I was going through the mall the other day, which is a pretty depressing affair, and it struck me that there was a very short window of time where malls played a part in the life of kids. Realistically you probably had to be born somewhere from 1970 to maybe something like 1993 for them to have any impact. (Years picked arbitrarily on my intuition.) If you were born before 1970 there wouldn't be malls at all. If you were born after 1993 they were in too much of a decline for them to draw any interest.
It must be mystifying for the later millennials and especially for Zoomers to hear older people talk about their great times in malls. It's not hard to see why. Here's my usual experience with a mall; these might be unique to the upper midwest but I suspect things are similar all over:
And that's it. Basically unless you are shopping for clothes there is very little reason to go the mall rather than any specific store. And even the stores at the mall feel dead. For example, at the local Barnes and Noble there are three sets of cash registers: one for the exit to the parking lot, one for the exit to the mall interior, and one for the media section. However only the registers next to the parking lot ever have anyone manning them. And there's never more than one person there. Sometimes there isn't even one person there and you have to hunt down a random store employee in order to check out. The whole atmosphere reeks of gloom and depression.
If this is all you've experienced of malls, it would be hard to believe that kids used to go excited to go there. But they were the hubs of youth culture for about two decades.
The most obvious difference is that malls used to be packed with stores. Demand was so high to be there that you'd never have a slot going vacant for more than a month. This led to a lot more variety. There were software stores, photo shops, music stores where you could listen to music and get used stuff, food courts full both of chain stores and weird local stuff, electronics stores where you could buy more than cell phones, etc. Part of the downfall of these have definitely been internet shopping. At the time there were so many things you could only see in stores. When we went to a place like Software Etc. I would always see games I had never even heard mentioned before, so just looking at the boxes was a thrill. Similarly if you were an anime fan at the time speciality stores at the mall were probably your only chance to see any anime at all (at least if you weren't so deep in the rabbit hole that you were ordering fansubs of questionable quality on VHS.)
Stores also catered more to trials. I've mentoined that music stores let you listen to CDs, tapes, records, etc. before you bought them. Any store that sold video games or computer software would have a place where you could try them out. Pretty common for parents to say "okay I'm going to be shopping in this section for the next 10 minutes, you can try out the games here while I wait." And just trying out a new operating system like Windows 95 or XP was pretty neat if you'd never seen it before. Toy stores would often have areas up front for kids to try out the newest toy, book stores were generally extremely lax about having people buy books before reading them in store, etc. You could always find something to keep yourself occupied in each store beyond just looking at what was being sold.
Then there were the places specifically meant for entertainment. The arcades loomed large because during this era they far outpaced anything that was available at home (or, in the age of Neo Geo, what anyone who wasn't rich could afford.) There were plenty of good home ports, but the arcade games always looked and sounded superior. This is without getting into the ones that took full advantage of being a separate cabinet. For example Silent Scope had a large screen and a sniper rifle prop in front of it. The rifle had a scope that would display a zoomed in version of whever the rifle was pointing, meaning you could look at the large screen for the big picture and then use the scope to get the shot. There wasn't anything like that at home. Simlarly you had games which modeled the insides of vehicles, plenty of games based around using light guns with various features, etc. It was a whole experience.
On top of that lots of malls had movie theaters, and these were often popular ones to go to since you could do so much while waiting for the movie to start. Wasn't uncommon for kids to simply roll into the mall without any idea what was playing (since you had to call in or check the newspaper for that) and then mess around the mall if the movie they wanted to see wouldn't start for a while. There were also commonly events and performances in the open space between stores. Now you still have opportunities for kids to meet Santa at Christmas and the Easter Bunny at Easter, but that's it. Previously you might have musical acts, novelties like hypnotists, etc. showing up. Basically any type of performance you might see at a county fair these days could have shown up at the mall.
But the biggest difference was probably just the number of people. If you lived in a city with a mall, chances were good that if you went there you would eventually see someone you knew. Even if you didn't, you could easily make friends there, especially at the arcade. When a mall does have an arcade now it's almost always empty, not even having attendants, so playing feels incredibly lonely. Previously they were so much in demand that there was even ettiquite about who played what games when. (The act of putting a quarter on the machine to reserve your slot was sacred.)
And it's this community that I really miss. If you go to a mall now you are unlikely to see anything but low income immigrant families and old people (who are only there to exercise by walking around the vacant mall.) People avoid even making eye contact with others, let alone striking up a conversation. Now we can of course order a lot of the things we got at the mall online, but there is of course no sense of community whatsoever in that. (We've also reached the point where you get scammed so much online that it would be nice to simply hold what you are buying in your hands instead, but that's another essay.)
It also makes me sad because there really isn't a replacement for kids. You have playgrounds I guess, but these really only cater to the youngest kids and not the teenagers who loved malls. (And many playgrounds are too dangerous from crime for them to work well even for young kids.) On the coast I suppose you could go to the beach, but that's not an option for most of the country. Movie theaters tried to play a similar role for a while (especially when they started adding arcade games) but these days they are even more miserable than malls. Is it any surprise that the answer for so many children is to simply stay inside and surf the internet?
Now I recognize that the mall wasn't an inherent part of human society; they diddn't even exist until the latter half of the twentieth century. And they were inevitably going to decline from economic factors. The world is not worse simply because there are no malls. But when malls were around they did appeal to our need for community, our sense of wonder, and our joy at simply being around activity. That has gone, but nothing has really replaced it. We should replace malls with something better, but I definitely would settle for simply having functional malls with people in them again.
August 9, 2022