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In the 1980's people wrote about malls as cultural centers, as temples to shopping. Now, they're dying.
Many observers are speculating about the growing trend of so-called dead malls: once-flourishing, large retail spaces that now have a high vacancy rate, low numbers of pedestrian traffic, or the lack of an "anchor" store (typically a department chain). Is it because of economic recession, or stagnant middle-class wages and growing income inequality? Or has the death of these malls been hastened by the rapid growth of online shopping?
It's difficult to say, but the dead mall phenomenon is becoming a cultural item of interest -- for retail historians, urban explorers and documentarians alike. We may read about dead malls in The New York Times or The Atlantic, but film footage can say much more than words.
Is Amazon to blame?
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:04PM (29 children)
1: seeing the products in person isn't as much of a pull as the malls thought it was. I don't think I've ever looked at something and gone "You know, this might interest me, but I'd really prefer to be able to see it physically first." Maybe I'm weird.
2: There are probably better places to be. Where I live has a nice climate so people tend to be, you know, outside. Malls in general are pretty depressing and sterile, I don't blame people for not wanting to go there.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:08PM (5 children)
>Where I live has a nice climate so people tend to be, you know, outside.
Where's that?
In the north-central US, it's below freezing for much of the year.
In the northeast US, it's below freezing for part of the year, and generally chilly for much of the year, and it rains a lot.
In the southeast US, it's horribly hot and humid for part of the year, and rains a lot and without warning.
In the southwest US, it's ridiculously hot for half the year or more, and is a great place to get skin cancer.
In the northwest US, the temperature is usually fairly nice if a little brisk, but it's constantly drizzling.
In the central US, the weather is extreme and there's tornadoes.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:16PM
Mountains in the southeast :)
Course it does get around freezing a lot of the time in january/february, but then there are also days in the 60's/70's those months.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:18PM (2 children)
You forgot the midwest, it's generally pretty nice here if you're a native.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:44PM (1 child)
I have ancestors and relatives in Wisconsin in the center of the state (like Wausau ha ha see I'm legit I know the funny names) and when I visit the weather is really nice for about one month in the spring and one in the fall. The rest of the year its the end of the world. Also being east of the mississippi it rains like every 3rd day. I don't think Californians know what rain is, but I assure you its annoying to get that much rain.
Also I am not sure how, but the mosquitoes in Wisconsin are worse than in the deep south.
The land is a frigging paradise. There's this mountain in Wausau near the center of the state where the WHOLE MOUNTAIN is one giant state park. I've been there and its like the garden of eden on a mountain or something. I can see why all of Illinois tries to drive to Wisconsin every weekend.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:00PM
I forgot to mention the mosquitoes, that's a pretty important point in the South or anywhere near it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:22PM
Really? You're bringing tornadoes into this?
"Hey hon, looks like a tornado might be coming."
"TO THE MALL!"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @05:37PM (13 children)
Malls in general are pretty depressing and sterile
Whats up with that meme? I don't remember depressing and sterile as a theme, but I'm sure its been tried at some times and places. I'm old so I've see some fads come and go down at the mall.
When I was a kid there was a fad of running water river like ponds down the middle of hallways where those ugly cellphone kiosks are today. It was like walking down a river kinda weirdly cool.
And in the holidays we had santa and easter bunny.
There was a fad after the water feature were removed of food kiosks before they all became dumpy sunglass/phone kiosks, and that at least tasted good. The food court idea wiped that out, unfortunately.
Another thing done with hallways was shows. I loved those. Car shows. Lego shows. Something like gencon but less wild (hell maybe it was gencon?). Here's a weird one, the piano show. It was so fascinating seeing some weird new event. I distinctly remember like 30 years later a computer show where a TI-99 or something had a graphical CPU display of assembly language which was fascinating as I was programming 6809 and z80 at home without any such amazing animation. And they had a IBM PC (probably 4.77 mhz pre-xt era) doing some sorting demo using bars on the screen and different algos. Well, that was the mall back in the good old days!
