Mall Nostalgia

I don't know about NYC but here in California they are a dying breed. In my hometown of Hawthorne, nearly the entire downtown was gutted for about 4 blocks in every direction... sooo many great parks, stores, theaters, and landmarks demolished... and a massive concrete box was erected. It finally shut down for good in 1999, and now is only used for dystopian films, zombie apocalypses, and such.

I later lived in Oakland, where the Eastmont Mall slowly decayed into god knows what it is now. Even the malls that have survived are kind of shitholes now--- Hilltop comes to mind.

Again, maybe malls are thriving in New York, but out here they're either abandoned death traps, or survive but barely anyone goes to them anymore.

Minneapolis still has a mega-mall and it does well.

People just do their shopping online and kids just hang out on their computers all day. Plus parents are afraid to let them go anywhere alone, even though crime is way lower now than 30 years ago.

Malls can still work if they focus on entertainment -- restaurants, movies, activity areas, and less on stores.

The malls in the West are the ones that took the biggest hit I think, most of them are abandoned or nearly abandoned but when I travel to the Midwest and the East they seem to be hanging on more. Certainly there was a hay day though, malls used to be pretty packed, it was were you went to clothes shop, get gifts and hang out.

Well it's still easier (for me at least) to shop malls to get something the day I need it, instead of waiting for it in the mail.

I'm thinking that you live in the midwest?

The closest thing we have to that is a small, outdoor mall in the town nearby; but it's mostly just shops wrapped around a little park and parking lot, with a movie theater at one end, and more parking wrapped around that. It's not the same, though it looks like a nice place to hang out with friends or do light shopping. We still go there to buy cell phones every 5-6 years, or get service/accessories in between those intervals. Sometimes we eat at the restaurants nearby. But still, it isn't the same as walking into this big building with indoor shops everywhere, a food court, escalators and fountains.

It might even be a climate thing too. Big malls tend to still do okay in places where the weather is harsh, like in the Midwest or the Northeast, because part of the year, it's either boiling hot, or freezing cold, and people like being able to shop without sweating or freezing to death while browsing. I lived in Texas for a few years and we had a gigantic mall in a town a few miles away from mine.

However, when I lived in IL, something different happened in regards to our malls. I lived in a town that was smack-dab in the middle of the state, and it had 2 malls that had been built in the late 80s/early 90s. One was an old mall, and the other was built in a more popular area of town, so it was no surprise that it sucked all the customers and business away from the old one. Eventually, the old mall was almost completely empty, save for two or three big "anchor stores" that were still independently in business. So the town knocked down the old mall, save for the anchor stores (making them into their own separate buildings) and built an "outdoor mall" where the old mall used to be, complete with a bunch of little shops wrapped around parking and a small green park.

The newer mall is still there, but I sensed it was dying a slow death in the last few years we lived in that town before we moved away to Texas. For one thing, less and less people were going to the smaller shops besides Macey's and other anchor stores. For another, gangs had moved in and you saw certain people hanging out and loitering by the less-used entrances, which gave the whole mall an ominous vibe. (Thank you SO much, Shitcago, for dumping your trash on our town back in the 90s. We really appreciate the spike in crime that came with it. It did nothing to clean out your South Side, and now crime is worse in your city than it ever was before).

That, and I quit going to that mall when they closed the bookstore and replaced it with yet ANOTHER clothing store. It's like, gee, having 6 or 7 clothing stores already wasn't enough? Let's cater to the idiot plebes in town who hate to read books anyway, as well as jack up the rent, and put ANOTHER useless clothing store in there! That'll increase business!

I was so glad to move out of that state. It wasn't because of the malls; they were just the tip of the iceberg as to what was wrong with that town.

Looks interesting. Thanks!

Yeah, I was thinking about that part of the story as well, how the small businesses in Hawkins were dying because the big, flashy mall had stolen all the customers. I thought about Nancy wanting to write a story about it, and yet all I could think was, "Hah! If you think small businesses dying off is bad, just wait until the World Wide Web comes online in 9 years! Those malls will be dying off within less than 5-10 years after that!"