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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, Insightful) by leftover on Tuesday April 25 2017, @06:16PM
My experience parallels this and the earlier comment by Runaway1956.
Malls at one point were nice places to go and even to shop. For-real bookstores and
specialty shops run by their owners. The mall itself was typically managed locally too,
maybe even by the developer. They provided handy services and held community
special events.
IMHO, the underlying forces behind the deterioration are all manifestations of the
same pox we obliquely refer to as 'rampant capitalism' and 'death by MBA'. Nearly all
the malls were bought by a very few "money manager" type corporations that would
pull out cash and do nothing to maintain the mall as a place to go. Simultaneously the
specialty shops were systematically slaughtered by the chains, who then turned on
each other. Sears killed itself by a decades-long effort to convince people it was a
women's clothing store, thereby pissing away what remained of its position as THE
hardware store for the country. How many people remember that once you could buy
a __house__ from the Sears catalog?
Somehow a half-baked economic concept called "capitalism" (lower-case 'c') became
an overblown fiction called "Capitalism" in which the only figure of merit for an enterprise
or project or individual decision was its financial return on capital. Also note that 'return'
really meant "return to the financial industry".
So malls could only keep the highest-margin stores and stores could only stock the
highest-margin products. If you were not the most common size, the stores no longer had
your size in stock. There went the benefit of shopping in-person.
Both malls and stores 'had to' pay employees less and less until the job no longer qualified
as an occupation. There went helpful and knowledgeable staff.
The precursor to the funny movies lampooning mall security was very unfunny:
rapes and murders in the malls and their parking garages. What do you suppose those did
for mall business?
Amazon did not cause the collapse of the malls, it rose to fill the rapidly increasing void.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.