Rebuilding Rob

Today, July 1, the local shopping mall in my hometown – a place that I roamed for countless hours as a kid, an adolescent, and eventually a young adult – is closing for good.

Anybody who is born of generation X, the time between 1965 and 1980, knows how interval shopping malls became as a part of adolescent culture. They were the closest thing we had to hangouts. They had all the cool clothes. All the cool music. All the cool toys, if you were into that kind of thing. Guys were there. Girls were there.

We would buy records, and cassettes, and eventually CDs and music stores. We would wait in a line, sometimes camping out overnight, in order to get a first crack at tickets to our favorite concerts. Who can forget Black Friday – the day after America’s Thanksgiving? just reminiscing like this makes me feel really old. 

It’s no secret that traditional mortar retail stores have been on the decline for the last several years. And well, this particular mall was not the largest mall in Michigan, it was for several years, the high volume shopping mall of the area. Am I completely uneducated opinion, there are three main factors that led to the downfall of my hometown shopping mall:

The opening of a newer open-air mall less than 2 miles away

In early 2000s, 2007 to be exact in this particular case, open-air shopping malls were seen as a proverbial shot in the arm to the traditional, brick-and-mortar shopping experience. the belief was that people no longer wanted to be lot inside massive fortress like shopping centers. In the open air approach, more closely resemble the traditional downtown shopping experience. Individual stores would more closely resemble individual boutiques with their own entrances and exits.

Personally, I feel like open-air shopping malls work, great in warmer climate areas like California or the south east. However, in a state Lake Michigan, where it is not impressed to see snow during six months out of a calendar year, the open air concept seems asinine.

But Rob, the sidewalks will be heated. That way if it snows, it will just melt. Yes, people actually made this argument.

One such open-air shopping mall opened less than 2 miles down the road from my traditional local shopping mall. Keep in mind, this was 2007. The next factor leading to the downfall of brick and mortar shopping was already making it ascent…

The explosion of online retail

https://www.officetimeline.com/blog/amazon-history-timeline does anyone else remember when amazon.com just sold books? This timeline goes through all of the website’s major milestones. In addition to becoming a force in multimedia, Amazon absolutely revolutionized the retail mail delivery services as we know it.

Today, people don’t need to leave their homes to do much of their shopping. Within a few clicks on a phone, tablet or computer and will receive a product from Amazon typically within a day. In fact, there are some instances now where Amazon is towards same-day delivery. This is me the shopping experience for multitaskers and introverts, much easier. Shopping and receiving entertainment from the comfort of your electronic devices would come in handy during the next factor in the downfall of brick and mortar retail… 

COVID-19

I know, it’s easy COVID-19 for so many things. But the fact is, we already had a lot of the infrastructure in place to make a life during the worldwide lockdowns relatively tolerable. People had already gotten into the habit of shopping online instead of going into traditional brick and mortar stores. Now, they have the excuse of the pandemic as to why to stay out of public places.

The lockdown have lifted, brick and mortar retail has never really returned to what it was pre-pandemic, let alone the what it was before online retail

Given these three factors, it was only a matter of time before great monoliths like my local mall went under. it’s the end of an era. And for people of my generation, it’s the death of another part of our youth. 10 years from now, if kids watch a movie like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, they won’t understand how central a place like Ridgemont Mall was to the characters in that movie. It’s the inevitable passage of time, I suppose.

But I still hold out hope for brick and mortar retail. as the Amazon timeline indicates, 2015 saw the opening of the first ever brick and mortar Amazon store. While I don’t think that places like shopping mall will ever have the impact upon our culture that they did during my childhood, I don’t think we will ever see brick and mortar stores completely go away. if anything, they will become more of a kitschy, hipster thing to do. “Let’s go into the store and actually try on clothes you know, before we buy them!” I think there are some things that we will always choose to buy in person, face-to-face. I for one, don’t know if I could ever take to the idea of buying a car over the Internet.

Also, two of the old mall’s “anchor” department stores will remain standing. They will continue to run business as usual. As for the rest of the property, there are plans in place to build a hotel, apartments, and presumably office space or parks as well. It all sounds a little lofty, and I don’t know exactly how much of it will come to fruition. I’ve seen other malls in my area repurposed with very promising results. 

Only time will tell.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Rob’s Retro Movie Review: This is Spinal Tap (1984) – The Movie That Scaled to Eleven
• A Death in the Family (And My Disposable Income): My Life in Comics
• The Supporting Cast: Navigating the Eras of Male Friendship
• Life is What Happens: A Look Back at My Non-Existent 2025 Vision
• The Moment I Walked Inside a Hallmark Movie

The article “Requiem for a Mall” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob