January 6, 2026 • 33 mins
While no one is going to malls (or so it seems), everyone seems to be talking about them: the CDC is writing up reports on mall walkers, people are growing beards to get into the mall Santa game, and writers are waxing nostalgic about them. But what exactly were malls intended to be? Why did the inventor of the mall try to distance himself from his greatest invention? And why are there never any escalators in the middle of them? Will and Mango dig in.
This episode originally aired on May 28, 2019.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what, Mango? What's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Will?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All right?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I know you love shopping malls, so I'm sure you've
noticed these people, but you know the people who like
to exercise by walking back and forth through the mall.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Sure, mallwalkers. It's like half the country's.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Grandparents at least, and as you mentioned, it's especially popular
with senior citizens. But they're actually not the only ones
doing this. There was this twenty fifteen report from the
CDC that shows that shopping malls are now the second
most popular place to go for a walk, just behind neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
How weird is this?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on mallwalking?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Well, this isn't a small report either. It's actually fifty
six pages long and I'm reading every word of it
is just riveting. But to be fair, taking walks is
a way to prevent certain diseases, and the CDC is
actually the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And I
bet you forgot that silent p at the end of
the CDC. There's one funny thing that I learned. It
(01:06):
actually turns out that most mallwalkers don't actually shop at
the mall. At most they might buy a coffee at
the food court or something like that. But according to
the CDC report, they really just want the camaraderie, you know,
to spend some time strolling and socializing.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And that actually puts.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Mallwalkers right in line with the original idea for shopping malls.
So the architect who designed the first mall in America's
name is Victor Gruen. He actually envisioned the mall as
a place to quote find opportunities for social life and
recreation and a protected pedestrian environment.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Ah, that's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything,
mallwalkers are really the only ones doing malls right.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but
definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind
for shopping malls than what they would ultimately become. But
what exactly did he envision, why didn't it work out?
And most importantly, is there still a chance that his
high hopes for shopping malls could still be fulfilled? Those
are just a few of the questions we'll try to
(02:06):
answer today. So let's dive in Hey their podcast listeners,
(02:30):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer
And on the other side of that soundproof glass, just
tucking into a feast of food court stables. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm
a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I know, Missus Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon,
a pretzel from Auntie Ann's, and a huge orange Julius
to wash it all down. Man, it's like a good
trip to the mall in food form. But from what
it sounds like, that wasn't exactly Victor grusion of them all.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
But to understand what his vision did entail, we should
first talk about who Grewen was and where he came from.
So he was born in nineteen oh three in Vienna, Austria.
He grew up in a middle class Jewish family, fell
in love with the city's thriving art scene, and this
was at a pretty young age. So in the nineteen
twenties he spent many of his evenings performing satirical theater
(03:23):
at various cafes, and then during the day he studied architecture.
And this was at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,
so it was actually the same school that had rejected
Adolf Hitler just a few years earlier. Just a little
fun factor thrilling.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I feel like too good for Hitler should be on
all their t shirts.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Well.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't the only point of overlap
between Victor Grewen's life and Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi
Germany annexed Austria back in nineteen thirty eight, Grewin knew
it was time to leave his country behind, and weirdly,
he left the same week as Sigmund Freud. I keep
throwing in these little side facts about.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
All these people I like him.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Well, leaving was easier said than done, so grew And
turned to one of his theater buddies for help with
the escape.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And it's actually kind of remarkable.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
His friend, dressed up as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Gruen
and his wife to the airport and then made sure
they were allowed to board a plane to Zurich. So
from there the couple made their way to England, where
they found passage on this ocean liner and traveled over
to New York City. So Grewin later looked back on
this journey and he said that he had arrived quote
(04:29):
with an architect's degree, eight dollars and no English.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Pretty tough.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story. So how do
you make it work?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Well?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
He once again turned to the art scene. He joins
up with some other German immigrants and together they form
what they called the Refugee Artists Group, where Grewin did
set design. So the group caught the attention of some
big names in the music business. This included Al Jolson
Irving Berlin, and they ended up helping them with their
songs and all of that help actually paid off. So
(04:58):
the next summer the group was a to stage an
original Broadway show and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight,
which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving
with eight dollars and how much longer later the guy's
putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks.
