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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I do think the reason why malls ultimately went away was because the Baby Boomers in charge never understood why the younger generations (Gen X and Y primarily, Millennials might remember a bit of it from their childhood, but it wasn’t for very long) went there. I’m sure for females it was a mammon temple as much as it was a social club, but for males I think it was because it pretty much was the only place we could go to just do things. It wasn’t uncommon for men to spend little to no money while hanging out, because they were mostly there for the social experience. Not to say the mall was ideal, but it was the last remnant of the concept of a community center. With it gone, there isn’t really anything left.
Now, where people go today, I have no idea. To be honest, I’ve had this impression for a few years now that a lot of people just dropped out of society and disappeared. Anywhere I go it feels like there is about 1/3 of the people out there that there used to be around in public. This was even before the pandemic, but I think that was the final blow for a lot of them. With the rise of remote work and uber-style delivery services even going into grocery stores, I get the impression that an alarming amount of people have just checked out of the very idea of community and society.
I keep hoping we can work past this, but of all the directions to go in, this is most definitely not ideal.
I vaguely remember going to the mall as a child and seeing all the diverse stores – clothing, gaming, toys, etc. So many people looking happy, just hanging out. I was born in the early 90’s so it’s more of a foggy memory.
I think for me what I considered the mark of the beginning of the end was when the Disney stores disappeared (who remembers those?). I think they brought them back during the marvel crazy, but it’s not the same, it’s not like walking into a microcosm of Disney World, it’s just a corporate shell of its former self.
We still have a large mall in my home town but there’s little diversity to it. It’s almost 50% shoe stores and 50% clothing stores. Throw in a food court, some jewelry stores, and two game stores, and thats it. Needless to say I don’t go there except to clothe shop, otherwise, it’s boring af.
In a way, I feel robbed because I had looked forward to growing up and being able to experience that. Now, the mall is just a marketplace, not a social commune that just so happens to sell stuff anymore.
As far as hypocritical Boomer shibboleths, “Why don’t you get out of the house and go do something?” comes second only to “Get a degree, any degree; you want to end up flipping burgers?”
Because it seems like anytime their kids did find a social activity they liked outside the home, their parents rallied to quash it.
“Stop wasting time and money at that mall arcade. It’ll wreck your eyesight!”
“You’d better not be involved with that Dungeons & Dragons garbage. The TV news said it’s Satanic!”
“Don’t let me catch you messing around that skate park. I’m not paying the bill if you break your leg!”
Yet spending countless after-school hours staring at TV – much of which actually *was* diabolical, and risking injury and sleep deprivation at parent-approved or even mandated football practice, were just fine.
A case in your exact point: Right after CGZ, an X-er friend of mine opened an all-ages dance club on the outskirts of town. He did it because he noticed that teens had nothing to do on Saturday night and wanted to give them somewhere to have fun while providing unobtrusive supervision. To show he meant business about running a clean operation, he had security enforce a discreet but firm zero tolerance policy. Get caught with booze or drugs, and you’d be quietly taken to the office to wait for the cops.
City hall, egged on by the cops, had him shut down by slow-walking licenses and even passing an ordinance specifically targeting his business. No matter that he should have been grandfathered in. He eventually ran out of money trying to fight it in court, and that was that.
Near as I can tell, since Boomers suffer from generational solipsism, they tend to view their kids as life accessories or extensions of themselves. Also beset with sloth, they sought the surest and easiest ways to control their offspring. TV was the ideal solution. But when even the tube started warning about its own negative effects (see Dinosaurs), totally managed extracurricular activities became the supplement of choice.
I knew a guy (this one was a Gen Y) who wanted to do the same thing where I grew up. He was blocked at every opportunity and nothing ever came of it. Now the location he wanted to use is dying and on its last legs, but I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like had he been allowed to do what he wanted to do with it.
Shame, but that’s how it goes. Mistakes have consequences.
“Now, where people go today, I have no idea. To be honest, I’ve had this impression for a few years now that a lot of people just dropped out of society and disappeared. Anywhere I go it feels like there is about 1/3 of the people out there that there used to be around in public. This was even before the pandemic, but I think that was the final blow for a lot of them. With the rise of remote work and uber-style delivery services even going into grocery stores, I get the impression that an alarming amount of people have just checked out of the very idea of community and society.”
As someone who left high school right when the pandemic hit, I definitely feel the same way. It’s hard to describe, but the world as a whole feels a lot more… empty, even now. The pandemic definitely killed the last bits of social cohesion the West still had. You’ve also got this increase in anti-social behaviour; all of the societal chaos is definitely getting to people’s heads.
