The name’s park: RETAIL park

Retail parks and convenience stores have always been rather looked down upon, especially when compared to other retail facilities. For some time they were regarded as a particularly poor and backward relation of the latest generation of shopping centres. Large developers were not interested in such small-scale centres with small catchment areas and would refer to them derisively (in Polish) as chicken coops. Investors were equally unenthralled, but the chickens have now come home to roost – and it is they who are laying all the golden eggs. Anna Wysocka, the retail leasing director at JLL in Poland, points out that the market has undergone quite an evolution over the last two decades. “The first retail parks appeared at the beginning of the 90s in large cities and were situated next to shopping galleries. Usually they were less than 10,000 sqm gla and completed the range on offer in the shopping centre with household goods, sports, electronics and furniture stores,”