It's not bad, you know. So things were going well
for Grewin, but his architecture career had you know, suffered
(05:19):
since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown, Grewen
bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna, was
this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to open
this leather goods store on Fifth Avenue, and he asked
grew In to help him design it, and so grew
In agreed, and what he ultimately came up with with
something of a game changer for American store design. So,
(05:43):
rather than build the entrance flush, you know, with the
street like all the other shops in the area, Grewen
actually made this recess like arcade style entryway with the
tall glass cases on either side to sort of draw
in the customers. So once they came inside, these guests
were just dazzled by these faux marble floors, a green
(06:03):
glass ceiling, a slew of bright spotlights that sort of
reflected these display cases, and you know, the result was
a store that felt decidedly modern and unlike anything else
on Fifth Avenue or really American retail in general. So
it's kind of hard to imagine now, but customers and
critics ate up this new design, and as a result
(06:25):
of this, Gruin was swamped with job offers. I mean
he was going to these upscale design stores all around
the city and beyond getting these offers.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So obviously designing these high end boutiques and then going
to big, boxy shopping malls seems like quite a leap,
and not exactly an upward one.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Maybe so, But keep in mind that grew And was
commissioned to design the country's first indoor shopping mall in
nineteen fifty two and it opened in nineteen fifty six.
So prior to that, malls as we know them really
didn't exist, so there wasn't any stigma that we might
associate with them today.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing
came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like
in America pre mall?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Well, it was, you know, mainly mail order catalogs and
department stores for the most part. Outdoor shopping centers started
to catch on in the nineteen twenties, but they were
basically just strip malls as we think of them now,
like a bunch of different stores stuck together and just
happened to share a parking lot. So Grewin's big idea
was to put all of these stores and walkways under
(07:27):
one roof, and then you'd have the addition of central
air and heating to make this complex sustainable year round.
And that last part was especially important given the location
of Gruin's first mall. This was the Southdale Shopping Center
and Edina, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Where the winters are obviously frigid.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Exactly, I don't think people would want to be walking
around in those parking lots in the cold of winter,
and so the project grew and signed on for was
meant to address the residents demand for a temperate place
to be able to shop, and one where they wouldn't
have to brave the cold if they wanted to visit
a different store after they'd gone to the first one.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what about
this bigger idea he had of them all being kind
of the social hub.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Well, a lot of that was just in how he
arranged the interior. So, just as an example, most shopping
centers of the era were on a single level. So
you know, you think about the number of stores in Southdale,
it was actually meant to house seventy two stores, plus
these two big anchored apartment stores so making your way
from one end to the other would have felt, you know,
(08:32):
like forever just to get there. So instead Grewin opted
for this two story design. They were linked by escalators,
of course, and now we're all envisioning, you know, kind
of the modern shopping center. So not only did this
breakup that monotony and make for a much easier trip
back to the car, but it also ensured that people
would circulate better, have more opportunities to socialize. But probably
(08:55):
the most prominent example of his people first design is
what he put.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
In the middle of it.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
It was kind of an indoor garden court, I guess
they called it, complete with a skylight, a goldfish pond,
towering live trees, balconies, hanging plants, like all of this
other stuff, including a bustling cafe. There was even a
twenty one foot tall cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds.
And so it was basically Gruin's ode to the European
(09:23):
piazzas that he had grown up with in Vienna, and
he wanted to bring some of that old world European
charm to the American shopping scene, which he kind of
saw is characterized by urban sprawl. And Tacki design. So
you fast forward a few years later, we're in nineteen
sixty at this point, and Gruen wrote a book in
which he outlined his hope and belief that the malls
(09:44):
could really be more like a town square and Greek
Agoras of the past, which.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Is not exactly what we think of malls today.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, definitely not so. When Southdale opened in October of
nineteen fifty six, it was met with this glowing praise
from shoppers as well as jerm from every publication from
Newsweek to the New York Times to Women's Wear Daily.
In fact, my favorite review though, comes from Time, which
harolded Gruin's mall as quote the pleasure dome with parking.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
You know, ally, it's just it's such a great quote.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
But with all that said, there was at least one
person who absolutely detested the Southdale Shopping Mall, and that
was none other than the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. So,
a month after the mall opened, and you know, it
had gotten all this national press, right made the pilgrimage
to Minnesota to see it for himself and he was
(10:38):
not impressed at all. So after his visit, Right penned
this scathing article for the Star Tribune, writing quote, what
is this a railroad station or a bus station? You've
got a garden court that has all the evils of
the village street and none of its charm.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I love that. The way he really criticized it was
by calling it a railroad station.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
He really really burned with that.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So I'm guessing even in the minorities, since you know,
every mall seems to have cred most of his design
from Gruin's, I mean, somebody must have liked these, right,
Oh absolutely.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I mean the design was such a success that it
became really the de facto blueprint for indoor malls throughout
the rest of the twentieth century. And Gruin embraced all
the love at first, and for about a decade after
the Southdale Mall opened, he gave speeches, he wrote books
about his creation, and really kind of pondered what he
hoped it would do for American society. But sadly though,
(11:33):
Gruin's view of his work soured in the nineteen sixties
and in the seventies as more malls began to dominate
the landscape.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I mean they popped up.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Everywhere, and worst of all these copycat malls were built
with tweaked designs aimed at maximizing profit rather than, you know,
more fostering that sense of community. So he even started
to see malls that he designed himself in a new light.
