This weekend many people will stand in the cold for hours outside department stores to buy Christmas gifts on one of the busiest shopping days of the year, with the level of sales on that day deciding whether many retailers will be in the red or the black for the year. What strikes someone going to a brick-and-mortar retail store or an indoor mall nowadays is the presence of much fewer people, the abandoned storefronts, and the degree to which retailers are discounting as they basically beg customers to come out to shop instead of ordering online from Amazon. The retail sector has been in decline for years, even as the overall economy has been considered strong by most economists. Around 10,000 stores have closed in 2019 alone, with brands such as Sears, Kmart, JCPenney, Macy’s, Payless, and Family Dollar making up part of an economic “apocalypse” that is likely to get worse before it gets better, especially if concerns about an upcoming slowdown are realized.
And as these retailers fall, in many communities a major venue for social interaction has fallen with them: the shopping mall. Currently, there are about a thousand malls around the country, and for the better part of the last half-century, the mall has been a symbol of economic progress for the community. More businesses and stores mean more jobs, and more jobs usually lead to more homes and development. The shopping mall acted as a hub for retail activity as well as a community social space for the public. People went to the mall to see the latest trends in what people were wearing and listening to, spend time with friends, and, most importantly, spend their money.
However, since the advent of the internet, all of those societal functions have now shifted online or to social media. Indoor malls come out of a Jetsons-era idea of progress consisting of everyone thrown together inside the same air-conditioned large edifice of modern technology in which the outdoor pedestrian storefront experience is recreated and everything is available in a Buy-N-Large way to be consumed. It’s something J.G. Ballard, George Romero, and David Cronenberg have harvested for disturbing elements in Ballard’s novel High-Rise, Romero’s film Dawn of the Dead, and Cronenberg’s film Shivers.
The first outdoor suburban shopping plaza opened in 1954 near Detroit, with the first enclosed shopping mall debuting in Minnesota two years later, both being the creation of the Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen; the idea spread far and wide. The opening of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, in 1992 was national news, and the mall was hailed as a marvel of commerce. But as time went on, the drawbacks of mall living have become more apparent in suburban sprawl, and the difficulties of sustainability while paving over paradise to put up a parking lot, which depending on perspective either exacerbated white flight from urban areas or gentrified poor neighborhoods. Malls tended to be built farther and farther away from city centers, as more and more people fled the cities for the suburbs.
But the issues affecting shopping malls have shifted as foot traffic to retail stores has decreased with the advent of internet shopping, and major brick-and-mortar brands have been dying off. The economic advantage to communities that initially saw growth from malls has now been replaced by concerns about what to do with huge buildings housing dying businesses, whose struggles will likely spread to everything else surrounding them.
Number of Stores Closed by Major Retailers in 2019
Payless ShoeSource |
2,500 (all of its retail locations) |
Charlotte Russe |
520 |
Fred’s |
520 |
Family Dollar |
390 |
Charming Charlie |
261 |
Destination Maternity |
258 |
Chico’s |
250 |
Gap |
230 |
Walgreens |
200 |
GameStop |
180 to 200 |
Forever 21 |
350 (178 in the U.S.) |
Sears |
178 |
Kmart |
160 |
CVS Health |
68 |
Bed Bath & Beyond |
60 |
Pier 1 Imports |
57 |
Party City |
55 |
Victoria’s Secret |
53 |
Abercrombie & Fitch |
40 |
Office Depot and OfficeMax |
50 |
JCPenney |
20 |
Lowe’s |
20 |
Walmart |
17 |
Barney’s |
15 |
Macy’s |
9 |
J Crew |
7 |
Kohl’s |
4 |
Nordstrom |
3 |
When a mall goes bad, it’s a descending spiral of suck. Malls are built on interdependencies. If the major retailers die off in a mall, the leases in many of the buildings allow other retailers to get out of their obligations, since they may have originally been charged higher rents based on the larger shops acting as a draw for the smaller ones. Abandoned storefronts begin popping up, or the major shops are replaced by local specialty boutiques, which doesn’t help motivate shoppers to visit for their everyday shopping trips. As a mall begins dying, all the businesses which surround a mall are affected. Fewer people coming to the mall means fewer people stopping at the gas stations near the mall, or the restaurants, or the grocery stores.
As the stores and businesses leave, there is less money being spent in the community which hosts the mall, leading to lower property values for those suburbs, since they’re now anchored by a big, partially abandoned building that’s hemorrhaging jobs.
From Ian Bogost at The Atlantic:
Americans loved malls, then they loved to hate them. Good riddance to these cathedrals to capitalism, many think, as they pore over apocalyptic photos of abandoned malls in ruins. This trope runs so deep that it’s begun feeding on itself.
