I will attempt to at least inject some hope into this discussion.
My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court.
Then smartphones and the internet came and all the malls started closing up, dying off and there was an entire generation that just ignored or forgot about them. Most of the malls around where I live have all but closed.
There are still a few open and now? They're thriving. My family now goes together on the weekends and its amazing. All the teenagers are in the food court, in their groups, talking, eating and socializing. You see groups of teens wondering in and out of the stores. I see a very similar cultural revolution happening and its really refreshing. The mall is truly a phoenix rising from its once former ashes. The major anchor stores are constantly busy no matter what night you go there. The movie theater is busy almost every night and its packed on the weekends. Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream because so many other malls just north or south of us have either died and been leveled, or are in various forms of trying to reinvent themselves as something else before its too late.
Either way, what I saw in my experiences at our local mall gave me hope that the Zoomers are in some ways, taking a break from their phones and going out and having a different experience and returning to socializing with their friends and creating a new way of connecting with people they're close to. My son said he still uses his phone when he's at the mall, but just to make plans to meet his other buddies and coordinate where they're all going to meet up. For the most part, once they meet up, they all stop using their phones.
> Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see... Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream
I am really really sorry to go off-topic here, but as an European this is... So strange and slightly hilarious to me. We went to a park. Or local river/lake.
"As a European", no we didn't. Europe is far too big to generalize so casually like that. In many northern parts of Europe it is frequently raining. In the 80s and 90s me and my friends spent our time indoors because when it was either cold, or cold and wet. You might get a month or two in summer when the weather was better - if you were lucky. So we spent our time indoors, doing homework or on computers, or round each other's houses (playing video games with each other).
A mall would have been a useful place to hang out because it's under a roof and there are things to do, but there were very few good malls in that part of the UK and anyway to get to them you'd have to be able to drive. But there's no culture of young driving there. In the USA in some states you can drive at 14! In the UK you can't even start learning until 16 and in most of Europe the minimum driving age is 18.
So did I, as an American. Locale, culture, and parents' values probably have more influence on this than continent.
That said, I don't think there's anything particularly strange/hilarious about people congregating in spaces built for congregation or feeling nostalgia for those spaces and experiences as they've begun to fade away. Memories can be made anywhere, and not everyone has access to the green spaces that you and I did as children.
> I don't think there's anything particularly strange/hilarious about people congregating in spaces built for congregation or feeling nostalgia for those spaces and experiences as they've begun to fade away.
You are right about that, and I admit I didn't thought of that perspective when I was writing my comment. The reason it evokes those feeling of me, is my immediate view of malls as purely consumer space, where everything is aimed at you to spend your money and this is their primary function. My knowledge of malls is limited either to their depiction in movies or experience of shopping malls in my country, where they are probably a bit different and not the most pleasant hanging out space I could imagine. But again, you are completely right about that and thanks for pointing that out!
Interesting point you bring up. With e-commerce, I am surprised that malls can work at all.
There is a brand new, massive and beautifully designed mall in The Netherlands called Westfield Mall of the Netherlands.
I went there once to quickly grab something and I got hopelessly lost, even while my phone navigation actually was able to display and navigate the layout of the mall, due to the sheer size I underestimated the navigational challenge my little trip would pose.
The mall really blew me away with its beauty and I am still completely flabbergasted how this can work financially, I perhaps incorrectly assumedthat everybody is like me, ordering everything online.
Although hard to believe, your argument may actually have a lot of thruth in it.
Malls provide a few benefits and attract some key shoppers in my opinion. Many malls near me open at 5am to "walkers". Basically seniors looking for a place to walk indoors. They often populate the food court once it starts to open. When I'm in a mall, many shoppers are older adults (remember, they didn't grow up with same day shipping and one click checkout). Lastly, as a parent with kids, there's huge benefit to holding up a pair of pants to my 3 year to see if they will fit. A 3T size from X clothing company is very different from a 3T from Y clothing company. We pretty much buy 100% of our kids clothes from a mall. These are just 3 examples of heavy mall users, I'm sure there are many more.
Westfield's basically the only company left making money on malls, because they made a crucial observation: The anchor store is dead. Sears, Macy's, etc., they're in direct competition with Amazon, and they're losing their shirts. Most malls had made huge concessions to these anchor stores, operating under the assumption that they were why anybody goes to the mall, but Westfield pushed the opposite: People go to the mall when they want attainable luxury. People going to the mall in the 21st century aren't going there because they need something specific. People go to the mall to see a wide assortment of luxuries, recreational activities, and food options, so that they can treat themselves a little. Board game shops, brand-specific retailers like Doc Martin or Abercombie, Lego stores, jewelers.
And it works. Walking around Valley Fair (Westfield's flagship location in San Jose) is fun. You can wander the place for a good long time, being presented with a seemingly never ending array of frivolous luxuries, and even if you don't end up buying any clothes or jewels or whatever, you can swing by the food vendors for some fancy ice cream at Salt 'N Straw.
> Total retail floor area 117,000 m2 (1,260,000 sq ft)
> Parking 4,000
That retail floor area is enormous!
And, LOL: If this was US, parking would be 10x!
FYI: Westfield is a huge global mall developer. Before 9/11, they ran the mall under NYC World Trade Center. It was one of the highest grossing retail spaces in the world. They must have done a lot of market analysis before they built that mall in the Netherlands.
That's not really enormous. It's big compared to most buildings, but ~1million sq ft of retail space is just about the minimum viable mall today. People aren't going to the mall to fulfill a specific need, they're going for the variety. It's hard to cram enough variety into much less space than that.
For context, Valley Fair, Westfield's mall in San Jose, has 2.2million sq ft, and looking through their list of holdings, it doesn't look like they operate any malls smaller than a million sq ft in North America.
Not only malls, in Europe and Scandinavia, many small towns and cities that has seen greater days are working hard to make it more livable for people of all ages, incentivizing small shops of all kinds and prioritizing bikes and pedestrians while the cars have to stay on the outskirts of the town center.
It takes time though, but I see a trend and a hunger among people to reclaime physical spaces and to spend more time amongst each other, making room for chance encounters etc.
My formative years from ages 15-25 were spent in the 80's and 90's. It was the apex of the mall experience. We saw the mall as a place to get away from our parents, hang out with our buds, run into other classmates and feel some sense of freedom while running amok playing video games in the arcade and chowing down tacos in the food court.
Then smartphones and the internet came and all the malls started closing up, dying off and there was an entire generation that just ignored or forgot about them. Most of the malls around where I live have all but closed.
There are still a few open and now? They're thriving. My family now goes together on the weekends and its amazing. All the teenagers are in the food court, in their groups, talking, eating and socializing. You see groups of teens wondering in and out of the stores. I see a very similar cultural revolution happening and its really refreshing. The mall is truly a phoenix rising from its once former ashes. The major anchor stores are constantly busy no matter what night you go there. The movie theater is busy almost every night and its packed on the weekends. Its like an entire generation has re-discovered the mall again and its refreshing to see.
Sometimes I feel like I'm in a dream because so many other malls just north or south of us have either died and been leveled, or are in various forms of trying to reinvent themselves as something else before its too late.
Either way, what I saw in my experiences at our local mall gave me hope that the Zoomers are in some ways, taking a break from their phones and going out and having a different experience and returning to socializing with their friends and creating a new way of connecting with people they're close to. My son said he still uses his phone when he's at the mall, but just to make plans to meet his other buddies and coordinate where they're all going to meet up. For the most part, once they meet up, they all stop using their phones.
So yes, there is hope yet.