I watch a lot of Dead Mall videos on YouTube and I wanted to see what everyone’s thoughts are on why there’s so many dead malls now.
Conventional brick and mortar retail is extremely expensive to maintain. It has less to do with Amazon specifically, and more to do with the rise of online retail & direct to consumer business models more generally. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon was a huge pioneer in that area, but it would have happened one way or another.
Urban malls seem to be doing mostly fine. Its mostly suburban once that are flopping. Selection is trash
I only go to the mall for Dicks sporting goods or Apple which both have their own entrances. Have not walked inside the mall or any other stores in years.
This is anecdotal to me, but I remember going to the mall a whole lot as a kid cuz my mom liked shopping at the stores there. Nowadays, she still shops at the same stores, but usually through their own websites. For me, when I learned how to drive and could go to the mall myself, it was probably only to go to a place like Gamestop, since the one in the mall was the closest to me. Again, online shopping, and especially being able to download games through like, Xbox Live, the eShop (and Steam, but I wasn’t really into PC gaming until much more recently) was much more convenient than having to drive 20-30 minutes to the mall.
EDIT: Another thing I remembered is that a Target opened up closer to where I lived, so it just became more convenient to shop there for stuff like cheap clothes vs brand name places like H&M. They also sold stuff you couldn’t buy at the mall like groceries, so it was more enticing, i guess.
Recently I went back to the mall I grew up around and it was a lot more empty. One of the really big stores that was there when I was a kid was Sears and they’re gone now, and that mall had a TON of space dedicated to Sears. No one has come to lease that space. The mall has a sprawling parking lot that’s mostly empty now.
I remember as a kid there were always like, crazy extravagant displays at the mall around the Holiday Season, and things like raffles where you could win a new car or something, but I don’t think any of that has happened there in recent years to nearly the same scale.
I wouldn’t say this mall is completely dead yet (I visited a different mall that had like, maybe 5 stores open and a lot of converted office space in it on a Saturday afternoon and that was eerie and dead while still being open to the public), but I think its on its way out.
Hrm. No one has mentioned the decline of middle class wages.
I remember in the … late 70s/early 80s my mother would drag us to the mall nearly every weekend. She was there to buy clothes. She always wanted something new and she wanted to try on at least a dozen items before buying one or two. I was thrilled when I was old enough to go off to the record store and/or hobby store while she did that. Earlier, I begged to go the the toy store, but was typically refused. Later, I was at the book store getting paperback scifi.
I don’t think people have as much disposable income as they did then. I don’t know many people who can buy as much frivolous stuff as my folks used to. I guess I could technically buy stuff all the time, but I want to save fore retirement. My folks had pensions. I have to put it away myself.
I’ll also offer the “sameness” of everything at malls. Let’s say you want jeans. There’s five shops that carry jeans. You want “normal” jeans, iow, not torn, not bleached, etc. Each shop carries jeans, but they are all some version of torn, worn, bleached, etc. For all the variety, they’re all the same.
Plus, mall overhead and branding makes the shops quite often more expensive than you might find at something like a Target or even a Kohls.
I’ve found that taking my kids to the mall to check out clothing we more often than not buy nothing despite visiting a half dozen shops. It’s all variations of the same thing along with being designer pricing.
The disappearance of defined benefit retirement plans is yet another way those on top are boning us, and it is NOT being talked about enough.
It actually screws us 2 ways. First, by removing liability/responsibility from the company and putting it on people. Second, by forcing everyone to have to car about the stock market, and be subject to its whims
Not to mention storage space. Like most people their generation, my parents have a garage and an attic. All this extra space to hoard stuff
So I’m not in America and might be able to offer some insight. Others have mentioned big box stores, online shopping, and lack of money as the main culprits. I’m fairly certain big box stores are not it, and the fault may lay almost entirely on amazon.
Where I’m from, malls are still the place to go for new things to buy, including electronics, clothes (of varying degrees of quality and price), drugs (the legal kind), and home decor. Businesses like Walmart (as in, supermarkets that sell things other than groceries) have shops inside those same malls. In the whole city, there is one standalone Walmart, in the emptiest part of town with middle-upper class suburbs around it. The one exception is Costco, which has two franchises in town, not inside a mall, but the demographic that goes there is decidedly middle class families and businesses.
We can order stuff from amazon, but it ends up being about the same in terms of cost, and takes up to a month to arrive. Money is tight for pretty much everyone at the moment, but we all still go to the mall from time to time, for one reason or another.
