It’s hard for Zoomers to believe, but the mall was once not only the preferred place to shop, its importance went beyond a mere retail hub. The mall served as a gathering spot where people connected, interacted, and shared their lives beyond their homes and workplaces.
Malls, which began in the 1950s and reached their peak in the 1980s, were central to the social and cultural life of many towns. But their dominance declined over time. To be sure, big box stores like Walmart and Best Buy undercut malls’ sales in the 1990s, and the rise of e-commerce took another bite out of their profits. But meatspace remained most people’s favorite plac to shop well into the aughts. In reality it was the sharp drop in social trust driven by rapid demographic changes that drove shoppers away from malls. The 2008 crash finished off many struggling malls, leaving behind hollow shells of what had been thriving centers of socioeconomic activity.
This phenomenon, known as Dead Mall Syndrome, reflects deeper changes in both economics and culture. More than just a shift in shopping habits, the decline of malls highlights a broader loss of connection in modern American life.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg described the Third Place as a setting separate from home and work where people could meet and build relationships. For decades, malls fulfilled this role. They were destinations for more than shopping—they were where people spent time together, ran into acquaintances, and forged friendships.
In the 1980s and 1990s, malls had something for nearly everyone. In my hometown, the local mall had two bookstores, an arcade, a two-story pizzeria, and multiple music shops. These attractions weren’t just conveniences; they encouraged interaction. Whether you were there to browse the latest video game releases or grab an Orange Julius, you were likely to run into friends or strike up a conversation with a friendly clerk.
That’s not to say it was all sunshine and roses. Malls replaced traditional meeting places like churches and men’s clubs in many American towns. While they were a downgrade, it’s undeniable that malls played an important role in fostering social bonds through the last half of the 20th century.
Related: The Last of the Third Places
The collapse of malls wasn’t just caused by economic factors; generational changes also contributed. By the early aughts, malls began targeting narrower demographics. Stores that catered to teenage boys or young men disappeared, replaced by businesses aimed at specific groups like suburban moms or fashion-focused teens. The decline of arcades—once a huge draw for young men—further accelerated this trend as online gaming replaced in-person gaming.
And though there were attempts to revitalize malls, they often failed to overcome these economic and cultural forces. In my city, a corporate chain arcade opened during the first Trump term, only to be plagued by gang activity from day one and ultimately close during the Corona-chan crackdown.
Related: Gen Y and the Pre-Internet Age
As mentioned above, younger generations often struggle to understand Xers’ and Ys’ obsession with malls. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, malls weren’t just places to shop—they were where we socialized and got our first jobs. They provided a sense of connection that’s hard to replicate in today’s digital world.
Here’s where the digital tech that helped kill the mall can give Zoomers and Alphas a vision of what it was like in its heyday. Watch this footage taken during the 1996 Christmas shopping season at a typical American mall:
Contrast the America captured in that footage with today. Shopping is now a solitary task conducted online. Friendships are relegated to apps and social media platforms, where interactions are parasocial when they’re not fleeting and impersonal. The decline of malls reflects a broader trend of disconnection in modern life.
So the question arises: After the mall, can we build a new Third Place?
As physical gathering spots vanish, so do opportunities for people to interact in meaningful ways. What’s clear is that the internet cannot match the depth of relationships built through in-person connections. Without intentional efforts to create places for people to gather, the isolation and fragmentation that define modern society will only worsen.
To counter this depersonalization, new Third Places need to emerge—whether revitalized town centers, public venues, or small, activity-centered clubs. The growth of alternatives to corporate tabletop RPGs and young men forming fitness groups may signal emerging substitutes. Anecdotal reports of men seeking now-scarce fellowship by returning to church are also hopeful signs.
As it stands, American society has a long way to go before we can recapture something like the cultural cohesion of the 90s, or even the early aughts. But as history shows, where there’s a social will, thre’s a way.
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I want this to be a reality, but honestly, with the ramifications of COVID and honestly the economy. It’s gonna be a long while for a true third place can be not just there, but also sustainable.
And again, the internet for the most part it is everywhere. It’s easy to access, and you can find your own echo chamber.That doesn’t judge you and that is so important for young people that they don’t want to be judged and looked down on.
Here’s hoping that.
A sustainable one, it comes true in the next coming years.
peace
To that extent, the internet mirrors real life. Anytime too many users crowded the old BBSes, message boards, or forums, they’d fracture into separate ghettoes. The same effect is now happening with the self-deportations from X to Bluesky. So some voluntary segregation is healthy.
Just last winter I was looking around my area to see if there was anything. No classes, no clubs, no groups, no hobbies, no anything–and all these things were around and plentiful when I was a kid. This is also why there are more single people than ever before. It is like everyone just up and disappeared. It feels like there’s no one around anymore even though the population in the area is supposedly much higher.
I don’t know what the next Third Place is going to be because right now it looks like people only want isolation and nothing else.
