In the US, did Amazon kill the mall, is everyone too broke, or a combination of other factors?
I watch a lot of Dead Mall videos on YouTube and I wanted to see what everyone's thoughts are on why there's so many dead malls now.
I watch a lot of Dead Mall videos on YouTube and I wanted to see what everyone's thoughts are on why there's so many dead malls now.
Hrm. No one has mentioned the decline of middle class wages.
I remember in the ... late 70s/early 80s my mother would drag us to the mall nearly every weekend. She was there to buy clothes. She always wanted something new and she wanted to try on at least a dozen items before buying one or two. I was thrilled when I was old enough to go off to the record store and/or hobby store while she did that. Earlier, I begged to go the the toy store, but was typically refused. Later, I was at the book store getting paperback scifi.
I don't think people have as much disposable income as they did then. I don't know many people who can buy as much frivolous stuff as my folks used to. I guess I could technically buy stuff all the time, but I want to save fore retirement. My folks had pensions. I have to put it away myself.
The disappearance of defined benefit retirement plans is yet another way those on top are boning us, and it is NOT being talked about enough.
It actually screws us 2 ways. First, by removing liability/responsibility from the company and putting it on people. Second, by forcing everyone to have to car about the stock market, and be subject to its whims
Not to mention storage space. Like most people their generation, my parents have a garage and an attic. All this extra space to hoard stuff
I’ll also offer the “sameness” of everything at malls. Let’s say you want jeans. There’s five shops that carry jeans. You want “normal” jeans, iow, not torn, not bleached, etc. Each shop carries jeans, but they are all some version of torn, worn, bleached, etc. For all the variety, they’re all the same.
Plus, mall overhead and branding makes the shops quite often more expensive than you might find at something like a Target or even a Kohls.
I’ve found that taking my kids to the mall to check out clothing we more often than not buy nothing despite visiting a half dozen shops. It’s all variations of the same thing along with being designer pricing.
So I'm not in America and might be able to offer some insight. Others have mentioned big box stores, online shopping, and lack of money as the main culprits. I'm fairly certain big box stores are not it, and the fault may lay almost entirely on amazon.
Where I'm from, malls are still the place to go for new things to buy, including electronics, clothes (of varying degrees of quality and price), drugs (the legal kind), and home decor. Businesses like Walmart (as in, supermarkets that sell things other than groceries) have shops inside those same malls. In the whole city, there is one standalone Walmart, in the emptiest part of town with middle-upper class suburbs around it. The one exception is Costco, which has two franchises in town, not inside a mall, but the demographic that goes there is decidedly middle class families and businesses.
We can order stuff from amazon, but it ends up being about the same in terms of cost, and takes up to a month to arrive. Money is tight for pretty much everyone at the moment, but we all still go to the mall from time to time, for one reason or another.
For example, I'm overdue a visit to get my eyes checked again, my glasses need replacing. And I'll probably stop by the radioshack (yup, remember that?) and nab some rechargeable AAs.
Malls were dying in the US well before Amazon and online shopping itself was meaningful. Big box stores did a number on them. Best Buy and Circuit City had nearly the same selection of music that mall music stores did for much lower prices. Stores like Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million eviscerated the smaller more expensive mall book stores. Walmart, Target, and the like hit everything else.
Once that decline happened, I noticed that many malls started going after the kids that just hung around malls and weren't in constant spend mode. Teens were treated like pests that were not wanted. Guess who got the message and didn't come back a few years later when they had jobs and money?
Malls in the 80s and early 90s were pretty awesome, but malls told us to fuck off so we did. They can rot.
Interesting. Malls around me seem to cater mostly to young adults with expendable income. Lots of non-traditional cuisine (commercialised of course, not high-brow places), wine bars, etc. Places where you'd go to on a night out with the gang.
Now that you mention it, they have stopped catering to the youngest demographic. I think the laser tags closed down before the pandemic, and the arcades have been gone for a decade. Unless Chuck E. Cheese has some, I haven't been. Maybe we're catching up, then. I still see young teens, around the age I was when I visited those places, walk around. No idea what shops they go into though. Maybe the ice cream places, and the food court.
Malls were being killed by big box complexes before Amazon was prevalent, but the one-two punch didn't do them any favors.
I see it as a combination of things...
Big box retailers.
Online sales.
People stopped going to movie theaters.
So what's the reason to go to a mall? Crappy food court food?