For example, I’m overdue a visit to get my eyes checked again, my glasses need replacing. And I’ll probably stop by the radioshack (yup, remember that?) and nab some rechargeable AAs.
Malls were dying in the US well before Amazon and online shopping itself was meaningful. Big box stores did a number on them. Best Buy and Circuit City had nearly the same selection of music that mall music stores did for much lower prices. Stores like Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million eviscerated the smaller more expensive mall book stores. Walmart, Target, and the like hit everything else.
Once that decline happened, I noticed that many malls started going after the kids that just hung around malls and weren’t in constant spend mode. Teens were treated like pests that were not wanted. Guess who got the message and didn’t come back a few years later when they had jobs and money?
Malls in the 80s and early 90s were pretty awesome, but malls told us to fuck off so we did. They can rot.
Interesting. Malls around me seem to cater mostly to young adults with expendable income. Lots of non-traditional cuisine (commercialised of course, not high-brow places), wine bars, etc. Places where you’d go to on a night out with the gang.
Now that you mention it, they have stopped catering to the youngest demographic. I think the laser tags closed down before the pandemic, and the arcades have been gone for a decade. Unless Chuck E. Cheese has some, I haven’t been. Maybe we’re catching up, then. I still see young teens, around the age I was when I visited those places, walk around. No idea what shops they go into though. Maybe the ice cream places, and the food court.
Malls were just a way to privatize mainstreet and allow the ownership class of capitalists to extract more money from a local economy through large chain stores and to give them private control over what used to be public space.
Now the middle class is worth a fraction of what it used to be, their purpose has dissolved.
People use Amazon instead of the mall because they can still afford the Temu-level garbage Amazon sells.
People use Amazon instead of the mall because they can still afford the Temu-level garbage Amazon sells.
I mean a few reasons.
- Pricing is better on Amazon vs mall. I can get a Gangsta Luffy T-shirt at $12 vs $20 at hot topic
- Inventory is significantly bigger. Outside of clothes, I can’t imagine not finding the exact online version and compare
- Malls are kinda ugly now. Many are indoor and just wall to wall commercialism.
- People suck. Naked dude stealing stop signs and angry Karen about the take a dump on the escalator.
- Driving vs ship to door.
- Both have temu-level garbage, but it’s cheaper on Amazon.
Both have temu-level garbage, but it’s cheaper on Amazon.
Currently, as they are dying today, yes.
This is not how malls have traditionally worked.
In the past, malls provided a plug-and-play way for national chain retail to offer premium, private-labeled goods that allowed them to extract money away from a community’s locally owned stores found on main street.
Indoor is good though. Floating around the mall is a good activity for shit weather days
How can I turn this into the class struggle?
For me personally, I’m fuckin lazy and the ability to have things delivered right to my door enables this laziness.
Yes, yes, and yes.
One of the big problems is horrible city planning since the malls were just built anywhere they could be crammed into. Combine that with a very car-centeric country and you get very little reason to go out to the mall with the advent of the internet.
Honestly malls are thriving where I live, and I go regularly to extremely large crowds. I know it’s a trend worldwide, but if all I knew was my local city, I would have no idea.
Without outing yourself… Can you share where?
Or even a population size.
In the big cities I’m in, they’ve become deserts.
This is a fascinating question. I don’t think it was just Amazon either. Although the price undercutting definitely helped.
Like many others here, I remember malls having lots of cool smaller shops with various specialties. Toys, books, electronics, games, clothes, decor, whatever. It’s where you’d find more niche things.
Like if “Spencer’s Gifts” wasn’t 99% raunchy sex stuff now. (Although hey, there was that too.)
It was funny in the 90’s watching this idea of teenage girls coming back with a multi-bag haul from a mall run. Ha! Not anymore.
Nowadays though, in my big metropolitan area malls are doing okay, but you get two classes generally:
- Run down, sketchy malls, with stores that can’t afford to decorate their storefront but they’ll have weird stuff like wall-hanger katanas and other almost-weaponry alongside dragon statues and glass pipes and stuff. Stores like this are punctuated by pushy kiosks that try to sell you snake oil.
These malls are still kinda hanging on. The ones here are trying to do cool things like theaters and experiences. I think it can be a cool place for fledgling businesses to do more experimental stuff. Unfortunately, the said-sketchiness still makes them a bit unappealing to visit.
