• expr@programming.dev
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    2 days ago

    This is pretty much what my local mall looks like right now. The whole “all the malls died out” thing is mostly a myth, in my experience. Every time I go it’s absolutely full of people.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      15 hours ago

      The difference is that cities used to have numerous malls dotting the suburbs. Now they might have one or two, usually in the rich part of town, filled with fancy stores.

      The local mall, with a couple of anchor department stores, a bunch of casual clothing stores, a bookstore, a record store, a movie theater and a food court, have been replaced by sprawling shopping centers with no sense of community.

      • expr@programming.dev
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        10 hours ago

        I can only speak to Nebraska, but the malls here have all of those things except for record stores (for obvious reasons), and the number of malls has not changed in decades. They’re all in various central locations of Lincoln and Omaha and are very much community spaces. Tons of families come to let their kids play in the play spaces (especially lower-income families), teenagers hang out at the mall with their friends, and so on.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
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      21 hours ago

      I moved from a more populated area to one that is…not. I had a thriving mall, current city’s mall is almost abandoned.

    • BurningRiver@beehaw.org
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      2 days ago

      My local mall got leveled and replaced with a giant Amazon distribution center. So now we have two anecdotal stories about malls.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        15 hours ago

        The mall I grew up with was the biggest mall in the city, but it closed 30 years ago. After it was closed for more than a decade, someone broke in and shot an Indy/ guerilla zombie movie.

      • expr@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        I qualified my statement, so not sure what you were hoping to achieve with your comment.

        Also, that can happen for any number of reasons that are entirely unrelated to whether or not malls are dead. Like, for example, Amazon offering an obscene amount of money to the owner of the mall to buy it out for the real estate.

    • Etterra@discuss.online
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      2 days ago

      Some malls died out, but the really big ones that are placed somewhere smart are still plenty busy. The death of the big department stores is what did a lot of the damage.

      • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, the malls at big walkable transit hubs are doing fine, here. It’s the ones with hectares of parking lot that seem to close, here. But I do not have data to back that up.

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Same. All of my local malls were packed during the holidays. Malls never died off; the only ones that shut down were the old and outdated ones that never renovated, and thus failed to attract businesses that customers actually want to shop at. The malls that kept up with the times are still thriving.