I think “want” is the wrong word to use about this. Most people simply don’t know that such things are possible, or have no idea how to seek them out. For me personally, it’s due to a lack of common interests and a generally unwillingness to break with comfortable routines, but IDK if that’s the case for anyone else.
Bible studies, perhaps. But youth groups kick you out in your 20s and then the Bible studies after that separate the genders, so good luck finding a spouse.
If the leadership would wise up, that is one thing the churches could actually offer that would bring young men back in droves.
“I don’t know what the next Third Place is going to be because right now it looks like people only want isolation and nothing else.”
It really is tempting to simply isolate yourself into your own little bubble, especially when (like me) you’ve spent most of your adolescence behind a computer screen. Pretty much the only times you’ll find me outside is when I’m heading to or coming back from my studies, heading to some cities with the train (sometimes with my dad), and frequenting retro gaming stores for old games/controllers/consoles, but that’s pretty much it.
In my view, much of the isolation likely has to do with the fact that walking around in most modern cities can only be described as profoundly alienating. A city like Amsterdam’s only positive is that the city centre still has some nice architecture from the Dutch Golden Age, but once you’ve actually walked through most of it, all that remains is a city centre where most street happenings are either shopping consumers or political activists, suburbs where almost every home is some decaying brown & grey monstrosity built somewhere between 1960-1980, and streets sometimes filled by mountains of garbage. When things are so bad that you literally need signs (only in English, btw) which politely ask people to put trash in the trash bin, your social environment is down the toilet. And believe it or not, cities like The Hague and especially Almere are even worse than that.
Simply put, if you’re constantly surrounded by both literal and spiritual foreigners, decaying consumerist malls, decaying brutalist buildings, mountains of trash, and with a city council filled by people who have no problem letting extremist activists and ethnic riots run amok, sitting alone in your apartment behind a screen becomes the only place in your life where you have any semblance of emotional peace.
What’s quite a disturbing idea to me is that I spent much of my life wanting to be seen as a ‘functioning member of society’, and now that I’m in a position to actually be one, it might very well be that nobody is there waiting for me…
I think people are not formalizing shared activities they way they used to. I’m part of a group of dads that regularly organizes bike rides. In the old days, we probably would have called ourselves a cycling club, which would have made it possible to new people to locate us. Today, it’s hard to see how it would benefit us to declare ourselves a proper organization. Email and group text are sufficient for all our comms. We’re happy to have friends and teenage sons come along, but there’s no need for more people just so we can say we’re growing.
We’re illegible from the outside, and that suits us just fine. I realize that presents an obstacle to people looking for an activity group, but it also serves to gatekeep (most of us attend the same parish).
There are two strategies here, and I think it’s useful to pursue both:
1) meet people you get along with, and engage in activities together
2) join in an activity and hopefully meet people you get along with
This is something I can’t 100% land on as right but something I do think about.
Part of the problem is the abandoning of cities and the continual drumbeat to move out to the country. If you want to have a social network you have to go where people are.
A friend of mine actually did the legwork on an idea that I had, that part of the reason dating fell off is that young women gravitate towards larger cities where they have opportunity, while a disproportionate number of men gravitate towards industries where they have opportunity but are geographically separate from those cities (oil and gas, many engineering and construction concerns). I was right; young never marrieds are disproportionately separated from each other. It’s not 100% obviously but it is imbalanced significantly.
Not sure what the solution is
I can’t speak to everywhere, but I have to say that Malls in the UK (or at least in London) are still a place for young people to meet. The difference between now and when I first got here in ’97 is that the smaller malls distintegrated, but they’ve built massive ones with 3 levels. It started with Westfield in Shepherds Bush in the early 00’s, then there was a new one built on the site of the Olympic village in the mid 10’s, which they imaginatively called Westfield Stratford (though it’s in East London, a social world away). You could be in either one and think you were in the other. Each one has a 17-screen cinema, a scattering of gadget shops, a cavernous Waterstones (bookshop), but no arcades. Those have survived in separate sites away from malls
Maybe it’s of a piece with megacorps taking over everything.
Demographics 100% collapsed the malls. Became too dangerous for women to go to malls unattended due to rise in black populations. Malls that existed in areas with fastest rising black population died first. “Guns Point Mall” for instance was the first to die in the Houston Tx area, because it was the first area to go black. Hence its name, a pun on its real name “Greens Point Mall.” Lots of white women got raped; the mall closed. Simple as.
Not only has the real world shrunk, the virtual world has as well. Back in the early days of Internet hype, the idea was that the virtual world would be an endlessly expansive frontier. (Many people still say things like that).
One of the big reasons why people accepted the decline and destruction of third places (not just malls) was this idea of their replacement by the limitless opportunities of the virtual world.
But that turned out to be a chimera. The virtual world is smaller now than it was in the days of the old Internet. That’s because the virtual world only works as a supplement to the real world. And that has to be the case because it’s virtual; it takes everything it has from the real world.