The last dozen or so times I've been to a mall, the only thing I've spent money on was food. It's hard to justify spending money at the mall when I know I can get just about anything there from an online retailer for a lot cheaper. But I can't get an Orange Julius online. Yet.
There's a fuckin delicious Asian place in my local mall that has the best teriyaki chicken and fried rice I've ever had. That and Charley's lemonade are a couple of the only reasons I go to my mall.
By charleys you mean the Philly cheesesteak place right? Love them, too bad there aren't any near me
That's the one. They also go by a different name in some other parts of the country, I think. I don't remember what it is though.
There's one about 45min away, just to far to justify, but maybe I'll make it out there sometime
Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.
In America, there's like 3 different things you could call a mall. When most people talk about them, it means a giant building with central indoor paths connecting a bunch of businesses. Typically, there would be a handful of "anchor" businesses, like department stores and a movie theater, and then space for a bunch of much smaller businesses in between including restaurants. These malls (at least the ones I've been to) for whatever reason don't typically have grocery stores. I have seen pharmacies and small Dr's offices in them.
Then there are "strip malls" that are typically a row of businesses on one side or surrounding a big parking lot. Typically grocery stores are in those.
Lastly, there's "outlet malls", which are often set up like a fake town with parking distributed throughout. They are commonly built on cheap land in the outskirts of towns, and they have mostly clothing. They are typically brand specific stores (e.g., Nike), so they are allegedly cheaper.
It's that first category that Americans are going to be talking about if they just refer to a "mall", though. The idea to have all your shops in a convenient place has been around forever, and still works great in many traditional business districts. The "shopping mall", though, was somewhat of an artificial movement in the 80's and 90's that was always a bit destined to fail. Like people have said, the internet is partially responsible, but malls were hurting before the internet started really doing damage. In America, you basically have to drive everywhere, and if you are driving everywhere, it's easiest to just drive directly to whatever shop you need. With malls, you have to park far out in a giant lot, and walk a long way to get to whatever business. You could call it lazy, but if you've only got a little bit of time after a day of work to do shopping, are you going to do the option where you get the task done in 30 minutes, or an hour?
Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.
That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.
Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!
We definitely get most of our groceries from standalone grocery stores. For the most part, you drive right to it.
I just looked at some Sydney shopping centres, and they look much like our malls on the inside (except for groceries), but it seems like they are much more integrated in the neighborhoods. It looks like parking garages are more popular there than the giant lots here.
I just looked at the dead mall wikipedia page, and it has a picture of the century 3 mall. That's a good example of what they look like here; separate from where people live, and surrounded by big lots. You can actually see the strip malls that replaced it all around it.
American malls are three categories. Generally when people say "the mall", they mean big, indoor, enclosed malls. That's what is dying a slow death.
A local example for me:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clackamas_Town_Center
The problem has been the large anchor stores are going out of business and the stores that remain struggle to survive.
The kind of mall you describe, Americans call "strip malls" and are much smaller and open to the elements. A grocery store, maybe a bank, fast food, not an official post office, but a pack and ship location, sometimes a DMV. That kind of thing.
Strip malls also struggle, there's one by my house where the big grocery store just closed leaving it maybe 50% vacant.
We also have stand alone grocery stores that aren't part of strip malls that collect other small stores around it like mini-moons. Barbershops, laundromats, liquor stores.
As long as the grocery store operates, everyone does fine.
Edit Almost forgot... "Big Box Complexes". Not really malls, just large block stores sharing a common parking lot. So like a Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, all stand alone stores with shared parking.
Take a Brazilian Lemonade recipe and sub in oranges. :) Make it at home.
https://houseofnasheats.com/brazilian-lemonade-limeade/
Apparently there’s a recipe on that page. Here’s the same page without the crud: https://www.justtherecipe.com/?url=https://houseofnasheats.com/brazilian-lemonade-limeade/
Great website.
Oohhh, that sounds delicious! My old boss at work was telling me about Brazilian lemonades a while back and I've been meaning to try it at some point.
Uber Eats, Door Dash, Grubhub, etc. all exist for this exact type of purchase.
Although you will pay for the convenience, as opposed to it being cheaper like most other products since the physical store is still involved.
Yep, when you want your Orange Julius to cost $22
Right, there's got to be a good reason to go to the mall. The successful malls still draw crowds because they have more than just stores and a movie theater.
Successful malls have an Apple Store, Tesla, and Louis Vuitton, which tells us something about who can still afford to shop there.
Paradoxically, I would still go to movies if they were willing to kick people out for using their phone once during the film. There's only one theater in my area that's strict like that.
