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.
I think “malls” in the traditional sense of giant concrete behemoths with nothing but row after row of stored and fast food were killed by online, but if you open up the definition a bit, some are thriving.
Like where I live, it’s an ‘archology’. A mix of residential units on top and commercial on the bottom. All outdoors which is a draw for folks in the forever pandemic world.
A mall that’s only random clothes, shoes, and jewellery stores surrounded by an ocean of parking lot is very unattractive.
As you say, a mall with actually useful stores, like grocery, pharmacy, perhaps a restaurant or two (not chain fast food), etc, with residential units on top or very close to constitutes more of a community than a mall and is very likely to be sustainable versus the former.
Man, I wish that became more of a thing here. I’m good enough at being a weird shut-in without the architecture pushing me to do so.
City Beautiful made a video video on the subject.
Great video thank you!
I think it is safe to say, the internet i general killed malls as people stopped leaving their homes the way they used to in general.
Indoor malls have been on the way out for a while. They’re large Indoor spaces that need to be heated or cooled and attract young people with no money and nowhere to go. Also in a mall you only buy so much as you tired of carrying it around. An outdoor Plaza encourages people to go back to their car and unload.
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.
Amazon certainly helped.
The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.
Birthed by and killed by capitalism. Tone deaf retailers charging too much for not enough for too long PLUS general trend to take away “free” public places where regular people can casually gather and kill a few hours having low/no cost fun.
our mall had an arcade, a waldenbooks, and a kiosk that sold gorgeous glass dragon figures.
can’t get any of those at amazon.
i miss it. :(
Dang, I kind of want one of those glass dragons. That sounds awesome
Speaking from an outside perspective; malls (what we call shopping centres) in Australia didn’t die anywhere near what has happened in the US. We have a very different geographic landscape (hyper-concentration of population in city centres) and definitely don’t have the same level of penetration that companies like Amazon do, but we have shared a lot of the same economic headwinds that the US has. From my armchair perspective, this would generally suggest that it’s less to do with economic position and more to do with idiosyncrasies of the US, but I have absolutely no data to back that up.
We have shopping centers in the US and a lot of them are still thriving. They tend to be smaller than malls but they’re more numerous. They usually have one or two big stores like Target or Home Depot along with several smaller stores. They’re also not enclosed so it’s easier to get to a small store in a shopping center than it is in a mall.
That’s really interesting! In the Australian content, we would only ever call a strip of shops a ‘mall’ if they weren’t connected by some interior structure. In fact, our ‘malls’ are almost all outdoor connections of shops. So interesting how our vocabularies vary!
Anecdotal, but I grew up in the heyday of malls and my local mall was one of the largest, and is now one of the most famous dead malls. The mall was in decline when Amazon was still in its infancy, mostly still selling books. Buying clothes online was considered lunacy at the time because there was no fitting rooms to try things on. Still, vacancy was on the rise in the mall and once a few violent crimes started happening inside that was all she wrote. “Big Box” stores like Walmart became more of a draw than driving all the way to the mall.
I think the reasons for the death of the mall are more complex, just like the death of the department store. There were lots of weird tax incentives, both for developers, and for (mostly white) residents fleeing the urban core during the 90s. Those were not sustainable. Malls themselves were a bit of a private equity shell game which couldn’t last. The story of dead malls is more about capitalism and land use policy than just Amazon.
I’ll never forget Forest Fair Mall in those first years though. It’s 1.5 MILLION square feet, and it was absolutely packed, especially during Christmas. Humongous fountains, sand sculptures, live music… every single spot of it’s airfield-like parking lot was full. The only thing today that I think comes close, if younger people want the experience, is the main concourse of a top ten airport.
I think the West Edmonton Mall comes pretty close at 5.3 million square feet. I remember seeing dolphins in there.
The West Edmonton Mall used to have more submarines than the Canadian navy. I think that was before the dolphins though.
West Ed is still dope. I don’t know about submarines, but they have a 10/10 water park in there, and a bunch of other stuff.
Amazon did more for killing off small businesses – the big box store chains did more for killing off shopping malls (their preference is the strip mall where they can showcase their entire frontage (and do an end-run around building codes))
and yes, everyone is too broke on top of everything else
I remember hearing that big box stores killed malls. I thought they killed malls, and Amazon killed big box stores, but Amazon can also kill malls, so it was a bit of a double-whammy for malls
The rise of the suburban mall and its downward spiral are pre-Amazon, and largely had to do with tax decisions and costs to the public sector, though online shopping did accelerate the collapse. Slate, 2017: The Retail Apocalypse Is Suburban
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.
The mall was dying by the 80’s, there was a sharp decline by then (I recall seeing numerous malls going vacant in the 90’s, around the country).
The things that drove mall popularity (especially things like large, enclosed, air-conditioned space), were no longer novel. Most cars were air-conditioned by then.
I’m sure there are many other factors, like the growth of free-standing single-vendor buildings (so construction and management costs must’ve changed).
Amazon really had nothing to do with it.
