When I was in my 20s, a friend of mine challenged me to go a
week without visiting the mall. (We really only had one in the small city in
which I lived at the time.) I couldn’t
do it.
In those golden days, a large enclosed mall was truly the
center of shopping. They contained
nearly every type of store (though few in the US had supermarkets, a staple of
early malls in Canada and other countries).
But they were a weather proof hangout; I almost always ran into someone
I knew at the mall.
But with the rise of big box stores and the
return-with-a-vengeance of strip malls in the 1990s, followed by the rise of
online shopping in the past decade, coupled with the remaining scars of a few
recessions and a heck of a lot of overbuilding in-between, many malls aren’t
what they used to be. Some are dead or
in hospice care, as noted by the DeadMalls.com website.
Others are discovering life beyond retail, as noted in How
About Gardening or Golfing at the Mall? reported by Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times
(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/business/making-over-the-mall-in-rough-economic-times.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all).
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