- Bougie malls, more numerous here. Every one is a clone because it features the exact same fashion-brand super-empires. And no, your working-class butt isn’t their target audience. Keep moving, because they removed the benches too. Along the way, you will still be harassed by pushy kiosks, but the snake oil is in much fancier packaging!
Each individual suite has like 15 items on display that cost more than the suited foot-aching sales person makes in 6 months before taxes.
I have no idea how these places are still running. Lol
I long for third spaces.
The mall is an ouroboros that demands I spend. But if it had a park combined with it, if it was just a series of semi-connected strip malls around a central or spread out park/walking path I’d be there constantly.
The mall just isn’t a enjoyable place to hang out unless you truly have no other choice, and even teenagers who don’t are opting to hang online because it’s less expensive and doesn’t require transit.
Yes! I’m amazed at how few responses here bring up the lack of attraction in a mall. Nearly every square foot has been given up for dumb kiosks for cell phone cases or something like that. There’s just nothing to give some warm fuzzies about visiting - a water feature, a kids play area… Heck, I grew up the first indoor mall and at one point they had a giant parakeet cage. If one landed on your finger, you could keep the bird.
Combinations. Amazon, smart phones, how kids hang out, poverty, giant stores like target and wal mart…It’s a bunch of reasons that all hit against malls.
Malls haven’t been the only hit over the decades. “Cruisin” is no longer a thing. Teens used to spend hours on nice nights driving up and down a certain stretch of road in nearly every city somewhere.
More kids used to ride bikes around for funnies.
Drive in movie theaters used to be huge.
Things always change and it’s almost never just a single reason.
“Cruisin” is no longer a thing
That’s not the case in much of the rural US. In small towns (~30-75k) everywhere there are kids driving up and down the road every Friday and Saturday night.
It’s because they can’t remember where their meth dealer lives this week.
“Cruisin” is no longer a thing. Teens used to spend hours on nice nights driving up and down a certain stretch of road in nearly every city somewhere.
Not only is this no longer a thing it’s actually explicitly illegal in some places. Passing the same location 4 times within a short period or “driving without a destination” can get you a ticket if the cops are paying attention.
Yep. That’s the thing that never changes. “The man” is a total asshole killjoy.
That’s kinda fucked up. Almost sounds like laws targeting homeless people living out of their cars. And for anyone else, why shouldn’t I be able to just tour around and look at sights without necessarily stopping anywhere? That’s basically what I do every weekend for fun.
Part of that is also how in our car-centric society, our public transportation sucks. And biking is unsafe in many places— even spots that have bike lanes. Everything is too far way, so you can only get there by car. Everywhere you that is close is either unsafe to bike to or actually impossible, unless you’re lucky. And if you wanna take the metro or bus, it’s slow af, unreliable, and in many places has very few stops and runs infrequently.
And then the lack of people using public transportation only leads to more cars on the road which makes the problem even worse! More lanes, more land used for parking lot deserts, etc.
Nowhere to go, no way to get there, nothing to do.
This is one of my things I go off about. People sometimes tell me they want to move out of the city “for their kids” and I’m like are you crazy? The suburbs were hell as a kid. Can’t go anywhere because you don’t have a car and walking is dangerous and slow. I was always so jealous of my friends that lived in the city. They could just go do stuff
I’d like to think it was a combination of all the online shopping sites for all your non-groceries that started killing them off.
Why go to a mall to buy that hat you always wanted when it’s not only available online on the website of wherever you are planning to go but could be cheaper? That, or just buy it on Am*zon.
That, and I firmly believe people in various first world countries have gotten lazy enough that they’ll gladly wait the however long it takes for something to arrive by mail, but spending the time to have to drive somewhere and walk from the parking lot to wherever in the mall the store they want is? Haell Nah! Combine that with inflation (meaning higher gas prices) and you have people not going to malls unless they have to.
It’s why surviving US malls usually have something to keep them alive to attract people anymore, I swear. Some sort of gimmick like that one well known mall with the amusement park in it or how the mall near where I live has an aquarium in it (never been, so I don’t know how effective it is at attracting people). I don’t think the restaurants you’ll find in malls are even enough to attract enough people keep malls afloat, either, but I could be dead wrong about that one.
When I was a teenager the local mall made it quite clear that they didn’t want teenagers in the mall. I think it just stuck for a lot of us.
The mall near me used to be a place where kids could get together even if they didn’t have money to spend all day buying things. They made a rule that young people in groups of more than 3 would be treated like a gang. I have no sympathy for them losing patrons.
