Who doesn’t love going to the mall on a rainy day or when there is nothing else to do! Depending on where you live, you can either spend two hours at your local mall – or an entire weekend. Okay, okay, it’s been covered before. But I thought it would be fitting to introduce to our MallCrawlers the list of the largest indoor malls in the country. A little trivia to impress your friends and a big challenge for you to find the bargains!

There are a few ways in which a shopping mall could be measured. It could be measured based on gross leasable area (GLA), which refers to the total square feet of space that is rented or is available for rent. It could also be measured based on floor area, which refers to the entire square footage of the mall.

According to GLA, the largest mall in the country is the King of Prussia Mall, located 20 minutes outside of Philadelphia. It has about 400 stores and 2,798,956 gross leasable square feet! This massive mall also contains 20 restaurants, 3 food courts and a 16-screen United Artist Theater with an IMAX.

Now, if you live near Bloomington, Minnesota, you might want to claim bragging rights for the Mall of America as the largest mall in the United States. The Mall of America contains 522 stores – but only 2,674,525 leasable square feet. How can this be? Nickelodeon Universe, a 7-acre amusement park inside the Mall of America – is not being counted as GLA, because, well, it is not retail space! But the mall of America is physically larger in terms of floor area than the King of Prussia Mall.

Here is the full top 10 list of enclosed malls based on GLA:

1. King of Prussia Mall, King of Prussia, PA: 2,798,956 SF
2. Mall of America, Bloomington, MN: 2,777,918 SF
3. South Coast Plaza, Orange County, CA: 2,700,000 SF
4. Sawgrass Mills, Ft. Lauderdale, FL: 2,503,035 SF
5. Del Amo Fashion Center, Torrance, CA: 2,500,000 SF
6. Aventura Mall, Aventura, FL: 2,400,000 SF
7. The Galleria, Houston, TX: 2,298,417 SF
8. Woodfield Mall, Schaumberg, IL: 2,224,000 SF
9. Roosevelt Field Mall, Garden City, NY: 2,189,941 SF
10. Millcreek Mall, Erie, PA: 2,139,244 SF

So here you have it, the ten largest malls in the country. The largest mall in North America is the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, at 3,800,000 square feet of GLA. And the largest mall in the WORLD is the South China Mall in Dongguan China, at 7,100,000 square feet of GLA.

For more information on these malls and on others you can check out the Wikipedia entry on the largest shopping malls, or the site for American Studies at Eastern Connecticut State University which put together a comprehensive list.

Now, who can find the needle-in-a-haystack deals and bargains in the country’s biggest malls? Contribute today to the live coverage and show the other MallCrawlers what you have found!