5 ms·

In my opinion, the suburban mall has always been an aberration and a contradiction. In the dispersed urban system that is the suburbs, malls attempted to offer

In my opinion, the suburban mall has always been an aberration and a contradiction. In the dispersed urban system that is the suburbs, malls attempted to offer the synergy and community that the dense city can offer - a walkable (from within) "city center" to buy what you need, for people to meet up and socialize, and so on. And yet they weren't - they were sprawling monoliths only accessible via car. They weren't integrated meaningfully into existing city centers or the existing communities of the city. They were erected and expected to produce their own mini-city and mini-community, which they did faithfully for some years as they filled a niche that is otherwise unavailable to suburbanites. But they don't make sense, not in the traditional city that can be navigated without a car, nor in the modern city that is thoughtfully designed with cars as a secondary concern and not as the first class citizen. The final token that big box stores offered - a variety of goods that cannot be matched by smaller local stores - is mostly extinguished by the convenience of e-commerce which gives us access to nearly any product straight to our door. This is why the most successful remaining big box stores are those that offer products that can be troublesome or impossible to ship - Home Depot, Ikea, etc

mdip 7y ago
They were erected and expected to produce their own mini-city and mini-community, which they did faithfully for some years as they filled a niche that is otherwise unavailable to suburbanites. That's dead on. All of the other things that malls were "supposed to be" were marketing and to the extent that they occurred, existed to feed the "mini-city/mini-community" which were the rent-payers who were there to sell their goods to the largest audience they could have available to them given the technology of the day. They were the non-Internet world's answer to Amazon with a lot of the same problems. We drove 15 miles to the mall a few times a year for holiday/general shopping -- it was the only "hope" for handling Christmas in one trip (on the 24th of December where you could lift your feet off the ground and have the people all around you carry you to each store). Plus a nice play area where Dad could fall asleep while the kids beat each-other up and mom had time to get all of the shopping done[0] I live next to two malls. One is an 80s, still-alive-but-barely, mall that will likely be on this site at some point. The other is a brand-new, outdoor mall with a variety of non-commercial attractions (live bands spring-fall Fri-Sun, a mini-splash pad for the kids and a larger play area). If I couldn't walk to the nice mall[1], I wouldn't visit either. Neither of them have any stores I'm interested in -- I've probably spent a total of $50 there in the 7 years since it's been around. It's hard enough to find things online with a search bar, let alone walking through miles of stores who don't make enough money to employ the staff required to provide the service that warrants the higher cost. [0] Yes, that's an intentional exaggeration of gender roles for the purpose of being silly, not offending; my parents were nothing like this. [1] When I moved here, it was a lousy par-3 golf course. This is a little more fun to walk to, and it's really neat listening to (some incredible) local bands for free, but a lot less fun to live next to at Christmas.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  > If I couldn't walk to the nice mall[1], I wouldn't visit either. This echoes my experience. I live in a city with excellent transit but I happen to live a solid 15 minute walk from the transit / urban part of the city and instead I live near a big road. Naturally, the big road is lined with big box stores. One of them is a Micro Center and I quite like having so many computer parts and electronics in one place just a 3 minute walk down the road. However, if it wasn't so conveniently placed near my home, I would instead order everything online (even if I owned a car, which I do not).
lonelappde 7y ago
A mall is simply a privately-owned small-town urban core "Main Street". Dead malls are just dead towns, which exist because people move to newer developments when land is cheap. Big box stores still exist.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  > A mall is simply a privately-owned small-town urban core "Main Street". With a lot better parking. On the other hand, people could walk to the small-town urban core...
  - smileysteve 7y ago
    One way that malls are attempting to survive is by adding living and working environments; It seems obvious - have captive customers for your stores, have the "company town" vibe for employees, all while reducing parking requirements. Though, it has some issues; particularly with zoning, insurance, and board approvals.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
totally agree. I won't be shedding any tears to see this monstrosity go.
tracker1 7y ago
In big box stores... I needed a small part a few days ago and don't think I'd been in a Fry's Electronics for several years. It was downright disturbing how barren the place felt. There were maybe a dozen cars in the parking lot and 3 people on the 40+ checkout registers. I remember that place being full up and busy to the hilt. Now 1/3+ of the shelves are empty and it's clearly past its' best days. The electronics area is completely stripped out, and the computer components area is staffed by kids who frankly don't know much of anything. It's really sad as I do have some fond memories of the place. A mall nearby is about to be torn down, converting an indoor mall into an outdoor mall, which the more busy malls in the Phoenix area are. If movie theaters weren't largely in malls, I wouldn't even notice.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Eh, there are lots of malls in fairly dense Beijing, the one next to my apartment complex (when I was living there) was 4 stories tall, fairly huge by USA standards, and still felt like it served a purpose even with a fully featured urban community around it. But yes, even urban Chinese malls are faced with the reality of e-commerce and focus mainly on things you might not want to or can’t buy online (clothes, shoes, food, entertainment). And even then, ghost malls are definitely a thing (for Beijing, Sanlitun soho is a ghost mall across the street from a very successful Sanlitun village). Surviving American malls have evolved roughly the same way, though there are high end and low end paths to success (eg compare crossroads mall to Bellevue square mall in Bellevue WA).
francisofascii 7y ago
While it is true most traditional malls required a car to access, once inside malls offer freedom from the car. Today's big box store strip malls practically encourage people to drive to each individual store. Traditional malls are good for kids who can wonder about without getting hit by a vehicle like in a strip mall or a city.
maxsilver 7y ago
I don't see the contradiction. There are lots of suburban-styled malls inside "traditional cities" (dense urban areas), that look and work basically the same way, but are urban. Seattle has one or two of them, Portland has one, Minneapolis has one, London Ontario has one -- all of these within the core downtown. Suburban malls are not uniquely suburban. Many of them are in suburbia because they originally targeted average/regular/middle-income people, so they are built in the places where those people are allowed to live (which in the US, is almost exclusively suburban areas). Generally speaking, "Dead Malls" has little to do with malls dying (in the US, we're still building brand new malls today), but has more to do with demographics shift (middle income people now live in different areas) and target market shifts (many new malls have moved up-market, there are less wealthy people than working-class people, and wealthier people generally don't live in the then-new 1970s/1980s suburbs anymore, they now generally live either full-downtown-urban or far-exurban)
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  The Eaton Centers in Toronto and Montréal also come to mind. They're huge, and intimately plugged into the center of the city, including being directly connected to subway stations. That said, they're also, I suspect, mostly for tourists. The Milwaukee area's malls really make the situation for suburban malls clear: The city buses do go to the malls, but the malls wouldn't let them drop people off by the door. They stop at an open air bus shelter at the far end of the parking lot.
  - koolba 7y ago
    Why didn’t they want bus traffic directly to the mall?
    - irrational 7y ago
      I'm wondering the same thing. I've never considered it before, but the mall near me does the exact same thing. Why?
    - mumblemumble 7y ago
brianpgordon 7y ago
I don't see the contradiction. A mall offers the walkability of an urban center but provides plenty of free parking. Additionally, there's no space "wasted" by residential and office buildings like there is in a city. What exactly doesn't make sense here? Indoor malls died because consumers who want to shop in person turned out to prefer individual stores and strip malls. If anything you should be pointing out how weird and wasteful those detached stores are. It seems to me that the indoor mall is at least speaking the same language as you, with its "synergy and community" and walkability. The model of having detached stores and restaurants spaced widely apart is the unsustainable aberration. The indoor mall makes sense.
jredwards 7y ago
Incidentally, in my city, the suburban mall is thriving and expanding, but the downtown city center mall is completely dead. The thriving mall is focusing on extremely high end retail and restaurants.