Let’s just say, I have a bad feeling about this…
the mall was the last Third Place.
Previous and following generations definitely don’t get it, and just how central it was to our childhoods.
Boomers had malls, but they had already developed their social habits before they really took off, so for them it was just a place to shop. We were dragged there by our mothers so they could shop, and allowed to do whatever we wanted so long as we were back at the predetermined meeting place in 2 hours.
Later when we had our own transportation we could go there every day for a week,never buy a single damn thing and still have fun.
Don’t know what to do? Time to go hang out at the mall, get $5 of arcade tokens, grab an Orange Julius and laugh at people.
I worked at a KayBee Toy one holiday surge and it doesn’t even feel like a real memory.
Watching the decline and slow death of the mall gives me a weird detached feeling. It was always inevitable, these crazy halls of consumerism could never have really lasted, could they? The idea that such a thing could exist in the modern day is simply ludicrous, and I don’t know whether to mourn the loss or marvel at the sheer assitude that could have believed that such a thing could ever work in the first place, if only for a few short decades.
A poignant testimonial.
Could you expand on this “Third Place” concept?
It’s something that’s been kicking around the last few years, on life and socialization. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place )
You have your First Place (home) and your Second Place (school or work), the Third Place is somewhere you go to socialize with friends (or strangers, I don’t judge) and generally just spend time Doing Stuff that explicitly isn’t work or home. Sociologists and other folks with more education and free time insist that these places are kind of essential to having a healthy psyche and sense of community.
These places, of course, are dying off, and the pandemic sure didn’t do them any favors.
Here’s a quick explainer on 3rd places.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/third-places-as-community-builders/
Thank you both for the helpful explanations.
“Now, where people go today, I have no idea. To be honest, I’ve had this impression for a few years now that a lot of people just dropped out of society and disappeared. Anywhere I go it feels like there is about 1/3 of the people out there that there used to be around in public. ”
This sentence sent a chill down my spine as I read it. It dredged up a memory of me and my family stopping at a mall food court early in the morning in a town in Colorado we were passing through. I don’t remember what we ate, but I do remember sitting at a small table made for four people with my older sisters and commenting to my oldest one, (who I believe is Gen Y) how weirdly dead it felt in there. Everywhere I looked I saw areas where stores should have been, shut down escalators, and an architecture that was so bare that I felt as if we were sitting in the bleached skeleton of some long dead beast, the glass roof above us cementing that thought in my mind. I remember leaving and asking my sister, “what on earth is the appeal of the mall?” All I got was a sad look from her, and a shush from the sister slightly older than me.
As for where most people gather now, the internet is 100% correct, but in my area, there’s a small college town that has a farmers market that almost doubles as a weekly fairground in the summer. Sure you have produce, but there’s also a few local artisan jewelers, a carpenter making cutting boards, and a snow-cone vendor and a frozen lemonade stand, alongside a live performing band, also local to the area. And it is quite the attraction, especially for the younger people. (and when my parents said young, they weren’t referring to 40 year olds, they meant early to mid 20s, which means millennials!) It could just be a last gasp of community before things turn to complete diarrhea, or it could be a small light at the end of a long monster filled tunnel.
Time will tell, but I can’t deny the tiny grain of hope that I feel going there.
Since the pandemic county fairs have actually been pretty packed in the midwest, reversing a trend of decline from before. (This is all based on anecdotal experience, but I go to at least five different county fairs each year.)
I suspect that this is because everything that is like them has either been killed off or been priced out of reach while simultaneously being made more miserable (ex. concerts.)
Honestly would not surprise me. There seems to be a small drive for community that has been steadily growing among Millennials over the last couple of years. Part of me suspects that it comes from the fact that most gaming and internet things have simply become boring to them, not from a drop of quality, (though that is a factor.) but simply from maturity. Every millennial I have met has had a feeling in their guts that things are about to become miserable, and want to have a community to help absorb the impact a little, and I can attest to the same desire.
I’m just tired of being alone…
Part of the pushback to your 11 year generations is the idea that the “normal” generations have too much similarity to not be considered the same. People will point out that there are many similarities between Gen Y and Millennials, like both being used to the idea of a computer as a normal part of life (even if they were much less of a novelty for Millennials.)
