Imagine an afternoon of shopping--you roll out of bed at a luxury hotel, check out all your favorite retailers, walk past a snow-covered ski park, and after a break drinking champagne in a poolside cabana, you end your day in a 3-story Hermes townhouse. Sound like a dream? That’s exactly what the minds behind the American Dream megamall are aiming for. The aptly-named, 3-million-square-foot New Jersey shopping center is scheduled to open this fall, and the owners expect it to make a splash--literally.

Following in the footsteps of Minnesota’s Mall of America, once the largest shopping center in the country featuring hundreds of shops as well as an indoor theme park, American Dream is fusing shopping with entertainment like never before. The structure includes a Nickelodeon-themed amusement park, a Dreamworks water park complete with seventy water slides and a wave pool, an NHL-sized regulation ice rink, the only indoor ski slope in the western hemisphere, an aquarium, a Lego Discovery Center, a 90-thousand-square-foot movie theater, over one hundred eating establishments including multiple food halls (even a kosher food hall!), 300 stores, and, of course, a hotel, so you can get right to exploring the giant structure.
“Mall just feels of another era,” said Ken Downing, creative director of American Dream, in an interview with Fox 5 New York, “when you have these types of amusements, these types of attractions, the over-the-top shopping opportunities, and dining that is unparalleled in this part of the world--the ‘M-word’ just doesn’t seem to work anymore.”

That’s why this shopping and entertainment structure is unlike any other--and needs to be lead by retail visionaries with a penchant for radical experiential retail. American Dream’s first incarnation was Xanadu, a shopping center designed to be a fraction of the size and scope of its successor. It broke ground in 2003, but changing management and budgetary issues delayed development until the project landed in the hands of the Ghermezian family. Mall moguls behind the Mall of America and Canada’s West Edmonton Mall, The Ghermezians founded the Triple Five Group which has managed countless retail development projects as well as municipal development, recreation and amusement park development, residential and suburban development, and more. Don Ghermezian, CEO of American Dream, knows retail--it’s in his blood, and on his extensive resume.

It’s no wonder the space has such far-flung and fantastical features. Don is a big believer in experiential retail as the cure to the retail apocalypse, with the numbers to prove it: the Mall of America is the biggest tourist attraction in the country, drawing in more annual visitors than Disneyland and Disney World combined--it’s also more than the combined population of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Canada.

With fifteen attractions and hundreds of retail spaces, as well as its proximity to New York City and the broader metropolitan area, American Dream is projected to draw in even more business than the Mall of America. There’s nothing like it in the Western Hemisphere, and consumers will certainly flock to shop, play, relax, and explore. It might just be the key to overcoming the inertia of online retail--as Ghermezian so succinctly put it, “you can’t ride a rollercoaster on your iPad.”