In the 00s they tried projectors / dance floor. That was creative. Somewhat more invigorating music, some lasers and disco balls, damn I have to give them credit I'm sure the 80 year old grannies didn't like the music but it was kinda cool. I donno if that was long term or temporary.
Somehow, some gang of lunatics brought in some chillers one winter and we had an pop up ice skating rink IN THE MALL. frigging unbelievable. I guess it was thermodynamically possible somehow.
There were more than a few concerts in the mall. Both high school kids doing christmas carols and dudes hired to pound a piano, all the way up to actual small concerts by like 3rd rate "below county fair" caliber bands. Interesting.
I distinctly remember several bridal shows in the main atrium. It was almost stereotypical after christmas before May/June I mean other than easter bunny what else did they have to do? I don't mind bridal shows some of the models are pretty hot.
Ah what else. There was exactly and precisely one RC car race in the atrium. I don't know if customers got hit or the clientele didn't get along?
I remember a plastic scale model show. I remember it because it had a scale aircraft carrier. About 30 feet long. Jawdropping.
There were numerous model railroad shows in the mall too. They had a modular n-trak one time that went from one end to the other, must have literally been 1000 modules.
There were military recruitment events at the mall. But not just dude in uniform at table like happened at high school. The army brought freaking tanks and M113 APCs and an attack helicopter on static display and the air force got a small training jet in there somehow. No I don't think they flew it in, I think it went in the cargo doors like anything else. I remember the navy getting teased "hey you guys bring in a battleship?" ha ha ha. The marines just brought in a bunch of marines in dress blues I think they had entire reserve units there, and were just as mobbed with people as the army so whatever.
I'm sure it exists today if you say so, I just don't remember the local mall as "depressing and sterile". I'm sure a dead mall with no traffic and closed storefronts sucks, but the old days were not like that, not at all. Its like a bar or restaurant, any POS hole in the wall is fun if its packed with people having fun, and no amusement park is fun no matter how cool it is, if its abandoned and tumbleweeds.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Tuesday April 25 2017, @06:05PM (4 children)
Dunno, you've probably got a good 10 or 20 years on me so maybe there was some shift in malls between then. I've been in a couple which weren't quite so bad, but those were in the larger cities in the US as a rule. Most malls are pretty bad.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:11PM (3 children)
Now that you point it out, it is true that almost everything good that I mentioned was from the 80s. That seems to have been the glory decade of the mall.
The only cool thing I've seen in a mall in the last 20 years is a traveling lego exhibition of Washington DC monuments. Vs all that stuff I saw in the 80s.
Maybe liability insurance I donno.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:12PM (1 child)
I dunno man, I'm only 27 and I remember seeing a lot of that kind of stuff in the mall of the small town where I grew up. Nothing too crazy but I remember seeing cars in the hallways pretty regularly, sometimes military hardware as well. And of course the "Santa's Village" or Easter Bunny whatever stuff. Or the small local bands or highschool choir. Nothing really *interactive* like the RC races, but it's a town of 10k with two malls so I don't think they would have had enough traffic for that.
But at the same time I *do* consider that mall kinda boring and sterile. Spent twenty years in that town, the mall only has one floor with three main hallways (kind of a plus sign with the side arms offset) but I'd still get lost in there because *EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME!* Flat white tiled floors with flat white cinder block walls and flat white drop ceilings above. Even the goddamn anchor stores mostly looked the same except for K-Mart. If I wasn't within sight of the RadioShack or K-Mart, I didn't have a clue where the hell I was in that place. And it's only got twenty or thirty stores! Even when they did do something more colorful or interesting, it was confined to very specific designated locations with rope lines and walls separating it from the rest of the mall. There was the mall, there were the shops, and there were the exhibits...and there was no visible interaction between the three. Almost like the mall was designed not to bring the shops together but to create an empty and inoffensive buffer zone between them...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:32PM
but to create an empty and inoffensive buffer zone between them.
Maybe the store managers didn't get along LOL. Sometimes its something that simple. Takes a lot of cooperation to pull off some of the stuff I saw. Even something as "simple" as the bridal show every store in the building went insane with bridal registry this and that, and theming every window display to match the event, handing out free junk bags from each store to the brides... I could see if the store mgrs hated each other it isn't happening and they're all gonna be much poorer till they're out of business.
