How America Broke up With Shopping Malls
I can still hear the sound, like a mosaic, made up of hundreds of conversations and sounds reverberating off smooth granite floor tiles, ascending to the vaulted fluorescent light ceiling. You would think that the tone would come off chaotic, but even with the shrills of excitement or laughter, it almost had a calming sensation, like white noise to the ear.
America’s shopping malls have been dethroned as the countries “third-place.” Where you live is considered the first place, your job is your second place, and where people go to congregate and hang out is the third place.
Today’s teenagers probably won’t ever experience the joy of meeting up with friends at the local shopping mall. Yes, there are shopping malls still standing in most cities. They are more depressive hollow structures now than the extravagant bustling community centers of the past.
Back in the 1950s, society was craving for a third place. The middle class had more wealth than ever before due to the economic boom that occurred post-WWII. The Eisenhower Federal-Aid Highway act, which provided people the ability to commute from the suburbs to their workplace, also contributed to a third-place desire.
Enter a man by the name of Victor Gruen. Known well for designing specialty boutiques and storefronts, he focused on developing a concept he termed an “indoor downtown.” By 1960, there were 4,500 shopping complexes scattered around the United States. The climax point for shopping malls came in the 1980s; every type of person could find entertainment within the neon light commerce centers.
Fast-forward to 2000, the rise of digital e-commerce. The dot com bubble burst. Amazon, an online retailer, recently had expanded to selling more than just books. An article by warehouseanywhere.com lays out some of the main reasons consumer habits shifted from physical locations like shopping malls to online.
- User Reviews: A way for the public to “crowdsource” information on different products, breaking through the smoke and mirrors of marketing.
- Convenience: With the rise of traffic and traveling for products, consumers are now more likely to pay an extra fee for items to be delivered to their doorstep.
- Consumer data: Maybe not the most popular aspects of e-commerce, but businesses’ ability to track and analyze customer data allows for more effective and concentrated successful marketing ploys.
With the decline of shopping mall visitors, anchor stores like Macy’s, Sears, and JCPenny’s began to close. Adding speed to the nose-dive for shopping centers.
In the same warehouseanywhere.com article, the question of if e-commerce killed brick and mortar businesses is addressed. The piece states, no, that online retail merely pointed out the flaws of the strategies many of these businesses were using. Chalk it up to reckless expansion or unsustainable sales models, but what it really comes down to is not adapting to the changing consumer market.
Shopping malls may be an innocent victim amongst the shift from an in-person shopping experience to an exclusively online experience, with the current COVID-19 pandemic restricting consumer society’s normalities. It leaves these once vibrant utopias desolated, cut down to merely a safe place for people to have their morning walk in.
Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-american-mall-2020-7
https://www.warehouseanywhere.com/resources/history-future-and-trends-of-e-commerce/
https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/amazon-timeline-infographic/#ecommerce-amazon-facts-and-stats