When I was a teenager the local mall made it quite clear that they didn’t want teenagers in the mall. I think it just stuck for a lot of us.
The mall near me used to be a place where kids could get together even if they didn't have money to spend all day buying things. They made a rule that young people in groups of more than 3 would be treated like a gang. I have no sympathy for them losing patrons.
It was always short sighted tax policy. We're just living with the blowback.
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled
That's really interesting! I'd heard the white flight explanation for downtowns falling apart, but this adds a new layer to it
I long for third spaces.
The mall is an ouroboros that demands I spend. But if it had a park combined with it, if it was just a series of semi-connected strip malls around a central or spread out park/walking path I'd be there constantly.
The mall just isn't a enjoyable place to hang out unless you truly have no other choice, and even teenagers who don't are opting to hang online because it's less expensive and doesn't require transit.
Yes! I'm amazed at how few responses here bring up the lack of attraction in a mall. Nearly every square foot has been given up for dumb kiosks for cell phone cases or something like that. There's just nothing to give some warm fuzzies about visiting - a water feature, a kids play area... Heck, I grew up near the first indoor mall and at one point they had a giant parakeet cage. If one landed on your finger, you could keep the bird.
What killed the mall:
It was an experiment on the 3rd place (read up on it) and it failed at that.
Big box retailers wanted big, huge, gigantic stores. So they left malls to open them.
Being surrounded by parking structures doesn't look appealing.
High rent for mall space.
Amazon.
*Other entertainment options are much better now with streaming tv, video games, etc.
also a big thing was the rapid openings of malls in the 80s and 90s. honestly they opened too many of them then just kind of limped along as it was too hard to close and Sears kinda funded them till their death.
Being a 3rd place you can't even walk to because you have to cross those huge parking lots and all the traffic they bring. Not to mention none of them had decent places to actually collect and hang out.
Big box retailers want to own the property they’re on. Most of the time they own the property any other shops are in even in their lot. Big box has a huge realty presence. They out malled the malls in this regard.
Also people getting used to group chat and online games with friends, being able to socialize more effectively made activities like the mall pointless.
That's why when you go to places where people used to hang out to socialise most people are just on their phones, the phone is better.
I sincerely hope that you don't think that group chats, online gaming, or phones are "better" than true social life, because there is overwhelming science indicating that those things are making people absolutely miserable... and we actually don't need science to see it everyday.
You're right. At the same time, there are now alternatives that generally don't require being in places that are trying to get you to spend money just to interact with other people.
Anecdotal, but I grew up in the heyday of malls and my local mall was one of the largest, and is now one of the most famous dead malls. The mall was in decline when Amazon was still in its infancy, mostly still selling books. Buying clothes online was considered lunacy at the time because there was no fitting rooms to try things on. Still, vacancy was on the rise in the mall and once a few violent crimes started happening inside that was all she wrote. "Big Box" stores like Walmart became more of a draw than driving all the way to the mall.
I think the reasons for the death of the mall are more complex, just like the death of the department store. There were lots of weird tax incentives, both for developers, and for (mostly white) residents fleeing the urban core during the 90s. Those were not sustainable. Malls themselves were a bit of a private equity shell game which couldn't last. The story of dead malls is more about capitalism and land use policy than just Amazon.
I'll never forget Forest Fair Mall in those first years though. It's 1.5 MILLION square feet, and it was absolutely packed, especially during Christmas. Humongous fountains, sand sculptures, live music... every single spot of its airfield-like parking lot was full. The only thing today that I think comes close, if younger people want the experience, is the main concourse of a top ten airport.
I think the West Edmonton Mall comes pretty close at 5.3 million square feet. I remember seeing dolphins in there.
The West Edmonton Mall used to have more submarines than the Canadian navy. I think that was before the dolphins though.
West Ed is still dope. I don't know about submarines, but they have a 10/10 water park in there, and a bunch of other stuff.
Malls were just a way to privatize mainstreet and allow the ownership class of capitalists to extract more money from a local economy through large chain stores and to give them private control over what used to be public space.
Now the middle class is worth a fraction of what it used to be, their purpose has dissolved.
People use Amazon instead of the mall because they can still afford the Temu-level garbage Amazon sells.
I mean a few reasons.
Currently, as they are dying today, yes.
This is not how malls have traditionally worked.
In the past, malls provided a plug-and-play way for national chain retail to offer premium, private-labeled goods that allowed them to extract money away from a community's locally owned stores found on main street.
