Seeing how big America is, you would think having a ton of shopping malls would be good for the country. But it seems like there are very few malls where they’re totally thriving. The rest are on life support or totally gone. I wonder why is that?

28 comments

  3. Well there’s this thing called online shopping and fast, free delivery. That killed a lot of the interest in local and chain specialty shops as you can find that stuff easily online from the comfort of home. The big anchor stores are also transitioning their efforts online to compete with Amazon and others.

    The malls are are surviving are offering more reasons for people to come there, the ones that were generic aren’t and failed/failing.

  4. Malls are super inconvenient if you just have one store to go to. And lots of people hate crowds. And Amazon Prime exists.

  5. The rise of big box retailers challenged them for supremacy and then online shopping killed them off.

  6. I would say a mix of online shopping and changes in teen culture.

    Online shopping removes the need to go in person to stores to browse or buy things.

    Before the internet teens often congregates at malls because they could hang out with friends, meet new people, and generally hang out. People can do al of that online now.

  7. In the 90s, juvenoia and the appearance of superstores like walmart took away malls’ biggest customers.

    Then the 2000s saw the rise of ecommerce. By the 2010s there wasn’t much you could buy in malls that you couldn’t buy online, so malls began losing their anchor stores.

  8. Leveraged buyouts played a role too.

    Toys R Us, Sears, and Payless all were bought out by hedge funds and loaded up with debt they were unable to pay. Once these stores closed, there was much less reason for people to go to the mall.

  9. Because you can buy the same products the malls sell for less online and you don’t have to leave your home- thus saving time and fuel.

  10. You’re not going to see a YouTube channel about thriving retail. Rest assured there are many malls here that aren’t dead.

  11. There’s a mall near where I live that was almost dead, but it’s slowly coming back by leasing for cheap to locals. There’s a skate shop, a smash room (pay to break stuff), pet gift store, and they’re building a new ice rink. The reasons why malls die is because they failed to adapt to the modern consumer.

  12. Online shopping doesn’t help. But it’s mostly because the stores became too hostile to the youth that kept them busy. You used to be able to get dropped off and hang out with your friends, walking around, buying pretzels or picking out gifts for birthdays. You’d meet boys/girls there, have a date sometimes. There were all sorts of opportunities to spend little bits of money on a weekly basis. But all the malls in my area started to treat this clientele like a nuisance and they started banning kids from hanging out. Once it became the kind of place you just run into to buy something people were more likely to just stay home.

  13. Online shopping and online forums/social media.

    Malls were a safe ‘neutral’ place for teenagers and young adults to hang out (with each other but not at one of their homes). These days they just stay home and hang out on Discord or (moreso in the 2000s) in WoW or another MMO and chat ingame (sidebar; social media has killed that as well, which is the real reason MMOs have lost a lot of their charm IMO).

    Online shopping has, obviously, made shopping destinations pointless. Other than groceries and occasional trips to the gun store, the only time I’ve gone to a physical store just to buy shit in the last ~5 years was to buy a PC power supply in an ’emergency’ (my PC wasn’t working and I didn’t want to lose my whole weekend waiting for even 1-day shipping).

  14. Mall stores haven’t done a great job of keeping up with what people want to buy, and we have way more options now on the internet so we don’t have to just settle for what they stock.

  15. Because America is a big country, we have lots of almost *everything.*

    That being said, if you’re getting your information from the media, social media, YouTube, etc… You’re getting, well, a **somewhat** biased picture. There’s plenty of healthy malls too.

  16. While everyone is point at online shopping, property values have also skyrocketed over the years as well.

  18. In addition to the rise of online shopping and big box stores, another factor is that many malls were built as tax shelters for their owners, so they built more than what was needed in the first place.

  19. A lot of people truly hate shopping in person. Plus the quality of a number of ‘anchor’ stores has seriously gone downhill, way before COVID hit.

    Macy’s used to have a lot of top of the line clothing for business wear and teens and some good housewares, but I only get sad disappointment when I walk into one now. Shopping Macy’s online is way different than the one in my area.

    Then you have what I would call high-quality or at least they cater to a certain monied demographic malls like Tyson’s Corner: [https://www.tysonscornercenter.com/Directory](https://www.tysonscornercenter.com/Directory)

    American Girl, Apple, Nordstroms, Bloomingdales, H&M, great selection of various dining options. BTW the Macy’s in Tyson’s is miles above the Macy’s in the surrounding NoVA malls.