The whole thing reminds me of "downtown boosterism" except at a mall, and unlike downtown, people actually went to the mall. Or maybe "downtown boosterism" is merely dreaming of doing today, downtown, what malls did in the 80s, I donno.
Maybe its just what successful retailers do, no matter where they are, and in the 80s they happened to be in the suburban mall. About all I'm sure is they're not in the mall now, LOL.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:36AM
Now that you point it out, it is true that almost everything good that I mentioned was from the 80s.
Most good things, in general, are from the 80s.
Movies: Aliens, Terminator, Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, etc. The 80s was full of great movies. Today's movies are mostly crap.
Music: Lots of great rock and metal (and lots of not-so-great but still fun to listen to stuff). Even the pop music wasn't too bad, and occasionally brilliant, at least until rap started infecting it (but that was really the 90s). Music today is crap.
TV: Lots of fun TV shows: Airwolf, Knight Rider, etc. Not always very realistic (an intelligent car?), but lots of fun to watch. There's some great TV these days I'll admit (GoT), but the fun factor really isn't there any more.
Houses: They were actually affordable in the 80s. Today, not so much. And they didn't have all those gaudy McMansions back then either.
Cars: Well, maybe not so much here... Cars were a lot better in the 90s actually, and today's cars are generally the best IMO. You can still get very decent cars under $20k now, and they'll be more reliable than anything from the 80s by far.
Being a kid: In the 80s, you could walk around outside all you wanted, even at under 10 years old. These days, you'll get picked up by the cops and your parents either arrested for child endangerment or at least getting in trouble with CPS (even though the crime rate is actually quite a bit lower than in the 70s or 80s). Why would anyone want to have a kid in today's environment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @06:58PM
When I was a kid there was a fad of running water river like ponds down the middle of hallways where those ugly cellphone kiosks are today. It was like walking down a river kinda weirdly cool.
I remember the indoor ponds and fountains that they used to have when I was a kid and missed them after they were removed. I also remember events like when the mall was filled with animatronic dinosaurs for the summer when Jurassic Park came out.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:19PM (2 children)
That shit's been gone for years and years. Malls these days have no space for "events." The interiors are filled with cart/kiosk obstacles selling sunglasses, watches, cell phone plans, perfumes, ugly jewelry, and trendy made-in-China junk. At Christmas, there are even more. If you're lucky, they MIGHT bring in a Santa at Christmas where they sell $30 photos of your kids. Just look for the "absolutely no cell phone photos" sign.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Tuesday April 25 2017, @08:25PM (1 child)
Interestingly, a major mall in my city recently finished a years-long renovation and expansion of a new 3-floor wing to accommodate 20-30 more stores. The ground floor at the very end of the expanded wing is kept clear of those popup kiosks for "events", and last year they had a fashion show to showcase a local music event that would be in a few months.
That said, the smaller shopping malls are indeed having problems. I just had a counter-anecdote to the idea that malls these days have no space for small or medium-sized events.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:40AM
Well, from my own experience in recent years and reading the comments here, it definitely seems to be varied: many malls are dying, but some malls are doing just fine or booming. I've seen a few malls that were doing great, and plenty that looked like they were on the way to bankruptcy. I guess it just shows that malls still have a place in certain areas, when they're run by smart management, and have figured out how to retain customers (and are located in places where they have paying customers), but meanwhile in many places these things just aren't in place and the mall is spiraling down. Overall, that industry is contracting, but that doesn't mean it'll completely disappear any time soon.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday April 25 2017, @11:09PM (2 children)
> [...] we had an pop up ice skating rink IN THE MALL.
In Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai, there are malls that have permanent ice rinks:
https://everythingtianjin.com/recreation/ice-skating-in-tianjin/ [everythingtianjin.com]
http://www.tour-beijing.com/blog/beijing-travel/beijing-top-10/top-10-ice-skating-rinks-in-beijing [tour-beijing.com]
http://www.smartshanghai.com/venue/4146/Wujiaochang_Champion_Rink_shanghai [smartshanghai.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:44AM
Speaking of malls with ice rinks ( and much much more ) this mall is still going strong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Edmonton_Mall [wikipedia.org]
It inspired a man in China to build an even bigger mall ... but when I was there in 2008 it was pretty much dead and on government life support. They were ahead of the curve there ;)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:03PM
Yeah that's a nice idea, but the amazing part of a pop up ice rink is I'm pretty sure the designers had no idea when they built the building. I guess anywhere the HVAC can be convinced not to blow hot air directly on the floor, and the structural engineering is sound for the modest mass of an inch or two of (frozen) water, and theres enough KW at the electrical panel to run the chillers, ta da instant ice rink. I guess if I were crazy enough I could do this in my living room...
Kind of like hot tub in my back yard, yeah, that's right where they belong, but walk into my office and see a surprise hot tub installed, whoa thats a surprise...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:09PM
You obviously lived somewhere with culture, and people who care.
I've lived places like that, "The Falls" mall in south Miami was purpose built around waterfalls like a Tennessee river, kinda cool as you say.
I've also lived places where we knew the "mall general manager" for a while, before he shipped his family off to the next culture-free town to maximize profits for the space owners. His mall's "special events" were tepid, vapid, boring and unattractive, but he had air-conditioning between the stores whereas the rest of the retail space in town did not, the competing retail space was mostly 3 miles of continuous strip-malls, parking lot with a row of stores facing it, with stellar anchors like Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and a movie theater.
Organizing and executing events like a piano show requires a market with sufficient disposable income to do something like buy a piano. As TFA says, that demographic is shrinking - it still exists in pockets, but those pockets are shrinking and "cool malls" are giving way to WalMart Supercenters. It's not my favorite trend of the last 30 years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Tuesday April 25 2017, @06:16PM
>>> I don't think I've ever looked at something and gone "You know, this might interest me, but I'd really prefer to be able to see it physically first."
Once upon a time, seeing things physically was pretty much the way you did it. Sure, there were advertising brochures in the newspaper - maybe those are before your time too.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 25 2017, @06:32PM (7 children)
1: seeing the products in person isn't as much of a pull as the malls thought it was. I don't think I've ever looked at something and gone "You know, this might interest me, but I'd really prefer to be able to see it physically first." Maybe I'm weird.
You're not "weird" (well, you may be, but that's beside the point here) -- but things have changed radically in marketing of products and delivery over the generations.
Before Amazon, buying a product locally wasn't just about "seeing the product in person" -- it was about convenience. If you ordered something from the Sears Catalogue (which existed since the 1800s), you might have to wait a few weeks for them to ship it. And then if you accidentally ordered the wrong thing or they shipped the wrong thing or it was broken, you'd be dealing with more days or weeks of waiting to deal with that.
If you go to a store, you avoid a lot of those problems and/or resolve them quickly. Amazon's ubiquitous super-fast shipping has changed all of that, making speedy mail-order service that you'd use to pay a huge premium actually pretty affordable.
But of course what made the Sears Catalogue exciting generations ago was the fact that you had more variety. You could get stuff that you couldn't find locally, or which you'd have to drive around or call around for hours trying to find.
The mall promised to save you that trouble by housing a variety of businesses under one roof. It was mostly about convenience of access to the products.
But there also used to be a greater interest in "in-person" product marketing. Old-school department stores used to set up displays of new products, which offered to let you try them out or have a free sample (or whatever, depending on product type). Salespeople would discuss new features with you. New product releases were often an event, because -- frankly -- there were such more limited options back then. A new type of toothpaste could even be a sales event; nowadays, when each brand offers a dozen varieties, and there are a dozen brands, would anyone really care about some salesperson trying to convince you to try another one within over a hundred existing options? If, on the other hand, there were only 3 or 4 normal options for toothpaste, suddenly a new product release has a lot more interest -- and the sample at the store could be helpful.