Indoor is good though. Floating around the mall is a good activity for shit weather days
How can I turn this into the class struggle?
The mall was dying by the 80's, there was a sharp decline by then (I recall seeing numerous malls going vacant in the 90's, around the country).
The things that drove mall popularity (especially things like large, enclosed, air-conditioned space), were no longer novel. Most cars were air-conditioned by then.
I'm sure there are many other factors, like the growth of free-standing single-vendor buildings (so construction and management costs must've changed).
Amazon really had nothing to do with it.
The rise of the suburban mall and its downward spiral are pre-Amazon, and largely had to do with tax decisions and costs to the public sector, though online shopping did accelerate the collapse. Slate, 2017: The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban
Birthed by and killed by capitalism. Tone deaf retailers charging too much for not enough for too long PLUS general trend to take away "free" public places where regular people can casually gather and kill a few hours having low/no cost fun.
Amazon did more for killing off small businesses – the big box store chains did more for killing off shopping malls (their preference is the strip mall where they can showcase their entire frontage (and do an end-run around building codes))
and yes, everyone is too broke on top of everything else
I remember hearing that big box stores killed malls. I thought they killed malls, and Amazon killed big box stores, but Amazon can also kill malls, so it was a bit of a double-whammy for malls
More joint households have both members in the work force limiting the amount of shopping being done between 9-5. Add to that the ease of ordering shit online. All of which is on top of malls requiring minors to be accompanied by adults. Add it all together and the result is noone goes to malls anymore.
Plus social media and the internet. Malls used to be teen hangout places but now there are a million more options that don't involve the hassle of actually going somewhere.
Conventional brick and mortar retail is extremely expensive to maintain. It has less to do with Amazon specifically, and more to do with the rise of online retail & direct to consumer business models more generally. Don't get me wrong, Amazon was a huge pioneer in that area, but it would have happened one way or another.
My favorite stores in the mall in the 80s and early 90s were the Electronics Boutique, Waldenbooks, Tape World or Sam Goody, and Sharper Image. None of those thing exist anymore. When I go to the mall now, it's 90% clothes and jewelry, and I'm just not that interested in it.
My kids like the rock/skate shops like B&C, Hot Topic, Zumiez, Vans... but it's still just basically clothes.
as someone who lives in a fairly densly populated area, malls are almost directly tied to income levels of the local populace. malls in poorer neoghborhoods closed. upscale malls in rich neighborhoods are still thriving.
our mall had an arcade, a waldenbooks, and a kiosk that sold gorgeous glass dragon figures.
can't get any of those at amazon.
i miss it. :(
Dang, I kind of want one of those glass dragons. That sounds awesome
As someone who lives through the height of the mall era I'm sad to see the go personally. However before online shopping it was sort of a pain in the ass. Not only did you have to go to the mall for clothes shopping sometimes you would have to go to more than one. I remember school clothes shopping would be a multi day affair to buy some jeans and shirts and a pair of shoes. If the mall didn't have the store you needed you would sometimes have to drive really far to go to that store. If the mall didn't have what you needed you were sort of SOL. So when online shopping started to provide anything you want in a few clicks it was not just the hard to obtain stuff people bought it was everything else too. But it's sad so many teenage sagas played out in malls for me. Friendships were solidified and dating occured there. It was a place you could hang out for a few hours with no parents and navigate teenage social life. I am sure teens will just do something else but it holds a special place in my memory.
I think higher education may have played a role. Kids have to spend more time studying for longer into their life. Less time for careless days of youth when every job requires 10 years of experience. Young people have been obsessing over how to fluff their CV with credentials rather thing just living life.
In addition to the other replies, items there were just too expensive. Now, items are too expensive without the mall, and it's not to do with regular/mid-low level management, supply chain costs, but due to price gouging, in order to pay executive, board, and and other major share holders/investors. (See the Economic Policy Institute reports on this, for more info).
Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.
We have shopping centers in the US and a lot of them are still thriving. They tend to be smaller than malls but they're more numerous. They usually have one or two big stores like Target or Home Depot along with several smaller stores. They're also not enclosed so it's easier to get to a small store in a shopping center than it is in a mall.
That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!
Hmm maybe what you call a mall in Australia is what Americans call a strip mall?
Its not any one thing, but a system of many things working against malls in a variety of manners:
What is white flight?
Throughout the 60s, as city centers became more populous, an increasingly paranoid and racist section (boomers) started moving to the suburbs out of fear of being around black people. They took their wealth and ambitions with them, leading to broad suburban growth in many metropolitan areas, and eventual policy actions.
