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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 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?