mdip 7y ago

They were erected and expected to produce their own mini-city and mini-community, which they did faithfully for some years as they filled a niche that is otherwise unavailable to suburbanites. That's dead on. All of the other things that malls were "supposed to be" were marketing and to the extent that they occurred, existed to feed the "mini-city/mini-community" which were the rent-payers who were there to sell their goods to the largest audience they could have available to them given the technology of the day. They were the non-Internet world's answer to Amazon with a lot of the same problems. We drove 15 miles to the mall a few times a year for holiday/general shopping -- it was the only "hope" for handling Christmas in one trip (on the 24th of December where you could lift your feet off the ground and have the people all around you carry you to each store). Plus a nice play area where Dad could fall asleep while the kids beat each-other up and mom had time to get all of the shopping done[0] I live next to two malls. One is an 80s, still-alive-but-barely, mall that will likely be on this site at some point. The other is a brand-new, outdoor mall with a variety of non-commercial attractions (live bands spring-fall Fri-Sun, a mini-splash pad for the kids and a larger play area). If I couldn't walk to the nice mall[1], I wouldn't visit either. Neither of them have any stores I'm interested in -- I've probably spent a total of $50 there in the 7 years since it's been around. It's hard enough to find things online with a search bar, let alone walking through miles of stores who don't make enough money to employ the staff required to provide the service that warrants the higher cost. [0] Yes, that's an intentional exaggeration of gender roles for the purpose of being silly, not offending; my parents were nothing like this. [1] When I moved here, it was a lousy par-3 golf course. This is a little more fun to walk to, and it's really neat listening to (some incredible) local bands for free, but a lot less fun to live next to at Christmas.

