The 70s and 80s were my formative years, and that meant frequent visits to the malls around Des Moines. Merle Hay Mall was closest to me, so that was the home mall. Valley West Mall was where all the rich people shopped and I was sure the girls in that mall were better looking as well. Southridge Mall was out of the way for me, but that one had an indoor full-sized merry-go-round and was the first Des Moines location to have a “real” Santa instead of some dude with a fake beard.
Merle Hay has amputated the Sears location and has added a Target as an anchor store. It also plans to be the new home of a local hockey team, building an ice rink. In addition, it houses a movie theater which includes a restaurant and craft beers on tap. The mall has evolved into a community center, filling roles that aren’t traditional for a shopping mall, while still having some spaces for stores to sell their wares. The bays are often empty, and the mall will need to make further adaptations but it seems to be evolving to fit the times.
Valley West Mall is over half empty. I don’t just mean the customers, but the areas for stores to inhabit. An entire wing of the structure is dark now, with a nail salon and the Hallmark store being the lone businesses hanging on down that way. The only anchor stores are JC Penny and the local Vaun Maur, which has already announced their departure for the greener grass farther west. This mall has become the place to go to if you want to shop the “Going Out of Business” sales for good deals that can’t be returned.
Southridge Mall has been long dead. I don’t get out that way often, but I think it’s now a strip mall and (maybe) a movie theater. The local Arena Football team held practices in there for a while. I think the mall has been taken over now by a community college, which is a fantastic idea.
Today, there is one mall that is showing any signs of life in the Des Moines area, maybe two. Those being the newer Jordan Creek Mall and the outlet outdoor mall in nearby Altoona. The outdoor mall has the uniqueness of being outdoors going for it, which I see as more of a deterrent in the winter months, and Jordan Creek has the “cool” factor since it is the newest of the traditional malls. It is mostly filled, though it has taken a few steps backward in the last 15 years.
The mall as a hub of the community is dying. It used to be where I met up with my friends. It used to be where I practiced my pick-up lines on girls. It was where entertainment, food, pretty much anything you could ask for as a teenager was found. And now it isn’t.
Where am I going with this?
The mall was created for a time. A season in the life of our country when the suburbs were growing and the cities were stagnating. That season has passed and the last 20 years have demonstrated this as people have stopped congregating at the malls. Online shopping, big box stores, urban renewal, social media, all have contributed. This is not a big change in society. It is a big change in what society looks like following generational value changes.
And what are these value changes? Are they good or bad changes? And why do you ask me? I’m just a blogger here! I’ll take a crack at it though since it is my blog.
Shopping isn’t seen as a social event to the same extent it once was. It has been replaced by social media. I call that a negative change. Not that consumerism is the hope of society, but just to say that informal social events should be held in venues other than screens.
The American people have made some shifts away from centralized fashion, making the newest trends in the mall less compelling than before. There are still plenty of styles that are universal to the same degree that they have been before. But people do value having an article of clothing or a decoration that is unique. And that means small businesses are benefitting. That’s good. At the same time, WalMart and Target have never been busier, largely because they remained open as the small businesses were crushed in the fascist Covid restrictions. That’s bad.
The sense of community has degraded since the malls were popular. This is a subjective sense that I hold. There used to be a shared experience among the people in central Iowa. We knew that we all had different backgrounds, but there was still a shared commonality that we could fall back on. Multiculturism demanded that we reject commonality, even called it racist, and now there are tribalisms throughout the metro, including certain areas where I’d prefer not to go after dark. That’s despicable.
Again, the withdrawing of malls as a communal hub is not what is important. Withdrawing the communal sensibilities is. Importing people who reject shared values and rewarding large corporations over local businesses is a bad combo, even though a majority of mall stores used to be large corporations. Malls are/were anchored by large corporations, but there were franchises that benefitted local owners, not to mention thousands of employed people.
The powers that be rejected the concepts that made malls possible in the first place. I’m fairly neutral up to a point. What bothers me is the seeming lack of a concept for the next site of interaction. Do they expect people made in the image and likeness of God to accept the metaverse as a long term solution? If so, they seem to be unaware of the response God makes when the nations (the powers that be) plot in vain. Psalm 2 is the reference here.
The concept of a shopping mall will be a thing of the past before long. That’s fine. Really. The owners of these huge buildings will figure out what to do to continue on or to sell and cut their losses. Yong people will adapt and come up with ways to gather together. It may begin online, but the craving for human interaction will take it offline eventually.
I’m not a sociologist, in case anyone was wondering. I did take a semester of sociology in community college in the early 90s though, in case that gives me any standing here. I find the closing of the age to be fascinating, and much like Lord of the Rings, the next age hasn’t fully been decided. The suburbs keep expanding and are becoming the new cities. The old cities claim to be reinvigorated, though this is caused by a pricing bubble that will eventually burst. Too many inexperienced college graduates making more money than they imagined live in these cities, but that is a story for another day. The small towns and countryside are becoming the trendy places to relocate once you have a family, just not a remote home that is too far from those attractive cities.
You know, the ones that you look longingly back on as you turn into salt.
