Twenty-five years ago this August, the Mall of America, America’s largest shopping mall, opened its many, many doors for business. The Minnesota mall is currently wrapping up a year of celebration at the dizzyingly vast temple to consumerism, but it’s a celebration that comes, ironically, as America’s malls are dying. But not the Mall of America, according to an analyis in The Guardian Sunday. Once the epicenter of American retail, malls are in crisis. Pictures of dead malls, their hollow shells left like abandoned sets, are rapidly replacing pictures of decaying Detroit as the go-to image for dystopia USA. It has been three years since a major new shopping mall opened in the U.S., leading even some mall operators to speculate that the last one has already been built. Of the roughly 1,200 spread across the nation, less than half are expected to be in operation five years from now. As usual, the internet gets the blame. The shift to online shopping has taken its toll on traditional mall anchors, such as Macy’s, JC Penney and Sears. But there are other issues. America has too much retail space and too many crappy malls. The Mall of America is different and its survival points to what has gone wrong in retailing and where it is heading. It’s a shift that will have profound consequences. On a recent visit, the Mall of America hummed with visitors. Its owners, the Triple Five Group, manage several mega-malls and their staff “programme” its spaces with fanatical attention to detail.