helen___keller 7y ago
> If I couldn't walk to the nice mall[1], I wouldn't visit either. This echoes my experience. I live in a city with excellent transit but I happen to live a solid 15 minute walk from the transit / urban part of the city and instead I live near a big road. Naturally, the big road is lined with big box stores. One of them is a Micro Center and I quite like having so many computer parts and electronics in one place just a 3 minute walk down the road. However, if it wasn't so conveniently placed near my home, I would instead order everything online (even if I owned a car, which I do not).

lonelappde 7y ago

A mall is simply a privately-owned small-town urban core "Main Street". Dead malls are just dead towns, which exist because people move to newer developments when land is cheap. Big box stores still exist.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
> A mall is simply a privately-owned small-town urban core "Main Street". With a lot better parking. On the other hand, people could walk to the small-town urban core...
- smileysteve 7y ago
  One way that malls are attempting to survive is by adding living and working environments; It seems obvious - have captive customers for your stores, have the "company town" vibe for employees, all while reducing parking requirements. Though, it has some issues; particularly with zoning, insurance, and board approvals.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

totally agree. I won't be shedding any tears to see this monstrosity go.

tracker1 7y ago

In big box stores... I needed a small part a few days ago and don't think I'd been in a Fry's Electronics for several years. It was downright disturbing how barren the place felt. There were maybe a dozen cars in the parking lot and 3 people on the 40+ checkout registers. I remember that place being full up and busy to the hilt. Now 1/3+ of the shelves are empty and it's clearly past its' best days. The electronics area is completely stripped out, and the computer components area is staffed by kids who frankly don't know much of anything. It's really sad as I do have some fond memories of the place. A mall nearby is about to be torn down, converting an indoor mall into an outdoor mall, which the more busy malls in the Phoenix area are. If movie theaters weren't largely in malls, I wouldn't even notice.

dreamcompiler 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Eh, there are lots of malls in fairly dense Beijing, the one next to my apartment complex (when I was living there) was 4 stories tall, fairly huge by USA standards, and still felt like it served a purpose even with a fully featured urban community around it. But yes, even urban Chinese malls are faced with the reality of e-commerce and focus mainly on things you might not want to or can’t buy online (clothes, shoes, food, entertainment). And even then, ghost malls are definitely a thing (for Beijing, Sanlitun soho is a ghost mall across the street from a very successful Sanlitun village). Surviving American malls have evolved roughly the same way, though there are high end and low end paths to success (eg compare crossroads mall to Bellevue square mall in Bellevue WA).

francisofascii 7y ago

While it is true most traditional malls required a car to access, once inside malls offer freedom from the car. Today's big box store strip malls practically encourage people to drive to each individual store. Traditional malls are good for kids who can wonder about without getting hit by a vehicle like in a strip mall or a city.

maxsilver 7y ago

I don't see the contradiction. There are lots of suburban-styled malls inside "traditional cities" (dense urban areas), that look and work basically the same way, but are urban. Seattle has one or two of them, Portland has one, Minneapolis has one, London Ontario has one -- all of these within the core downtown. Suburban malls are not uniquely suburban. Many of them are in suburbia because they originally targeted average/regular/middle-income people, so they are built in the places where those people are allowed to live (which in the US, is almost exclusively suburban areas). Generally speaking, "Dead Malls" has little to do with malls dying (in the US, we're still building brand new malls today), but has more to do with demographics shift (middle income people now live in different areas) and target market shifts (many new malls have moved up-market, there are less wealthy people than working-class people, and wealthier people generally don't live in the then-new 1970s/1980s suburbs anymore, they now generally live either full-downtown-urban or far-exurban)

mumblemumble 7y ago
The Eaton Centers in Toronto and Montréal also come to mind. They're huge, and intimately plugged into the center of the city, including being directly connected to subway stations. That said, they're also, I suspect, mostly for tourists. The Milwaukee area's malls really make the situation for suburban malls clear: The city buses do go to the malls, but the malls wouldn't let them drop people off by the door. They stop at an open air bus shelter at the far end of the parking lot.
- koolba 7y ago
  Why didn’t they want bus traffic directly to the mall?
  - irrational 7y ago
    I'm wondering the same thing. I've never considered it before, but the mall near me does the exact same thing. Why?
  - mumblemumble 7y ago

brianpgordon 7y ago

I don't see the contradiction. A mall offers the walkability of an urban center but provides plenty of free parking. Additionally, there's no space "wasted" by residential and office buildings like there is in a city. What exactly doesn't make sense here? Indoor malls died because consumers who want to shop in person turned out to prefer individual stores and strip malls. If anything you should be pointing out how weird and wasteful those detached stores are. It seems to me that the indoor mall is at least speaking the same language as you, with its "synergy and community" and walkability. The model of having detached stores and restaurants spaced widely apart is the unsustainable aberration. The indoor mall makes sense.

jredwards 7y ago

Incidentally, in my city, the suburban mall is thriving and expanding, but the downtown city center mall is completely dead. The thriving mall is focusing on extremely high end retail and restaurants.