Gruen had meant well. He wanted to import the pedestrian experience of modernist, European cities like Vienna and Paris into America, where the automobile was king. By creating places for community in the deserts of suburbia, he hoped to lure people from their cars and into contact with one another. The malls would be for shopping, yes, but also offer food, relaxation, and green space. In his original conception, malls would also connect to residential and commercial space, medical care, libraries, and other public spaces. Even though unrealized, this idea was not that different from today’s New Urbanists, who advocate denser, more walkable mixed-use development in cities broken up by the dominance of the automobile.
Gruen would eventually disavow his creation, expressing disgust for how malls had exacerbated rather than ameliorated urban sprawl—not to mention exporting it globally, infecting the Old World with this land-use virus of the New.
The overall idea of the mall, and the concept of convenience through centralized services and products, is still going strong. It has just been replaced and has morphed to include online retailers such as Amazon and the one-stop shopping of Walmart, each with its own social issues and problems that have been the subject of much criticism. But both Amazon and Walmart are expected to make out well in this year’s Christmas shopping season.
From Carlos Waters at Vox:
People spend the majority of their lives in one of three places. The first is the home, the second is the workplace, and the third is any other social space.
Those “third places” are critical for relationships. Ray Oldenburg introduced the concept in his 1989 book The Great Good Place.
In their best iterations, third places are the building blocks of community — think public libraries, local cafes, or the neighborhood barbershop. But when Americans started building and moving into new suburbs in the 1950s, they had a problem. There weren’t enough social spaces to hang out with friends or meet their neighbors.
“The problem with our society since World War 2 is that the government ruined community by single-use zoning,” Oldenburg told Vox. “There are no places that people can get together where they live. It’s the dumbest thing in the world.”
So where did suburbanites go? Cue the mall music … But 60 years later, social connections form as much on apps like Instagram or WhatsApp as they do in real life. And as more Americans do their shopping online, the predicted “shopping mall apocalypse” will eliminate a prolific, albeit imperfect, third place.
I grew up near Memphis, Tennessee. During most of my childhood, my mother would go to the Raleigh Springs Mall in North Memphis, one of the four malls in and around the city at the time. By my teens, Wolfchase Galleria had been built in another suburb of Memphis, farther away from the city center, and it pulled most of the shopping traffic away from midtown and downtown. When that happened, stores in Raleigh Springs dried up, with the mall limping along with whatever tenants it could get, and the neighborhood surrounding it suffering as other businesses that had been supported by the traffic died as well.
Southland Mall, a mall in the predominantly African-American area of South Memphis, is usually regarded as the “black mall” in the city. To show how segregated shopping at a store can be, for years sold-out products at other locations in the city could be found at Southland because scared white people wouldn’t venture into the Whitehaven area of Memphis.
Almost a quarter-century later, it’s Wolfchase Galleria which is now dying. A new open-air shopping center even farther away from the city, in an upscale suburb of Memphis, is considered the “good mall.” And to put this in perspective, one has to drive about 25 minutes from Downtown Memphis to get to Carriage Crossing. The abandoned Raleigh Springs Mall has been bulldozed and re-purposed by the city to create a new green space.
From David Uberti at The Guardian:
Leaders in many towns that once fought for malls now grapple with how to inter their remains. Highland Mall in Austin, Texas, is being converted into a community college campus, and Lakeland Mall in Florida now houses a megachurch. Others have been redeveloped to include housing, offices and even green space. But it’s hard to envision many ageing malls, especially those in the Rust Belt, mustering demand for such transformations.
Driving past Northland Centre in Southfield, Michigan, unfamiliar passersby would have been hard-pressed to judge whether the mall had a pulse on recent afternoons. Located just past Detroit’s racially charged border at Eight Mile Road, the shopping centre opened to great fanfare in 1954. A New York Times article the next year estimated that it attracted 30,000 daily carloads of shoppers who “stroll about and window-shop just as they do on Fifth Avenue in New York”. The mall “created a new downtown”, the piece concluded.
That may be true, but not without helping destroy another. Some locals today point to Northland as the symbolic beginning of the end, an emblem of the postwar sprawl that gradually decimated Detroit. Indeed, the shopping centre heralded a new wave of malls in nearby suburbs – a dozen were built in southeast Michigan over the next 20 years. They drew consumers away from downtown shops like Hudson’s, once the second-largest department store in the world. The 410-foot titan was demolished in 1998, leaving young Detroiters with a block-long expanse of concrete as the only clue to its former grandeur.
For middle-class white people who fled Detroit in the boom years, Southfield was a prime destination: its population quadrupled between 1950 and 1980. But the well-off have continued sprawling to more distant suburbs – a trend that accelerated after 2000 – and poorer Detroiters have continued moving in to replace them. Northland Centre likewise stagnated; its last major update came in the early 1990s. Only two anchor stores remain, with the shell of another set to house a local church. Many local shoppers have turned toward more lustrous megamalls in outer suburbs.