We all know why malls are dying in America; Amazon has changed the way we shop, out of brick-and-mortar stores and firmly glued to our couches—thumbing through product reviews while day-old DoorDash delivery boxes collect flies on a nearby coffee table. Our new way of shopping is obviously more convenient. If it weren’t, then malls wouldn’t be on the chopping block. But with this change, some believe we’ve lost something.
A recent NYT article profiled Facebook groups and subreddits where people wax nostalgic about the heyday of American shopping malls in the ’80s and ’90s. For many of them, malls weren’t just malls—they were a “part of the community.”
“You could trick-or-treat at the mall, from store to store. There would be fashion shows to showcase new seasonal collections. It was fairly safe for groups of kids to gather there, and there was more genuine excitement about seeing what stores had to offer.”
I don’t mean to deny these experiences as meaningful for the people who had them. It’s just that I remember malls a lot differently…
There were only so many times we could go into the Sharper Image to see what new gizmos they had; the merchandise didn’t change over as often as we went to the mall. And sometimes, we didn’t want to see what the stores had to offer—we just wanted a place to hang out. But as teenagers, we were the primary threat to law and order in my suburban Chicago community; when too many of us congregated together in the food court, we were promptly shoed away by security guards.
There wasn’t really a socially acceptable place for us to go. So what did we do? We went underground—literally—into our parents’ basements, where many of them also happened to store their liquor.
No matter how you remember malls, the rise of e-commerce certainly hasn’t nudged things in the right direction. There’s no longer even a pretense for teenagers—or any of us—to leave our homes. And that carries with it a social cost.
“You’re not interacting with the guy at the corner store anymore or the checkout person at the grocery store. On some level, that’s attractive to people but, at the same time, you’re sort of missing these small social interactions in terms of community when you’re holed up waiting for Amazon packages to arrive.”
My question is: what does it say about us that we couldn’t think of a better reason to socialize than to go shopping?
I know this phrasing risks overstating the problem. Americans do find plenty of other reasons to socialize (touch football, church groups, community theatre, and many others). But to the extent that mall nostalgia captures a lost sense of community, it speaks to a real problem of unmet social need in the population. What the decoupling of community and commerce has taught us is that consumerism didn’t capture all the values we care about. When we vested our desire for community in market forces, we didn’t realize that what the market gives, it can also take away.
If we really care about fostering community, then we have to put in the effort to make it happen. We must create the space for it—both physically and in terms of our time. It must be the destination, not just a pit stop between many others in our busy lives.
And we must be wary of cheap substitutes. In the same way Amazon caters to our laziness as consumers, Facebook and Instagram cater to our laziness as socializers. They can be used as effective organizing tools, but in a world where our phones are turning into our teddy bears, it can often feel more comfortable to tend to the representations of our social lives rather than the real thing.
Building real human connection remains hard and messy work. It cannot be short-changed. It cannot be productivity-hacked. It’s something that’s best done the old-fashioned way: face-to-face.
Published on September 12, 2019