Ode to a mall

During the recent Memorial Day weekend I went through a time warp. Not an actual time warp that allowed me to re-live or re-do past life events (that only exists in the world of Star Trek) but culturally I went back in time to when the economy was strong,

During the recent Memorial Day weekend, I went through a time warp. Not an actual time warp that allowed me to re-live or redo past life events (that only exists in the world of "Star Trek") but culturally I went back in time to when the economy was strong, social strife was muted and all meaningful problems in teenage life could be solved in front of Orange Julius. I found a thriving indoor shopping mall (outside of Detroit no less). And during my little trip to the past, I saw a sign of what lays ahead, and it doesn’t look too bright.

Large indoor malls are failing in the United States with no end in site. Mall openings have ground to a halt and anchor stores like Sears and JC Penny are ending their leases right and left. The real estate crash has left many malls that incurred large debts in the late 1990s scrambling for cash at the same time customers are scaling back. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, overall mall sales in America are down 6.5 percent in the last year alone, after a decade of slow decline. General Growth Properties, owner of over 200 malls nationwide, has filed for bankruptcy with other major mall owners soon to follow. The insane gas prices of the last decade, mixed with wide-ranging unemployment has turned a 15-minute drive to the mall for shopping, food court at Sabarro’s and a movie into a $100 afternoon that many Americans just can’t afford anymore.

This is a shame since the mall that I visited, which was full of shoppers, a bustling food court and even an old school Waldenbooks, reminded me of why malls are so vital to our culture and economy.

From the 1970s to the mid 1990s, the American mall was like a job factory and a sociological Petri dish all rolled into one. Those with little education could get a decent wage in a safe environment with a national chain that provided potential for upward mobility. Returning college students could get easy summer work for books or disposable income, and when they returned to school in the fall, parents looking for a low stress side job for bills or Christmas money could drop off a resume and get hired in no time.

As a cultural phenomenon, malls were the new frontier for diversity and social awareness when the nation was too busy paying attention to Reagan or the Gulf War. Chris Rock once joked about the “white malls” being nice and the “Black malls” being filled with low-end stores and sneaker outlets.

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