Some places drained out or paved over pools just to make sure those scary people would enjoy themselves too much.
One of the big problems is horrible city planning since the malls were just built anywhere they could be crammed into. Combine that with a very car-centeric country and you get very little reason to go out to the mall with the advent of the internet.
Big real estate killed malls. They aren't as efficient at generating rent due to their maintenance and upkeep costs, so real estate holdings firms are hell bent on liquidating them, subdividing them, and redeveloping the land piecemeal in ways that better optimize for fine access control and not having to take care of any "dead" non-money-making spaces such as the concourses between the stores. Instead: just parking lots between store fronts.
Now there's a Walmart, a Home Depot, an Applebee's, a mattress store, a liquor store, and maybe a transient party supply store that will occasionally occupy a space on a seasonal basis. When a slot isn't occupied by a tenant, they get to shut off the power, water, and climate control completely, and not have to end up wasting electricity or fuel conditioning the air of a space no one goes to right then.
If you WANTED to make a mall work, you could, especially if you added faux "residential" space (actually retail space where the product being sold is storage and privacy, with "sleep" being "against the rules" but they built it to intentionally not know that that's what the "customers" are doing there). Residential malls would guarantee a constant customer and worker base as people come and go to visit family and friends and end up shopping along the way.
But they don't want that.
They want to sell a MINIMUM viable product, and charge maximally for it.
This is what happened near me. The malls got turned inside out, so it's just big boxes around a giant parking lot.
Capitalists are always minmaxing ...
I think it is safe to say, the internet i general killed malls as people stopped leaving their homes the way they used to in general.
Combinations. Amazon, smart phones, how kids hang out, poverty, giant stores like target and wal mart..It's a bunch of reasons that all hit against malls.
Malls haven't been the only hit over the decades. "Cruisin" is no longer a thing. Teens used to spend hours on nice nights driving up and down a certain stretch of road in nearly every city somewhere.
More kids used to ride bikes around for funnies.
Drive in movie theaters used to be huge.
Things always change and it's almost never just a single reason.
Not only is this no longer a thing it's actually explicitly illegal in some places. Passing the same location 4 times within a short period or "driving without a destination" can get you a ticket if the cops are paying attention.
That's kinda fucked up. Almost sounds like laws targeting homeless people living out of their cars. And for anyone else, why shouldn't I be able to just tour around and look at sights without necessarily stopping anywhere? That's basically what I do every weekend for fun.
Yep. That's the thing that never changes. "The man" is a total asshole killjoy.
Part of that is also how in our car-centric society, our public transportation sucks. And biking is unsafe in many places— even spots that have bike lanes. Everything is too far way, so you can only get there by car. Everywhere you that is close is either unsafe or actually impossible to bike to, unless you’re lucky. And if you wanna take the metro or bus, it’s slow af, unreliable, and in many places has very few stops and runs infrequently.
And then the lack of people using public transportation only leads to more cars on the road which makes the problem even worse! More lanes, more land used for parking lot deserts, etc.
Nowhere to go, no way to get there, nothing to do.
This is one of my things I go off about. People sometimes tell me they want to move out of the city "for their kids" and I'm like are you crazy? The suburbs were hell as a kid. Can't go anywhere because you don't have a car and walking is dangerous and slow. I was always so jealous of my friends that lived in the city. They could just go do stuff
That's not the case in much of the rural US. In small towns (~30-75k) everywhere there are kids driving up and down the road every Friday and Saturday night.
It's because they can't remember where their meth dealer lives this week.
You'll just have to trust me, or ask an old timer from one of those cities you speak of (I'm from one of several in the area). They're about 1/4 the amount of traffic that they used to be.
I think "malls" in the traditional sense of giant concrete behemoths with nothing but row after row of stored and fast food were killed by online, but if you open up the definition a bit, some are thriving.
Like where I live, it's an 'archology'. A mix of residential units on top and commercial on the bottom. All outdoors which is a draw for folks in the forever pandemic world.
A mall that's only random clothes, shoes, and jewellery stores surrounded by an ocean of parking lot is very unattractive.
As you say, a mall with actually useful stores, like grocery, pharmacy, perhaps a restaurant or two (not chain fast food), etc, with residential units on top or very close to constitutes more of a community than a mall and is very likely to be sustainable versus the former.
Man, I wish that became more of a thing here. I'm good enough at being a weird shut-in without the architecture pushing me to do so.
