Instead of conducting a single building interview, we interviewed a subsample of up to three individual establishments within each sampled mall building using an establishment questionnaire and, in addition, interviewed a representative of enclosed malls to collect information on the common area of those malls. We used publicly available information and data from a purchased shopping mall database in combination with establishment data collected by CBECS to estimate the square footage of mall buildings.

We present the building characteristics data with two sets of building characteristics tables. Tables A1-A8 include all commercial buildings while tables B1-B46 exclude mall buildings. Tables A1-A8 have a limited number of row categories—only those for which CBECS collected complete building information. The rowstub categories are building floorspace, principal building activity, year constructed, Census Region and Division, and number of establishments. The data in these tables are representative of the entire commercial buildings sector and the data are comparable with previous CBECS. Table Set B (which begins with Non-Mall Buildings) has the full range of row categories of previous CBECS, but excludes mall buildings; therefore, these data are not directly comparable to previous CBECS.

Similarly, there are two sets of consumption and expenditures tables. Tables C1-C38 exclude mall buildings while tables C1A-C38A include all commercial buildings. Tables C1-C38 have the full range of row categories of previous CBECS, but they exclude mall buildings; therefore, these data are not directly comparable to previous CBECS. Tables C1-C38 have the same limited row categories as Tables A1-A8 (see previous paragraph). The data in these tables are representative of the entire commercial buildings sector and the data are comparable with previous CBECS.

Figures 1 and 2 show the "All Buildings" and "Principal Building Activity (PBA)" row categories for Tables A1 and B1. Within the PBA category, the number of buildings and total floorspace are the same for both tables except for the "Mercantile" category. In Table A1 (Figure 1), "Enclosed and Strip Malls" are included. It is the buildings of this category that are excluded from all set B tables. These buildings total 213 thousand (4.4 percent) and 6.9 million square feet of floorspace (9.6 percent).

Figure 1. "All Buildings" and "Principal Building Activity" of Table A1

Table A1. Summary Table for All Buildings (Including Malls), 2003
	Number of Buildings (thousand)	Total Floorspace (million sq. ft.)	Mean Square Feet per Building (thousand)	Median Square Feet per Building (thousand)
All Buildings.....	4,859	71,658	14.7	5.0
Principal Building Activity
—Education.....	386	9,874	25.6	7.0
—Food Sales .....	226	1,255	5.6	2.8
—Food Service .....	297	1,654	5.6	3.5
—Health Care	129	3,163	24.6	6.0
——Inpatient.....	8	1,905	241.4	106.0
——Outpatient.....	121	1,258	10.4	6.0
—Lodging.....	142	5,096	35.8	12.5
—Mercantile.....	657	11,192	17.0	6.9
——Retail (other than mall).....	443	4,317	9.7	4.8
——Enclosed and Strip Malls.....	213	6,875	32.2	12.3
—Office.....	824	12,208	14.8	4.0
—Public Assembly.....	277	3,939	14.2	6.7
—Public Order and Safety.....	71	1,090	15.5	5.0
—Religious Worship.....	370	3,754	10.1	6.0
—Service.....	622	4,050	6.5	2.8
—Warehouse and Storage.....	597	10,078	16.9	5.2
—Other.....	79	1,738	21.9	4.6
—Vacant.....	182	2,567	14.1	3.7