Decline Of The Mall

A quick cheer for all the males out there. "The death of the mall. The death of the mall. Hooray!"  That's right. In this country, and there are signs of the same in many others, the shopping mall is losing so much appeal for consumers that they are closing in large numbers every day. Shopping malls didn't just happen and they are not the result of wise planners deciding that suburban people, having no social life and stimulation, needed a place to go. The mall was originally conceived of as a community center where people would converge for shopping, cultural activity, and social interaction. It has achieved that.

But even teens are bored with them now. And as more and more people do their shopping on line the mall is going to do a disappearing act everywhere. In fact, pictures posted on the web of dead malls are everywhere.  The Dead Malls Enthusiasts Face book group has 14,000 members and  Google said recently that searches for  "dead malls" produced 5.7 million results last year. a. 2007 was the first year in more than four decades when no large malls opened in the U.S. Only one has opened since then, in 2012.  But there is one bad aspect to the death of malls. I think the mall addicts of old are now hanging out with their cell phones instead.  The sense of community that teens and young adults once found by socializing at malls has also been replaced ny hanging out with one's social media. It's substituting an old addiction for a new one, I guess.

Malls that are failing tend to be in areas where the entire local economy is in the dumps, so that is also another element of their decline.  If you take a trip to deadmalls.com to see which states in the U.S have lost the most malls you'll find that New York leads with 42 closed malls, almost all of them upstate where the economy is especially bad..  Pennsylvania is next on the dead-malls list, with 28; Illinois and Ohio are tied at 27.  About 15% of U.S. malls will fail or be converted into non-retail space within the next 10 years, according to Green Street Advisors, a real estate firm.  Why go there and experience bad sights, bad smells, long walks to find stores, and those teenagers we all love to label as delinquents? The trend now is to buy on line instead.

I rarely go to malls and still most prefer to shopping at single detached stores, not malls. in fact. I buy more on line than at a mall. Oh well, the mall was quick to come and fast to go. And on balance, when they do all disappear I doubt many will cry any tears at their death.