Indoor malls have been on the way out for a while. They're large Indoor spaces that need to be heated or cooled and attract young people with no money and nowhere to go. Also in a mall you only buy so much as you tired of carrying it around. An outdoor Plaza encourages people to go back to their car and unload.
This is anecdotal to me, but I remember going to the mall a whole lot as a kid cuz my mom liked shopping at the stores there. Nowadays, she still shops at the same stores, but usually through their own websites. For me, when I learned how to drive and could go to the mall myself, it was probably only to go to a place like Gamestop, since the one in the mall was the closest to me. Again, online shopping, and especially being able to download games through like, Xbox Live, the eShop (and Steam, but I wasn't really into PC gaming until much more recently) was much more convenient than having to drive 20-30 minutes to the mall.
EDIT: Another thing I remembered is that a Target opened up closer to where I lived, so it just became more convenient to shop there for stuff like cheap clothes vs brand name places like H&M. They also sold stuff you couldn't buy at the mall like groceries, so it was more enticing, i guess.
Recently I went back to the mall I grew up around and it was a lot more empty. One of the really big stores that was there when I was a kid was Sears and they're gone now, and that mall had a TON of space dedicated to Sears. No one has come to lease that space. The mall has a sprawling parking lot that's mostly empty now.
I remember as a kid there were always like, crazy extravagant displays at the mall around the Holiday Season, and things like raffles where you could win a new car or something, but I don't think any of that has happened there in recent years to nearly the same scale.
I wouldn't say this mall is completely dead yet (I visited a different mall that had like, maybe 5 stores open and a lot of converted office space in it on a Saturday afternoon and that was eerie and dead while still being open to the public), but I think its on its way out.
Yes, yes, and yes.
Urban malls seem to be doing mostly fine. Its mostly suburban once that are flopping. Selection is trash
Honestly malls are thriving where I live, and I go regularly to extremely large crowds. I know it's a trend worldwide, but if all I knew was my local city, I would have no idea.
Without outing yourself... Can you share where?
Or even a population size.
In the big cities I'm in, they've become deserts.
Malls killed individual stores. They were bolstered by a heavily car-centric society.
I only go to the mall for Dicks sporting goods or Apple which both have their own entrances. Have not walked inside the mall or any other stores in years.
This is a fascinating question. I don't think it was just Amazon either. Although the price undercutting definitely helped.
Like many others here, I remember malls having lots of cool smaller shops with various specialties. Toys, books, electronics, games, clothes, decor, whatever. It's where you'd find more niche things.
Like if "Spencer's Gifts" wasn't 99% raunchy sex stuff now. (Although hey, there was that too.)
It was funny in the 90's watching this idea of teenage girls coming back with a multi-bag haul from a mall run. Ha! Not anymore.
Nowadays though, in my big metropolitan area malls are doing okay, but you get two classes generally:
These malls are still kinda hanging on. The ones here are trying to do cool things like theaters and experiences. I think it can be a cool place for fledgling businesses to do more experimental stuff. Unfortunately, the said-sketchiness still makes them a bit unappealing to visit.
Each individual suite has like 15 items on display that cost more than the suited foot-aching sales person makes in 6 months before taxes.
I have no idea how these places are still running. Lol
I'd like to think it was a combination of all the online shopping sites for all your non-groceries that started killing them off.
Why go to a mall to buy that hat you always wanted when it's not only available online on the website of wherever you are planning to go but could be cheaper? That, or just buy it on Am*zon.
That, and I firmly believe people in various first world countries have gotten lazy enough that they'll gladly wait the however long it takes for something to arrive by mail, but spending the time to have to drive somewhere and walk from the parking lot to wherever in the mall the store they want is? Haell Nah! Combine that with inflation (meaning higher gas prices) and you have people not going to malls unless they have to.
It's why surviving US malls usually have something to keep them alive to attract people anymore, I swear. Some sort of gimmick like that one well known mall with the amusement park in it or how the mall near where I live has an aquarium in it (never been, so I don't know how effective it is at attracting people). I don't think the restaurants you'll find in malls are even enough to attract enough people keep malls afloat, either, but I could be dead wrong about that one.
City Beautiful made a video video on the subject.
https://youtu.be/mEBQPpSHQME?si=e83xmwAgiGDNL13a
Great video thank you!
Amazon certainly helped.
The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.
For me personally, I’m fuckin lazy and the ability to have things delivered right to my door enables this laziness.
Stores are becoming less relevant by the day.