Posted on 10/16/2023 6:58:40 PM PDT by DallasBiff
"I should mention that the BIG one that was featured in Wayne’s World shut down a couple of years ago."
I do the same and I like it. I am not spending hours looking for things I will never find because the stores can’t stock everything.
I was a surgical strike shopper anyway. Go in, get what I want and get out.
One of the last times (pre-pandemic) I went to the closest mall, I found that the store I wanted to visit had disappeared. A new “urban clothing” store had appeared where the old one had been, and it was grand opening day. There were giant speakers set up playing “ethnic music” at ear splitting volume. I gave up and went to the food court for lunch. There were a large number of “youths” there raising a ruckus. I got my food and ate quickly, and vacated without spending another penny. These days, I would never go there after dark.
I just googled the name of the mall, and found that last July an “ethnic” tried to abduct a 14 year old girl. Last April, an “ethnic” robbed the Apple store and had to jump off a railing to escape but ended up with multiple broken bones and couldn’t stand up. He had threatened to shoot someone who tried to stop him. Also in April, a guy was arrested for trying to use a hidden camera to record females in a fitting room. There was also an attempted carjacking by “youths” in the parking lot.
Danbury Fair Mall in Connecticut is one the few growing and thriving. Palisades Mall in New Jersey (three levels) is a ghost town.
As a daily walker, I use malls to get my miles in on rainy days. Will be sad to see them go.
The concept is dead - there’s no getting around it. Even when you visit malls that aren’t served by public transportation deep in the suburbs, they’re a shell of what they used to be in the 80s through the early 2000s. Online shopping killed the anchor stores, which was enough to destroy the foot traffic that kept these malls alive.
Why bother wasting your time heading to the malls to see if you could get a shirt or pair of pants when you can order from 1000s of retailers and return it with little hassle if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit?
I miss the specialty stores that smaller malls used to have - trading cards, computers, trains, etc. They’re the losers in this process since they have to spend the equivalent of the rent to market themselves online.
There are feral minority children running around malls, sure. But there are just as many white kids running around in many places (at least in the Northeast), they just tend to keep to themselves. Malls could kill this problem overnight by requiring an adult to accompany minor children. Pyramid Malls in many locations have had this policy for years after a certain time of day (6PM? 7PM?) on the weekends and it makes a difference.
I don’t understand why anyone would drop their kids off at the mall for hours on end, but clearly it’s a “thing”.
I’d love to see these malls redeveloped into something else commercial or light industrial - machine shops, auto repair, something that would hire local people to *do* something with a decent, livable wage. That would require rezoning, which means that the politicians would screw it up... again.
With that being said, there's an upscale outdoor mall that was built a number of years ago just 3 miles east of the old mall.....go figure.
A lot of areas where malls were built in cities have now been swallowed by urban growth. In short, the ‘hood got bigger.
New shopping areas are open air with strip malls and free standing stores around. Mostly the same types of stores as before, just configured differently. Shopping areas around here have grown around big boxes like Costco, Walmart SuperCenters, Meijer’s, etc. Our new Costco has 5! new restaurants that all serve fast food chicken.
have a cover charge weekends/nights- keeps the kids out.
Oldsmobiles
Someone in my city thought it would be a capital idea to open a mall right next to a Black housing project. Well, at least the movie theaters in it flourished...
Where I’m at, the mall and the area around the mall are actually expanding.
Hey, an old Penney’s logo.
No Demonrat Party in Canada. In Ontario, you have three left wing parties to choose from: the Socialist Tories, then you have your Communist Liberal Party under Justine Turd Dough and the ultra-Communist NDP (and a 4th leftist party: the Greenies). Although Little Fidel is trying to get to the left of the NDP to make it full Stalinist, which he’s been quite successful at.
malls make great Amazon distribution centers :)
7 Corners shopping center was an open air strip mall and had Lord and Taylor’s just across the street. Tyson’s Corner was “too far”, and Springfield mall was where we would ride minibikes. (It was a cow pasture.) It was eventually enclosed.
Development prompted the building of Springfield and Tyson’s II then Fair Oaks. I remember when Annandale road heading out to Fairfax was a two-lane, unpaved road.
I live in between both malls you mentioned. Danbury is changing with the times and has many more local retailers (instead of national chains) than they had before the pandemic. They also got Barnes and Noble to move into the Arhaus space - happy to see a bookstore, but its selection is terrible compared to other B&Ns in the region.
The Palisades Mall is in trouble, yes, but some of the problems are organic - they used to draw a fair number of shoppers from Bergen County in NJ, now those folks go to the (even-bigger) American Dream mall next to MetLife Field in East Rutherford. They also took out $418MM mortgage in 2018 right before the American Dream mall opened and only a couple of years before the pandemic - clearly it was based on a repayment schedule that include rising rents and little competition. I read an article earlier this year that they’re trying to re-finance the mortgage. Some days it’s like a ghost town, other days it’s pretty active, especially with the bars and restaurants on the upper level (which I thought was the top of a 4-level mall). I wish them luck and hope they can find a way to survive.
For me, I would go to a mall once in a while to see if I can find a specific item, usually at a specific store. The membership fee for the mall would be so hefty (in order to support the smaller, niche shops) that I wouldn’t pay it - too much money for too little return.
Just my $.02.
I didn’t know I was a surgical strike shopper...lol
Then work on changing laws. Do not pick on people who follow laws. It shows you do not respect law abiding people. Post more messages about 7 million illegals imported by Biden.
Plenty but their roots are mostly from former British colonies. They have adopted some of the dims attitudes of course but its more muted. In some ways I see things getting worse however and the patterns of the American ghetto are being copied somewhat. Hasn’t been the organized or even random shoplifting that is going on in the US but there is crime but not on the level of the US ghetto.
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