Arcadia : Mall to Prohibit Smoking

On May 31, Santa Anita Fashion Park will become the first mall in the San Gabriel Valley to ban smoking in all common areas.

Those who want to light up will be asked to step outside and smoke under one of the covered entrances at the 19-year-old Arcadia shopping center, said Jeanie Van Amen, the mall’s marketing director. She said ashtrays will be placed outside.

The mall is following the lead of several other Southland shopping centers, including South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa and Los Cerritos Center in Cerritos, that adopted no-smoking policies earlier this year. In the San Gabriel Valley, managers of the Puente Hills Mall, The Plaza at West Covina and Plaza Pasadena are considering no-smoking policies for their centers’ common areas.

Santa Anita Fashion Park officials said the no-smoking policy will provide a healthier shopping environment. May 31 was chosen as the first day of the ban because it coincides with the World Health Organization’s “World No Tobacco Day.”

“We’ve heard very positive things about this smoking ban from other (Southern California) shopping centers,” Van Amen said. “And at different children’s events at our mall, we would find people smoking around children and parents would ask us why we didn’t have a policy banning that.”

How will the smoking ban be enforced?

“Other malls with this policy tell us it’s the shoppers that police it and remind other shoppers of the (ban),” Van Amen said.

The center’s three department stores, J.C. Penney, Robinsons-May and The Broadway, and many of the approximately 140 other stores in the mall already have no-smoking policies. Despite the smoking ban in common areas, however, individual stores in the mall will continue to set their own smoking policies, Van Amen said.