This is true, but what breaking things down into the smaller generations shows is that if you pair generations with their “other” neighbor there are also many similarities. If Strauss and Howe had defined a generation consisting of those born in the 70’s and 80’s, it probably would have been called the “Mall Generation” (since these are the only people who understand the phenomenon) and the idea that people born in the 90’s could be part of this generation would be as ridiculous as it is to a normie that a cynical Gen X-er could be the same as a Millennial. Though in that hypothetical timeline the Millennials and Zoomers probably would have been grouped together into the “Cell phone generation.” It’s an interesting game to see how you can group together Jonesers and X-ers, Gen X and Gen Y, etc.
But on the topic of malls, one thing that is different now is how much interactive they were back then. People will probably think of the arcades and theaters, which still exist in some malls (albeit in a pathetic form). I’m thinking more of how you would get performances and events in the common areas, kind of like what you see at county fairs now. But what I really remember was how sampling the merchandise was the standard in pretty much every store. If you were born in the 80’s, then you would play at least one new console or game on display. To this day that remains the only times I’ve ever played Super FX Racer were while waiting for my parents to get done shopping at Sears. Toy stores would have toys you could actually touch and try out, music stores let you listen to albums, etc. You could do quite a lot without ever paying a cent beyond just talking to people.
Your idea might have legs. The NPC firmware updates have militated too many people against the term “Gen Y.” But classifying age cohorts by inarguable cultural touchstones might gain more traction.
I may try using “the Mall Generation” for Gen X, “the Nintendo Generation” for Gen Y, and “the Online Generation” for Millennials.
I still think “Oregon Trail generation” has some legs.
I have died of dysentery.
Another good entry.
We will send the widow a corsage.
I want the mammon temples back.
Obnoxious, confusing site layouts and intrusive account settings plague electronic commerce—and that’s if you shop on a desktop. Shopping on a smartphone is self-torture.
Recently I bought a defective item on Amazon. Returning it required that I drive to a local department store. My question is, why couldn’t I have just bought it there in the first place?
Ecommerce has devolved into 1950s shopping with extra steps.
Amazon could always add a livechat space for lonely Millennials.
“No way! Brian, you’re [consuming product], too?”
“You bet! Let’s ship to the Amazon lockers at Whole Foods; we can meet to [consume more product].”
It would be just like hanging out at the mall—except more uncanny.
As a Millenial, (Or online generation, which I find I prefer, now that I think about it) Hard pass! Discord does just fine…
Online shopping has a convenience aspect for Americans, but an image on a website can never replace the importance of seeing an object in-person and being able to hold it in your hand, evaluate the weight and materials personally. There’s also a social & community element to malls that serves an important social function.
I traveled last year to Russia. What’s interesting is that Russia has modern conveniences like online shopping, but the mall culture there is still lively. In an all-White country, where crime is not prevalent, it seems that malls continue to survive and thrive. You’ll find some quite beautiful malls there, and the people are generally dressed well and are thinner.
The 1960s hollowed out American cities with crime, and the flight to the suburbs did more to harm American White communities than we can even acknowledge. In ethnically homogeneous European countries, cities are safe and lively, but in America going to a city is putting your life on the line dealing with criminals & drug addicts living in tents.
Thanks for the fresh perspective. Russia seems to have a lot that we don’t.
“Russia seems to have a lot we don’t.”
You can say a lot Russia’s political system (which I’d still consider authoritarian), but on a social and cultural level, that country actually has a future. The modern-day West, with its mainstream thinking, has absolutely none.
When I was a child in the 2000s, my parents would occasionally take me to a mall. It was about 50 miles away from where we lived, so we only went there when making a monthly trip to the city where it was.
Some of the pricier stores there like JCPenney (which we couldn’t afford to shop at) looked very glitzy and glamorous. The lighting in the common area was largely dim and moody except under the large skylights that were placed in some areas. In contrast, bright light came through the doorways of the stores. It all combined to create a sense of grandeur for me. There was a “rock climbing” activity in one place, where people could get strapped into a safety harness and climb a large plastic facsimile of a cliff. The food court had a Chick-Fil-A and a Chinese restaurant.
Tonight during David Stewart’s stream, I searched the internet to see whether the mall is still open (I haven’t been there in about a decade and a half or more), and found that it does indeed still exist. However, I was disappointed to find out that last year, there was a shooting there. A 16 year old girl and an 18 year old boy, who knew each other, opened fire on each other. Both were injured and both were charged with 4 counts of aggravated assault. Fortunately, the bystanders were all right.
You paint a vivid mental picture.
Where is that mall image from the top of the article from? Is it from a movie / tv series? I tried using Tineye to track down its origins but without luck. Any info would be appreciated.