Closest mall to where I live -- and it seems to be dying.
Poor location (too close to a giant mall in the Kalamazoo area, and no close-by captive markets) and the bad luck to have a Macy's that called it quits before JC Penney and Sears stores shuttered... not a bad-looking mall. It is easy to get to from Interstate 94 (one of the busiest non-metropolitan freeways in America, and I am surprised that the freeway is still only four lanes even if it was built about sixty years ago and is fully inadequate for the traffic that it now has)... but much other retail is close by that isn't in this mall (Target, Best Buy, Kohl's) which often ends up in a mall but didn't in Battle Creek while Sears, Macy's, and JS Penney were still there. Target, Best Buy, and Kohl's are in a mall about forty miles away in Jackson, Michigan, which is even more of a dump than Battle Creek. (Jackson has a big men's prison, and the wives of convicts staying there have often moved there. The mall in Battle Creek has a Barnes and Noble; Jackson has nothing of the sort. Criminals as a rule didn't go to prison for 'excessive reading', and if they got wives, they did not select them for intellectual interests. It's fairly easy to get good cheap help in Jackson, but try finding a bookstore there. The mall in Jackson seems to be doing OK even if it had a Toys 'R' Us that, as elsewhere, went belly-up.
Poor location (too close to a giant mall in the Kalamazoo area, and no close-by captive markets) and the bad luck to have a Macy's that called it quits before JC Penney and Sears stores shuttered... not a bad-looking mall. It is easy to get to from Interstate 94 (one of the busiest non-metropolitan freeways in America, and I am surprised that the freeway is still only four lanes even if it was built about sixty years ago and is fully inadequate for the traffic that it now has)... but much other retail is close by that isn't in this mall (Target, Best Buy, Kohl's) which often ends up in a mall but didn't in Battle Creek while Sears, Macy's, and JS Penney were still there. Target, Best Buy, and Kohl's are in a mall about forty miles away in Jackson, Michigan, which is even more of a dump than Battle Creek. (Jackson has a big men's prison, and the wives of convicts staying there have often moved there. The mall in Battle Creek has a Barnes and Noble; Jackson has nothing of the sort. Criminals as a rule didn't go to prison for 'excessive reading', and if they got wives, they did not select them for intellectual interests. It's fairly easy to get good cheap help in Jackson, but try finding a bookstore there. The mall in Jackson seems to be doing OK even if it had a Toys 'R' Us that, as elsewhere, went belly-up.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.