While store displays and free samples and trials still exist, they just don't have the value they once did. Hence -- and here we get to the final issue with the death of in-person shopping -- everything is generally "in a box" at stores. It seems to me even a few decades ago that there were more "display models" out for you to try something or at least look it over in some detail; now, you're just shopping for an anonymous item shipped in a big box, which is often 1 out of 100 different models/varieties of that sort of thing.
So yeah, I agree with you: today there are fewer and fewer things I actually care about seeing in person while shopping. Hence malls (and many retail stores) become less and less useful as years go by.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:10PM (3 children)
But of course what made the Sears Catalogue exciting generations ago was the fact that you had more variety. You could get stuff that you couldn't find locally, or which you'd have to drive around or call around for hours trying to find.
I like that point, there's a lot of talk about internet killed this and that, but its worth pointing out that Radio Shack (a common mall store) is dead but Digikey and Mouser (and a few others) are basically the Sears Catalogue of electronic parts online and AFAIK business is booming for them.
Supposedly in the old days, old men at old fashioned hardware stores gave personal service the way parametric search does today online. "My horse wagon wheel is squealing" and next thing you know you're holding a tub of muskrat grease or something. Today you go online, I need a SMD DC blocking capacitor, 0402 physical size, resonant frequency above 2.6 GHz, blammo here's a list you'll have a pick-n-place spool of any of them by airmail tomorrow morning if not faster. And its all automated and incredibly cheap.
Its a pity Sears didn't go that strategy for home hardware and stuff. Or radio shack should have tried.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by draconx on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:44PM (1 child)
I don't know how these guys manage to deliver products so consistently fast. We recently ordered some parts on Digikey for our office. It arrived on the 2nd business day after we ordered it. Through no action of our own, Digikey apologised for the delay and refunded the $8 shipping cost.
This is how you get customers that are happy to give you money, over and over again.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:06PM
You must live "far away" because I'm close enough for tomorrow morning. I believe they claim anything ordered before 8pm local is shipped that day. I think the whole thing is robots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @06:05PM
While there are a couple shitty hardware stores around that give 'condescending' service, if you don't look like 'their kind' of people, we also have one in my town that is ~1/8 the size of a Home Depot, but has about the same number of employees. They give customized service to each customer, know where almost all the stock in their store is (occasionally you get people who are from another department helping you out, and if they can't help you, they try and find a proper employee of that department, or will check inventory if that fails.) Their parking lot is almost never less than half full, they seem to make plenty of money, the employees are always cheerful and helpful, and they have a diverse staff of multiple ethnicities all knowledgeable in the diverse fields of hardware they carry.
While I don't believe our town could support dozens or hundreds of similiar stores, I do believe that same level of care and commitment needs to followed by more stores if they expect to survive the current online purchasing trend. The issues of inventory and cost are problematic, but as the store in question shows, people are willing to pay a 10-50 percent markup if they can find the item same-day and get the right tool for the job, but *IF* and only *IF* they feel the experience was worth it. If the experience dealing with the store is bad, people will only go there for discounted goods, which in turn is a self-perpetuating cycle into oblivion, just like happened with Radio Shack, Montgomery's, Circuit City, Best, Good Guys, Computer City, etc in the 90s-00s.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Wednesday April 26 2017, @12:52AM (1 child)
Back about 100 years ago, you could literally buy a house in the Sears catalog. The program ran from 1908 to 1940,and the kits were usually delivered by boxcar. Some people would construct them like a barn raising, while others hired local contractors. There were hundreds of styles, and many had modern conveniences like central heating. These houses were high quality, and many still exist today.
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(Score: 2) by nethead on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:34AM
Yep, the Craftsman. For $800,000 you can have one too!
http://www.windermere.com/listing/WA/Seattle/106-NW-50th-St-98107/55192797 [windermere.com]
How did my SN UID end up over 3 times my /. UID?
(Score: 2) by nethead on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:31AM
A Thomas Organ store, couldn't have a real mall without some dweeb blasting out the Laurence Welk from his store.
To be honest, some of those organs were pretty cool considering the tech of the day.
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