Malls revamp perks to fight Christmas shopping trends

All those gifts you buy online mean shopping centers are in a life-and-death battle for your holiday dollars. Fifteen percent of U.S. malls are expected to fail or convert into something else in the next decade, but some retailers are reinventing themselves in the face of a cyber-blitz, reports CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy.

Janine Sabin and her three kids came to see Santa at the Glendale Galleria near Los Angeles. What they got was something you'd find at an amusement park, not something typically next to the food court: a sleigh ride with Shrek to the North Pole, an interactive snow ball fight and a visit with the jolly old man himself.

"I thought it was really cool because the sleigh ride was really fun," Sabin's son Cade said.

"I have to admit this is our first time in 10 years that we've ever been to Santa," his mom added.

The plan is to do just about anything to get shoppers offline and back in line at the mall. Mall visits declined 14.6 percent in the U.S. during the 2013 holiday shopping season and this year consumers are expected to do a record 56 percent of their holiday shopping online.

To win your business, malls are now offering free gift-wrapping. And so you don't have to carry all those heavy bags, they'll even deliver the gifts to your front door.

Some malls are delivering the shoppers to the stores. At The Grove in Los Angeles you can get a free Uber ride and they'll take you home if you spend at least $450. Rick Caruso owns The Grove and said many typical malls will be gone within a decade.

"I think the future of a traditional indoor mall, I think they've got big challenges. Somehow they have to create a real different experience," Caruso said. "How do they differentiate themselves? You've got to wrap it around an experience, you've got to wrap it around service."

The experience there already includes live music and roasted chestnuts.

And it's one place in L.A. where it snows every night. In New Jersey where the temperature actually feels frozen, the Disney movie attraction was enough to get Samantha Wittek to drive 25 minutes to the mall at Short Hills. She'd already done her shopping online.

"If I had known about this earlier, I probably would have waited and done my shopping while I was here, brought my husband, had him stand online with her and gone and spent money," Wittek said.

But malls are betting that by offering a little sugar and spice, you'll find the experience is even nicer than shopping from home.