Two months ago, I took a family vacation to Minnesota & Wisconsin. As we spent most of our time in the Twin Cities area, we devoted half a day to wandering around the Mall of America in Bloomington (in Minnesota, near Minneapolis). It was the first time that I had gone to a shopping mall with my whole immediate family in over 10 years, especially because the main shopping mall that we used to frequent where I grew up closed a few years ago and was already on life support a few years before that.
There are several reasons, beyond mere nostalgia for my childhood or the lightness of mind from being on vacation, that I felt particularly gratified to visit the Mall of America, even though I didn't directly try its novelties like its indoor amusement park and I'm generally not into shopping for its own sake. These reasons are as follows.
- I had noticed over the last few years that indoor shopping malls in the US were following a K-shaped trajectory. Malls serving people with high incomes (including one that I needed to visit a few times near Sacramento to be fitted for a suit for a wedding) were thriving, as they could afford to support more boutique stores & "experiences" to attract visitors, while those serving people with low & middle incomes (including the one that my family & I used to frequent when I was growing up) were struggling & ultimately closing. In recent years, when I happen to have visited indoor shopping malls, I have been sad to see the decline of struggling malls catering to people with low & middle incomes, and I have felt out of place at thriving malls catering to people with high incomes. The Mall of America seemed to be an exception to that, because it had many stores selling goods at price points affordable to people with middle incomes, not just people with high incomes, so I could feel instinctively welcome there, yet it was also thriving.
- Most large indoor shopping malls, including the Mall of America, have been built to hold 4 anchor stores. Many indoor shopping malls have encountered financial troubles when one of the anchor store tenants leaves & isn't replaced, with those troubles compounding when more anchor store tenants leave & aren't replaced. By contrast, the Mall of America only has 2 out of 4 anchor stores occupied, yet the mall as a whole still thrives.
- Perhaps most importantly, unlike most indoor shopping malls that have "pivoted" to either luxury goods or cutting-edge consumer technology to attract visitors, the Mall of America focuses on simpler stores & attractions, like clothing/fashion, books, simple toys & games, and food to attract visitors, making it feel like a relic of the second half of the 20th century, yet it thrives. I was particularly taken to see & enter a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which I hadn't been to in 15 years, so much that I bought a book on a whim, which is notable because I almost never buy anything on a whim (though that book also happened to be on my reading list and will likely become the subject of a future post on this blog). These features make the mall & its merchandise a welcome respite from the pervasion of Internet technology in most people's lives that steal people's data, addict people, make people frustrated & hopeless, and extract people's wealth (through things like surveillance pricing); I didn't feel like I needed to worry about these current-day problems with commerce & the implications for national politics while I was at that mall.
I suspect that these features are made possible by the mall's huge size being a novelty in itself supporting as many visitors as it has, with that novelty further reinforced by explicit novelties like the full-size indoor amusement park, aquarium, and movie theater. I also recognize that indoor shopping malls & national chains gutted small independent businesses in the second half of the 20th century, so although it may technically be true that businesses in indoor shopping malls then represented more freedom for consumers than current businesses, they do not represent a paragon of a kinder capitalism. Even so, visiting the Mall of America made me more confident that current commerce based on stealing people's data, addicting people, making people frustrated & hopeless, and extracting people's wealth to an unconscionable degree is an artifact and hopeful that there is a viable alternative that can return to the fore.
