A shopping mall is a building or group of buildings containing retail stores, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily traipse from one store to another. A typical shopping mall has several anchors, larger stores who are usually department stores, franchise stores of retail chains, local mall retailers, and a food court, where a number of fast food vendors surround a shared eating area.

Shopping malls can be classified as three types: regional malls, super-regional malls, and outlet malls. The normal size of a regional mall is from 4000,00 sq ft to 800000 sq ft. It usually has at least two anchors and a wide selection shop. A super-regional center has more than 800000 sq ft of leasable space and dominates the shopping venue for the region. An outlet is where manufacturers sell their products directly to the public through outlet stores.Outlet stores carry products sold back or cancelled by other local stores and usually offer heavily discounted prices.

Shopping malls are operated by property management firms. Simon Property Group and General Growth Properties, Inc are the biggest two and together own near 50% of shopping malls in the United State. According to our statistic, there are about 900 shopping malls across the country and the average store number of a mall is 115. California has the most malls, followed by Florida, Texas, and New York.

State	Malls	State	Malls
Alabama (AL) Alaska (AK) Arizona (AZ) Arkansas (AR) California (CA) Colorado (CO) Connecticut (CT) Delaware (DE) District of Columbia (DC) Florida (FL) Georgia (GA) Hawaii (HI) Idaho (ID) Illinois (IL) Indiana (IN) Iowa (IA) Kansas (KS) Kentucky (KY) Louisiana (LA) Maine (ME) Maryland (MD) Massachusetts (MA) Michigan (MI) Minnesota (MN) Mississippi (MS) Missouri (MO)	9 2 22 5 109 11 10 2 1 71 24 8 4 35 20 11 5 8 11 3 26 31 28 17 7 17	Montana (MT) Nebraska (NE) Nevada (NV) New Hampshire (NH) New Jersey (NJ) New Mexico (NM) New York (NY) North Carolina (NC) North Dakota (ND) Ohio (OH) Oklahoma (OK) Oregon (OR) Pennsylvania (PA) Puerto Rico (PR) Rhode Island (RI) South Carolina (SC) South Dakota (SD) Tennessee (TN) Texas (TX) Utah (UT) Vermont (VT) Virginia (VA) Washington (WA) West Virginia (WV) Wisconsin (WI) Wyoming (WY)	1 4 9 5 29 6 44 20 1 32 8 9 40 4 1 12 2 19 61 7 2 31 20 5 17 3