The Mall Is Pretty Depressing Now

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We should have seen this coming way back in the late 90s. The red flags were everywhere back in those early days, but Amazon, eBay, Google- all of them felt like cute alternatives to the IRL shopping experience. Something fun to do on occasion but most certainly not better than a real, physical storefront.

But this was never going to be a swift death. It was never going to be a chopping off of the head. Oh no. The death of the mall would be limb by limb – a slow, torturous bleed out.

I can remember a time when the mall just a few miles from my childhood home was routinely mobbed on the weekends frequented by middle-class suburbanites. There’s no doubt it was the same scene at malls across the country. Going to the mall on a Saturday afternoon was a fool’s errand if you were not fond of crowds, but in those days – the late 90s and early 2000s – even if you were some introvert with a fear of the masses, in a way the mall felt like it beckoned to you at the same time. It was inviting.

It’s difficult to explain, and maybe it was just my childlike wonderment and all of the flashy items for sale, but the mall used to be a sort of magical place. Marshall Fields, Macy’s, Sears, Spencer’s Gifts, and of course Abercrombie and Fitch. You could smell that store from the parking lot.

Auntie Anne’s, Sbarro, Orange Julius, and Dippin’ Dots. Give me a pretzel doused in cinnamon sugar, a strawberry banana smoothie, and a goddamn slice of cheese pizza. On any given Saturday from ages 14 to 16, myself and probably seven or eight of my friends could be found at our local mall not really doing anything at all.

We’d walk from store to store browsing aimlessly for hours on end, terrorizing the mall cops and trying and almost always failing miserably at talking to girls who went there out of sheer boredom just like we did.

It was a place where we could go to be unsupervised, and while I cringe now at the thought of hanging out at a fucking mall, that was the place to be back then. It was where one could be seen. I understand that it’s totally different now. With social media and the meteoric rise of Amazon, there is no need to go to the mall anymore if you’re a teenager that wants to be seen by his or her peers (unless of course you want an Auntie Anne’s pretzel.) There’s nothing convenient about going to the mall, and with Amazon there is no longer a reason to do so.

Last weekend I went to a mall in southeast Michigan. From the parking lot I could smell desperation, not the fumes from Abercrombie and Fitch’s latest cologne. Walking through a mall now is paramount to being in a spaghetti western film. Tumbleweeds blow across a desolate plain, past the Finish Lines and department stores and food courts with empty seats.

It’s downright depressing to go into a mall today. Everywhere you look there’s a store with one of those giant, retractable metal doors barring anyone from entering. The only patrons I saw at the mall on Saturday afternoon were teens, and even those young faces looked like they weren’t very happy to be there.

I don’t know who’s to blame for the demise of the modern mall. For centuries people have gathered at a central place like a mall, arcade (the covered passageway), or marketplace for job opportunities and social engagement. Now, inside the once-modern American mall, there is neither.

It used to be a place where you could buy everything you wanted and everything you didn’t know you wanted. You could walk into a mall with the express intention of buying a pair of Nikes for the gym and leave not only with the Nikes, but with a new Slinkee, a sweatshirt from the GAP, and maybe even something for your kid sister from PacSun or Hot Topic.

The mall brought scores of people from entirely different backgrounds together into one place. Angsty teens, housewives with nothing better to do, mall walkers trying to get their aerobic workout in for the day, and weird goths who never left Spencer’s Gifts – they all came to the same place.

Nowadays these groups go online, and instead of face-to-face interaction we’re talking through our keyboards. Will we one day be writing this article about the demise of the Amazons and eBays of the world? Only time will tell. That’s a column for another day and another person. Today I mourn the death of the American mall. It wasn’t perfect, but for the time period that it thrived it was enough for me and for countless other Americans across this beautiful country. RIP..

Image via Youtube

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Johnny D

fashion icon

• jduda@grandex.co