The Anchor Leaving Ala Moana Center Isn't The Story. The Storefronts Filling In Are.

Neiman Marcus is closing. Saks Global announced in March 2026 that it would shut twelve Saks Fifth Avenue stores and three Neiman Marcus locations nationwide, and the Ala Moana Center store made that short list. For a mall built around the idea of one big department store per wing, losing an anchor usually reads as decline.

Except walk the same building this year and you'll count nearly a dozen storefronts that opened, moved, or reopened in that same stretch of months. None of them is a department store. All of them are sized for someone who's already there.

The Anchor That's Leaving

Ala Moana Center has swapped anchors before. Sears closed in 2013. The Ewa Wing expansion opened in November 2015 with Bloomingdale's and a relocated Nordstrom taking its place. Nordstrom's old spot became Target's first Hawaii mall location in 2017. Each time, one big name replaced another big name, and the footprint of the building barely changed.

This time is different. As of this writing, no replacement anchor has been announced for the Neiman Marcus space. The mall itself still describes its footprint the same way it always has: more than 2.4 million square feet, over 350 stores and restaurants, more than 160 of them dining. What's changed isn't the total square footage. It's what's competing to fill the gaps inside it.

What's Filling In At Eye Level

Since the start of the year, the mall's own announcements to Aloha State Daily read less like a leasing update and more like a list of things a resident would actually use on a Tuesday.

None of these is a 100,000-square-foot flagship. A coffee roaster. An ear-piercing studio. A Korean beauty counter. A jewelry brand. A second location of a cookie shop that already had one. This is single-brand specialty retail and quick-serve food, the category of business that exists to be visited two or three times a week rather than once a season. The mall isn't just replacing tenants. It's replacing the type of tenant it leases to most often.

The Local Brand That Outgrew Its Old Neighborhood

The clearest example of what that shift looks like in practice isn't a national chain at all. It's Always A.line, a Hawaii-made apparel brand founded by Lynn Sakutori and sewn entirely in the islands, that spent years at South Shore Market in Ward Village before moving into a space at Ala Moana Center roughly three times the size of its old one. The new store sits on the third floor of the ‘Ewa Wing, across from North Face, and opened with a traditional Hawaiian blessing on February 5, 2026 ahead of its public grand opening two days later.

Always A.line didn't start at Ala Moana Center. It started selling through Macy's Hawaii before building its own storefronts, and its move here is the kind of decision a brand makes once it has already proven demand somewhere smaller. That's a different growth story than a national retailer signing a lease. It's a Hawaii-based business choosing this specific building as the place to scale, which says something about what kind of foot traffic the mall now offers compared to a boutique retail row a mile away.

The Proving Ground Nobody Named

The mall's role as a testing ground shows up again, less obviously, in fried chicken. Ala Moana Center's Chick-fil-A was the first Chick-fil-A to open anywhere on Oahu, in October 2022, according to owner-operator Kurt Milne, who ran that location for nearly four years before opening his second, a freestanding restaurant at the corner of Kapiolani Boulevard and Kalakaua Avenue that debuted on April 2, 2026 as the chain's largest in Hawaii, with seating for about 260 guests and roughly 120 jobs attached to it. Unlike the mall counter, it's dine-in only with no drive-through, and Milne has said directly that the speed and volume habits his team built at Ala Moana Center prepared them for the crowds at the new site.

That's a business graduating out of the mall and into the surrounding blocks, not the other way around. It's a small piece of evidence for a bigger pattern: the retail energy inside Ala Moana Center doesn't stay contained to the building. It seeds what gets built around it.

What This Looks Like If You Live Here

None of this reads as news if your relationship to the mall is a shopping trip twice a year. It reads differently if you live in one of the towers across Ala Moana Boulevard, Kapiolani Boulevard, or Atkinson Drive and pass through the building most days.

The mall has been dog-friendly in its common areas and select stores for a while now, with a short list of exceptions worth knowing if you walk a dog through on your way somewhere else:

• Dogs aren't permitted in the food court, at water fountains, or in children's play areas
• Dogs can't ride the escalators, so owners either carry them or use an elevator
• Individual stores and restaurants that don't allow dogs can ask you to leave with one

Centerstage still runs a daily hula show and live music, the kind of low-key cultural programming that a visitor treats as a photo opportunity and a resident treats as background noise on the way to pick up dry cleaning. And for locals specifically, a handful of Ala Moana Boulevard businesses, including the Escape Game location in Suite 2404 and Body Balance Hawaii in Suite 1235, run kama‘aina rates that only make sense if you're coming back.

None of these details are new this year. What's new is how many of the storefronts around them are.

Put the anchor closure next to the small-format openings and the pattern isn't decline. It's a building quietly re-sorting itself around the people who already have a key fob to a tower across the street, while the one true department-store tenant heads for the door. Whether a new anchor eventually fills that space or the mall keeps subdividing it into more of what's already arriving is the open question worth watching over the next year, not because it changes anyone's daily walk through the building today, but because it will decide what that walk looks like five years from now.

If you own property near Ala Moana Center and want to understand how shifts like this one are showing up in what buyers are willing to pay for a unit in your building, The CHOI Group tracks these changes block by block as part of how we advise sellers in this part of Oahu. Request a confidential home valuation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing.