Posted on 04/28/2017 6:15:53 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Back to the Crabtree Mall. It was the best thing going back in the early 1980s. The main anchors were Ann & Hope, Lechmere and Zayre's with a nice food court that included the ubiquitous Orange Julius, Mrs Field's cookies, Auntie Jenn's Pretzels and some Chinese fast food joint in which you could get a heaping plate of rice and meat with Chinese women standing outside of it offering free samples of stuff on toothpicks. What was not to like?
Another anchor was Sears & Roebuck which was quite the store and they had dungarees, lawn mowers, washing machines and a huge section full of Craftsman tools as well as a huge furniture area and a bunch of TVs all tuned to the same station with some of them showing the picture constantly scrolling and in need of a v-hold adjustment. Remember the knob in the back of the TV in which you had to turn to keep the picture from scrolling? The Sears was so huge that they had escalators going to three levels.
The exterior corridor of the mall housed Pier 1 Imports, La-z-boy, Service Merchandise, Waldenbooks, Tape World, Brookstones, Pizza Hut, Ace Hardware, Jewelry store, Hickory Farms, Denny's, a video game arcade, Hallmark Cards, Spencer's Gifts, some candle store, CVS, Radio Shack, a multi-plex cinema showing movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and a bowling alley for bowling.
In the 80’s you could buy a handgun in the sporting goods store.
Micronesia Mall here is still worth visiting. There is fun Rube Goldberg Machine that little kids will spend hours watching as well as a nice food court.
But Guam is weird place because it cost so much to ship thing to here people still go to the mall to shop
Did they have Dippin’ Dots? (The ice cream of the future.)
There's always '80s movies. I caught part of "Weird Science" the other day with a very young Robert Downey, Jr and some other guy going through a mall. It was awesome.
I looked up on Google streetview and saw that the one featured in “Back to the Future” is still around, minus the JC Penney, of course.
Oahu is about the only place that still has a vibrant mall I have visited in decades.
I was visiting family in Fresno last summer and for the heck of it stopped at a mall there. My God. It looked like I landed in Kinshasa.
Got me.
I moved to my current state 8 years ago. Closest mall is 20 miles away. I think I’ve been there twice, never to “go shopping” but to get and go.
:-|
“The last time I was in a mall was about 5 years ago to get some help with my (then new) Samsung cell phone. It had been at least 20 years since I had been to a mall.”
Decades ago I worked at a department store in a large mall. I spent many hours there and it had just about everything you could want - including a movie theater. For years afterward I shopped at mall here or there, but in the last 20 years I have barely been to a mall. They rarely have what I’m looking for. Many cities have seen once popular malls shut down because of violent “teens”.
“It felt sort of surrealistic - kind of like the movies where people at the Coney Island amusement park when it’s closed.”
Recently I needed to kill time while waiting for an appointment. I decided to pop into a mall I had never visited. It was very nice, but completely empty. I was shocked. I’m sure it’s busier on weekends, but business must be suffering.
I have fond memories of a few malls from the 1980s when I was a kid. My parents used to take me at a young age and as I got older we did the “meet up here at X o’clock” thing. I learned some life lessons about shopping, money, society and the rest. Some of my favorites were Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, any comic book store, Kay-Bee Toys and the music stores. I remember buying 45 rpm singles until the tide turned to cassettes.
Plus at Christmas time it had a magical feel, when the big name department stores would decorate to the nines and the malls would do their bit in the center areas.
I think I was in a mall maybe five or six years ago because of poor planning on my part at Christmas. It was my first visit to a mall in years and it was a miserable experience because very little of the above remained.
The fact is I don’t buy that much anymore, Amazon and other online stores are often superior in price and convenience for much of what I do need, and society has coarsened and devolved. That’s why malls are now a fondly remembered “thing of the past” for me.
Correct. Salem Mall in N Dayton closed because of too much theft. When bus routes were put in to Dayton mall, it started to die.
The mall nearest me still seems to be holding up pretty well. It has a couple of design features that, I think, discourages the ferals and other crowd problems. There are no theaters and there is no food court. All food outlets are dispersed throughout the mall and they all have their own seating areas.
Schaumburg???
Hey, that’s my neck of the woods.
80’s and 90’s I was always at Woodfield.
Now, once or twice a year...maybe.
Across the road is Streets Of Woodfield.
An outdoor mall, that has the feel of being in an upscale neighborhood.
In the summer it’s hoping and has a pretty good vibe.
Your mentioning of Oahu made me think of back in March 1985, me and my family were on our way back home from a two and a half year stint overseas in New Zealand and Australia and we spent a few days in Hawaii (on the big island).
In any event, we stopped in at the mall in Kailua-Kona and it had some major grocery store chain (I can not recall the name, might have been a Safeway) and a JC Penney plus a bevy of other stores. Boy, did I ever feel good to visit that bit of Americana that afternoon after being away from it for so long, lol.
Is Cool Springs Galleria still nice?
“Service Merchandise”
Now there’s a blast from the past.
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