Yesterday a fascinating intergenerational conversation took place on X. And it put me in mind of a subject we haven’t touched on in a while: The cultural impact of the mall – how it rose to dominance, and how it faded.
While loving the idea of a mall is a Gen X tendency and Gen Y affliction similar to nostalgia for Blockbuster, it’s a widespread phenomenon that merits scrutiny.
Here’s the whole original post for context:
Malls’ rise to prominence started in the 1950s. By the 1980s, they were the undisputed kings of American retail commerce. But even then, proto e-commerce in the form of online shopping channels and catalogs signaled the coming threat to their reign. Big box stores like Best Buy and bargain outlets like Walmart took a big bite out of malls’ profits throughout the 90s. Those many cuts softened malls up for the crash of 2008, which finished off many shopping malls whose anchor stores had been poached and whose smaller tenants had been forced to close. The result: Dead Mall Syndrome.
However, economies are just people interacting with other people. And a major contributing factor to the 2008 mortgage crisis was predatory lenders selling immigrants properties they couldn’t afford. So the cause of Dead Mall Syndrome isn’t an either/or economics or demographics problem.
Back in the Trump years our city’s main mall, which has lost all but one of its three anchor stores, filled half of one empty mega-shell with a Round 1 arcade complex. When word got out that a new arcade was coming to town, the local gangs got into a turf war over the rights to sell drugs there. Round 1 was forced to hire private security to keep the gangbangers in line, which probably contributed to the location’s quick demise, along with the Covid crackdowns.
As for Zoomers’ puzzlement over older generations’ obsession with shopping malls, this will sound like a cop out, but you had to be there.
It’s hard to explain to people born after the 1980s just how central the local shopping mall was to a town’s social and economic life. I remember when Conservatives would lament that nobody went to church anymore, and that malls were the new secular temples.
Now people are still going to church, and the malls are empty.
My hometown mall was one of the largest in the Midwest outside of Chicago when it opened in the 1970s. As kids growing up in the 80s, that meant my friends and I were kind of spoiled. We got two bookstores, two record stores, a two-story pizza place, and an arcade that remained a major social hub until the early 2000s.
That’s all gone now. Anything that didn’t cater to bored housewives, vapid teenage girls, or stoners disappeared ten years ago. Borders bought out the last bookstore, closed it down, and then went out of business themselves. Best Buy did the same to the video store. They’re not dead yet, but online retailers are steadily driving them to the same fate that the big box stores inflicted on the mom & pop outfits.
It might surprise you that young men used to go to malls. They’ve since been driven out, just like they’ve been driven from pretty much every public establishment and institution. As is the case with college and the office, young men have retreated to their homes and the internet. Online gaming rang the death knell for the arcade much as Amazon did for the anchor stores.
I used to frequent the mall on Saturday afternoons starting in junior high. Chances were I’d run into not just one, but several, friends, which was how socializing happened before the internet. That habit continued through high school and beyond. The mall wasn’t just a place to blow money on PS1 games and comics. It’s where many of us got our first jobs and even worked our way through college, back when you could still do that without hawking street drugs.
Was the shopping mall a secular temple of Mammon? Yes. But it preserved echoes of traditions going back to the Roman forum. Now shopping is a solitary affair conducted via smartphone. Video games are likewise played alone or with strangers from over the horizon.
Above all else, the mall is now the canary in the coal mine of American isolation and atomization.
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