On the way back from a trip to a funeral in Dallas, I stopped at an outlet mall because I was getting sleepy and needed to walk around and wake myself up.
When I was in school in Dallas some 15 years ago, this particular mall was a-bustling with activity. Now, not so much. If you think an empty storefront is kind of sad, drop about 60 of them in one spot. Whole sections of the place were vacant, to the degree of just plain eeriness. The fountains were still on and the flags were flapping in the wind, and other than my own footsteps and the mall PA system, that's all I could hear.
A couple of families of geese walked around the sidewalks in front of the stores, undisturbed by shoppers.
A few stores are still open, and some of their displays decorate a few of the empty storefronts. The PA system plays music and in between, it has ad spots for the ones still open. It plays in the food court, which has no restaurants anymore but which stays open because it's also where the restrooms are. A lady was exercising, walking laps around it when I went in, but she had finished by the time I left. A couple of friends said it sounded like a scene from the Will Smith movie I Am Legend, while I thought of the Ray Bradbury short story "There Will Come Soft Rains" from The Martian Chronicles, about an automated house that continued to serve its absent owners after they and everyone else had died in a nuclear war. I wound up buying a pair of cuff links in a Van Heusen store because I needed a new pair and I felt kind of sad for the store, one of maybe a dozen still open.
Hard to figure out what happened, although if I researched it I guess I could learn. You'd think an outlet mall was a fail-proof idea -- things you find at the mall but cheaper. This one used to have a Brooks Brothers store, a deep-discount bookstore, a Levis outlet and a whole lot more that I can't remember.
I guess there are no fail-proof ideas.
2 comments:
I know exactly where you're talking about. It was teetering that direction about 10 years ago, but I haven't been back in almost that long. I had no idea.
When it first opened and for a number of years after, that was where my mom, grandmother, aunts, great-aunts, and cousins would load up and go to spend a day (or day and a half if we threw in a hotel stay) shopping. It was the first place I had a Subway sandwich, Cinnabon, and a soft pretzel. Of course what I remember is the food. And getting in trouble with my cousin when we were 10 for digging change out of the fountains.
It is a fairly common scene. We stopped in an outlet mall in northern Colorado and over half of the buildings were vacant.
Malls aren't doing much better, though. Crossroads is only a few steps away from closing shop.
I wouldn't come close to putting forward the idea that we are LESS materialistic as a culture. I think it has to do more with the desire of a different shopping experience. The mall model is a dying model. Along with any store that doesn't offer an experience.
Except Wal-Mart. It is just a social experiment.
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