goth girl rule~
goth girl rule~
transcription: women be like "where can i find a goth gf?" my sister in christ we killed the american shopping mall and the goth girls lost their natural habitat
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Wait, malls died in USA? Wtf happened? I thought these were supposed to be temples of consumerism!
What happened was same day delivery.
On kind of a weird note, a kind of bright side... a number of former malls are basically being converted into... sort of really slapdash, improvised arcologies.
Most of the stores get resectioned and converted to basically apartments or condos, and sometimes a few are kept open as actual stores.
So... you can now, theoretically, be a goth girl who actually literally lives in a mall, possibly even directly inside a former Hot Topic or Spencers.
Here's Forbes laying out the case for this potentially making financial sense:
Ironically... the original intention of the guy that came up with the concept of a shopping mall... was that they would actually be much more like this, intentionally planned, walkable, largely self-sustaining, utopian communities, dreams of the 1950s/60s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen
The mall was commercially successful, but the original design was never fully realized, as the intended apartment buildings, schools, medical facilities, park and lake were not built.
Yeah.
Malls were actually always supposed to be this way.
But we decided to build suburbs and highways instead, fundamentally missing the entire point, because Oil and Gas profits must go BRRrRr
The homely feeling some shopping centers/malls have make sense now, not surprised that was supposed to be the endgame.
Yep.
Fundamentally designed to be inhabited, not just visited.
They've been dying for a while. COVID was a bit of a deathblow, but the rot was setting in way before that. A combination of online marketplaces becoming the norm, and the progression away from people ever leaving their houses really ate away at American malls over the past two decades.
I don't live in America, but I spent a decent amount of time on r/deadmalls back in the day and found the factors behind these monoliths crumpling fascinating.
...big boxes killed malls in the 2000s, the retail apocalypse killed big boxes in the teens, and covid put the nails in big retail's coffin...
Honestly my interpretation is that many of the malls that were either built in places they shouldn't have been or built too large are finally dying off but I've still been some absolutely popping malls as recently as last week
Basically any mall that continues to rely entirely on a big box store or 4 to sustain themselves is crumbling but those which have refocused on smaller stores are in much better shape
Most of them. Now the only ones around are the high-end ones in sizeable cities
I mean there's still a lot of old malls around but they're really pretty sad and most of the stores inside are dead or shuttered.
mall of america is still packed pretty much everyday
Amazon happened
Yes, but at least in my area, which is a mid-sized city, shopping malls are still alive and well.