayed merchandise to entice customers in. Mr Gruen when he builds his first shopping mall inverted the whole environment, controlled the internal environment (A/C and heating) and created a two floored shopping experience to decrease the physical toll on customers. Prior to this approach weather would affect the foot traffic to the local malls and because everything was in a single level, customers would have to walk around the exterior of the mall to access their favourite stores. This revolutionary designed Southdale mall in Minnesota was called “the pleasure-dome with parking” by the press and was design was practically copied by every …show more content…
Victor Gruen invented the shopping experience that we take for granted today with big department stores sharing the mall's space with small retailers and creating a ‘cooperative capitalism’ that benefits everyone overall (Gladwell, 2004). Amazon bought this same approach to offline retail to online by creating an ecosystem of products and services. Amazon’s primarily early advantage was in the 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Quip vs North Dakota that stated “the lack of presence in a state was sufficient ground to exempt a corporation from pay sales and use taxes to a state” (Taplin, 2017). As a hedge fund analyst at D.E Shaw concerning primarily with internet companies, Jeff Bezos immediately realised how the retail environment changed because of this ruling, quite his job