    Across the way you have Tysons II or the Tysons Galleria with Burberry, Chanel, the Ritz-Carleton, Louis Vuitton, etc…

  20. The mall where I live is actually relatively far from the town center, requiring a car or a bus trip to reach. Most students in my university town couldn’t easily reach it. So when online shopping became a thing, it was MUCH more convenient for the students to go online than to trek all the way out to the mall.

  21. The number-one answer is going to be online shopping. However that is *mostly* wrong. Though online shopping will be the final blow to malls, malls were dying long before online shopping was more than a novelty (keep in mind, online shopping has really only been mainstream for about a decade, and still accounts for less than 20% of US retail sales).

    So reasons:

    1) Oversaturation.

    Malls were built non-stop pretty much everywhere. They were relatively cheap to build and were though to be sure-thing real estate investments. Anywhere there was cheap land, especially the rust belt and Midwest, there were malls everywhere, and many were owned by various pension plans. Ultimately, there was no need, demand, or support for half-a-dozen, large, malls in places like Akron, Ohio.

    Many dead malls also tend to be located in bad or inconvenient areas. Rolling Acres, the poster child of American dead malls, was located way out on the edge of town, miles away from the city center, and you had to navigate residential streets to get there. Looking at a map, unless you lived nearby it appears there is no easy way to get there. There were other, more centrally located malls in town as well.

    2) Indoor Malls are Simply a Poor Business Plan

    Indoor malls rely on few large anchor stores to drive traffic to the smaller store within the mall. So the success of all the businesses in the mall is reliant on the success of places like Sears and JC Penny (both of which had ruined themselves in the 1990s and early 2000s).

    3) Expensive to Operate

    Can you imagine the cost to cool these places?

    4) Economic Downturn in the early 2000s, then 2008, then just plain economic change

    Rural America had a far greater number of indoor malls, but is also the first to cut discretional spending. Also, during this time, many of the large anchor stores fell into bankruptcy and were sold off to larger competitors or consolidated. This left relatively few suitable stores for anchor tenants and closing of many locations. Without anchors, malls fail. And this is all before 2008…

    5) Big Box Stores

    Places like Walmart, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond etc, exploded in the 90s (I am aware they existed before that but they expanded rapidly in the 90s).

    6) Cultural Shifts

    The Mall Culture of the 80s is long gone. I’m going to blame helicopter parenting but perceived crime in malls is also a factor.

    Also, we have shifted (sort of) to a culture of experience rather than consumption. We also shop with purpose now, we no longer have time to spend in malls, partially due to in the increase in dual income families, so we head to the big box store instead.

    There is also a large shift to supporting small, local, businesses rather than national, or multinational retailers. At least on the West Coast.

    7) Online Shopping

    We’re really only just starting to see the effects online shopping is having on retail. If malls have been able to survive to this point, online shopping will likely kill them off

    8) so many other things. I could go on and on.

  22. Malls were overbuilt in the 70s-90s due to retail speculation. More malls were built than markets could sustain and as a result they had a population crash. Many of these malls were pretty much the same thing, same stores, etc.

    Higher end malls are absolutely thriving

  23. My local mall has been dead for the past 20 years. 5 stores in the whole mall, i heard there use to be way more.

  25. Because they overbuilt them prior to online shopping and the market was at or over saturation.

    Online shopping has caused major contractions in the brick and mortar business of major retailers causing them to pull out of malls. The mall company has a hard time getting more tenants in and they may or may not be able to fill the space. If they don’t, it brings down the vibe of the place and decreases incentive to shop there because the good thing about malls is that you can find a lot of different things in one place in person. This further contributes to online shopping and future mall store closures.

    There are so many dead malls around because it’s hard to convert the architecture and space into something else. It’s not profitable to raze them to the ground and build something else because it’s cheaper to build on new land, often because places where there was a mall were chosen because the land was cheap and bountiful.

  26. There is one mall in St. Louis that seems fairly busy and healthy. The popular one from the 1990’s is now a subdivision.

  27. 1. Online Shopping.
    2. Many of these Malls are in the Rust Belt areas that have been in decline since the Steel industry is no longer so large a part of the economy, ditto for auto industry.
    3. Town square revitalization projects, the original malls teneded to kill the old town squares, as the old town centers are being revitalized its at the expense of the malls.
    4. Profit margins for mall owners mean that mall shops are more expensive than strip malls, outlet malls, or individual stores.
    5. In many cases new Highways have moved traffic away from malls built on previous main service routes.
    6. Decline of Macy’s, Sears, and other big retailers, without major anchor stores Malls tend to suffer, though successful malls today usually have a Target or Walmart attached.

  28. Imo they put a lot of dumb stores like sunglasses hut and ugly jewelry , skin creams and charge 500 times what you’d get anywhere else

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