Dead Malls and the Generational Cycle

[pbrower2a]

(01-02-2017, 11:45 AM)The Wonkette Wrote: This is apropos.  The Washington Post's Sunday issue features a small suburban mall that was my hangout in junior high school because of its proximity; it was the place where you could go to after your FTA or yearbook club meeting after school and get an ice cream.

Quote:Shops like Ties, Shirts and More fill Beltway Plaza Mall, one of the area’s oldest shopping malls. The owner of the shop is Indian. Kiflemarian is Eritrean, and she sells these rainbow-hued dress shirts and broad ties to a largely Latino clientele. She has learned to say a few words in Spanish, mostly greetings and numbers, because neck sizes and prices are important.

At Beltway Plaza, Spanish rings out from every aisle and the food court is populated by not Taco Bells, but various immigrant cuisines.

“It feels to me like back home. It’s the center of social life,” Kiflemarian says.

She laughs. There is one way it is nothing like home: Back in Eritrea, she says, she never imagined that she’d be speaking Spanish one day.

Unlike Tysons Corner or Arundel Mills, Beltway Plaza doesn’t house a Victoria’s Secret, a M.A.C. store or an American Eagle Outfitters. Mostly, Beltway Plaza has found a niche as a large — and faintly 1980s — urban souk, hawking the necessities, and the oddities, of immigrant life.

It can confound the users of Yelp, who bemoan its “shadiness” and who struggle to comprehend just what they’ll buy at Luv’n Time, the lingerie shop, or First Lady, with its Sunday sermon-appropriate power suits and lace hats the size of hubcaps.

“They’re not big merchants; they’re not big corporate entities,” says Jon Enten, a marketing consultant for the mall. “We have everything from African fashion to an As-Seen-on-TV store.”

In a retail landscape that is increasingly bleak, could this be this the future of malls?

Here is the link to the full article.

Washington Post article

Possible response, economic and cultural. There are large non-white, non-Anglo, and non-Christian populations in America, and there is much entrepreneurial talent within them.

Shopping malls are expensive infrastructure, but they also are valuable assets. I can expect them to be put to new purposes from community colleges to jails as well as commerce. If commerce, it will not be to connect free-spending white people to overpriced boutiques.

The days of free-spending with no sensitivity to price is now over for the middle class. Big Business will have to adjust to that. People like me were cautious with spending even when things were sort-of-OK. Even if they have money, people are not filling their dwellings (smaller than they were in the 1960s as the middle class increasingly become renters of tiny apartments) with the schlock that people bought twenty, let alone forty years ago.