Malls were being killed by big box complexes before Amazon was prevalent, but the one-two punch didn’t do them any favors.
I see it as a combination of things…
Big box retailers.
Online sales.
People stopped going to movie theaters.So what’s the reason to go to a mall? Crappy food court food?
Paradoxically, I would still go to movies if they were willing to kick people out for using their phone once during the film. There’s only one theater in my area that’s strict like that.
Right, there’s got to be a good reason to go to the mall. The successful malls still draw crowds because they have more than just stores and a movie theater.
Successful malls have an Apple Store, Tesla, and Louis Vuitton, which tells us something about who can still afford to shop there.
So what’s the reason to go to a mall? Crappy food court food?
The last dozen or so times I’ve been to a mall, the only thing I’ve spent money on was food. It’s hard to justify spending money at the mall when I know I can get just about anything there from an online retailer for a lot cheaper. But I can’t get an Orange Julius online. Yet.
Take a Brazilian Lemonade recipe and sub in oranges. :) Make it at home.
Apparently there’s a recipe on that page. Here’s the same page without the crud: https://www.justtherecipe.com/?url=https://houseofnasheats.com/brazilian-lemonade-limeade/
Great website.
Oohhh, that sounds delicious! My old boss at work was telling me about Brazilian lemonades a while back and I’ve been meaning to try it at some point.
There’s a fuckin delicious Asian place in my local mall that has the best teriyaki chicken and fried rice I’ve ever had. That and Charley’s lemonade are a couple of the only reasons I go to my mall.
By charleys you mean the Philly cheesesteak place right? Love them, too bad there aren’t any near me
That’s the one. They also go by a different name in some other parts of the country, I think. I don’t remember what it is though.
There’s one about 45min away, just to far to justify, but maybe I’ll make it out there sometime
But I can’t get an Orange Julius online.
Uber Eats, Door Dash, Grubhub, etc. all exist for this exact type of purchase.
Although you will pay for the convenience, as opposed to it being cheaper like most other products since the physical store is still involved.
Yep, when you want your Orange Julius to cost $22
Out of curiosity; where are your grocery stores, pharmacies and post offices? Because here in Australia, most of them are in shopping centres (Aussie for ‘mall’). The vast majority of us go to do our weekly shop, grab medication, send back returns from our online shopping etc. so they’re still very much alive and well.
In America, there’s like 3 different things you could call a mall. When most people talk about them, it means a giant building with central indoor paths connecting a bunch of businesses. Typically, there would be a handful of “anchor” businesses, like department stores and a movie theater, and then space for a bunch of much smaller businesses in between including restaurants. These malls (at least the ones I’ve been to) for whatever reason don’t typically have grocery stores. I have seen pharmacies and small Dr’s offices in them.
Then there are “strip malls” that are typically a row of businesses on one side or surrounding a big parking lot. Typically grocery stores are in those.
Lastly, there’s “outlet malls”, which are often set up like a fake town with parking distributed throughout. They are commonly built on cheap land in the outskirts of towns, and they have mostly clothing. They are typically brand specific stores (e.g., Nike), so they are allegedly cheaper.
It’s that first category that Americans are going to be talking about if they just refer to a “mall”, though. The idea to have all your shops in a convenient place has been around forever, and still works great in many traditional business districts. The “shopping mall”, though, was somewhat of an artificial movement in the 80’s and 90’s that was always a bit destined to fail. Like people have said, the internet is partially responsible, but malls were hurting before the internet started really doing damage. In America, you basically have to drive everywhere, and if you are driving everywhere, it’s easiest to just drive directly to whatever shop you need. With malls, you have to park far out in a giant lot, and walk a long way to get to whatever business. You could call it lazy, but if you’ve only got a little bit of time after a day of work to do shopping, are you going to do the option where you get the task done in 30 minutes, or an hour?
Such an interesting perspective, thanks for your contribution! I guess our ‘shopping centres’ are essentially the first condition you’ve described that also have grocery stores attached, and it’s likely the grocery store (in Australia this basically means one of 3-4 companies) that are keeping these structures going in the modern age. Our shopping centres tend to be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, with 3-5 storey shopping centres (with up to 7 storey parking lots) being fairly common within city limits that are closely accessible to more than 50% of the population.
That being said though, I live fairly equidistant between two of the largest shopping centres in Sydney and still choose to go to my local, smaller, single-storey shopping centre which is very small by Australian standards (<40 stores) which feels much more like a ‘mall’.
Do you guys have a lot of standalone grocery stores that you can drive right up to, park, shop and leave? Because that’s definitely the minority here!
We definitely get most of our groceries from standalone grocery stores. For the most part, you drive right to it.
I just looked at some Sydney shopping centres, and they look much like our malls on the inside (except for groceries), but it seems like they are much more integrated in the neighborhoods. It looks like parking garages are more popular there than the giant lots here.
I just looked at the dead mall wikipedia page, and it has a picture of the century 3 mall. That’s a good example of what they look like here; separate from where people live, and surrounded by big lots. You can actually see the strip malls that replaced it all around it.