So when he visited some later in life, he wrote
of the quote severe emotion shock he'd experience, and the
(12:02):
ugliness and discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that
sprang up around these. So it definitely changed the way
he thought about them, and it was a bit disillusioned,
and he decided to move home to Vienna. But when
he got there, he was actually heartbroken to discover that
the new shopping mall had been built just south of
the old Vienna and that it was driving independent shops
(12:24):
out of business. And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in
a piece for The New Yorker, quote Victor Gruin invented
the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna.
He ended up making Vienna more like America.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Oh that's awful, But you know, I'm a little confused.
It sounds like Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots.
So were those something that was added later and not
a part of his original design.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Oh yeah, that's actually pretty right.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean, Gruen's mall designs included a much more modest
parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we
were used to associating with malls today. And in fact,
when Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed
it in the center of this four hundred and sixty
three acre plot, and to fill all that surrounding space,
he drew up designs for apartment buildings and schools and
(13:10):
a park and actually even a man made lake. But
unfortunately none of that ever came to pass, and instead
the space was used to make this massive parking lot.
And of course future malls followed suit, and very few
of them ever adapted Gruin's multi use approach to these developments.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
That is a shame.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
The whole story kind of reminds me of what happened
with the inventor of the TV file of Farnsworth. You know,
he was another guy who saw his invention grow up
in a way he wasn't expecting and grew to kind
of hate it over time.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, it is weird.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
To kind of resent the thing. That's held up as
the biggest achievement of your life. Right for both these Yeah, and.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
In Gruen's case, he actually took his distaste even further
than Farnsworth by completely disowning his creation. So two years
before his death, which was in nineteen eighty, Grewin gave
a speech in London and he washed his hands of
malls entirely. Here's what he told the crowd. I'm often
called the father of the shopping mall. I would like
to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all.
(14:10):
I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They
destroyed our city.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Okay, well, and now that we've unspooled the long and
sad history behind the birth of shopping malls, what do
you say we step inside of one and take a
closer look at some of the behind the scenes tricks
that developers use to keep the customer shopping.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Sounds good, but before we get to that, let's take
a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and
we're talking about all the sort of devious design tricks
(14:48):
that shopping malls use to empty our wallets. But to
be clear, none of the stuff we're about to talk
about came from Victor Gruin. As you can probably guess
by now, he was fundamentally opposed to any design aimed
at manipulating customers into spending more money. I think he
would have felt like he was betraying that sense of
community that he was hoping to instill in these malls.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, but there's another dark layer to the story because
despite his principal approach to design, Gruon still wound up
having a shady mall tactic named after him. So you
know how sometimes you get disoriented in a mall or
a big store, like you're just walking through this giant
maze and you kind of lose track of where you
are in the building or how long you've been there.
That's known as Gruin transfer, and Gruon would have hated
(15:33):
the name, but the effect is a real thing, and
stores actually put a lot of effort and thought into
how to best trigger this reaction in their customers. So
Victor Gruen might have wanted malls that were easy to navigate,
but future designers learned that confused shoppers actually spend more money,
and that's why so many malls have these maze like
layouts with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around,
(15:54):
other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part
to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can
think about things like musac that's relaxing and played through
the pipe speakers, or eye catching entrance displays. And the
more time you spend in this mall days, the more
likely you are to make impulse buys. Right, Like, an
article on New Scientists describes it as being quote confused
(16:17):
into a state of unplanned consumption.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
I call this the Ikea effect, I think, and all
this makes sense. I get why they called it after Gruin,
but you know, because he helped build these malls, but
actually helped me out with that last part, the word transfer.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, so what's actually being transferred is the desire to
have a specific item. So you go to the mall
to buy a sweater, and it's only a sweater that
you're looking for, But if the designers play their cards right,
you'll be so dazzled by the time you get to
the store that your desire for a sweater will already
have been transferred to a bunch of different items that
you never planned on buying.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh okay, that makes sense, But I mean, I'm still curious.
If Gruin didn't come up with the different sales tricks
that we find in malls now, then who is responsible
for that? Like it was just mall architects who followed
him or what I mean.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
That's where some of the ideas came from and new
methods were added over the years. Certainly, but a lot
of the common features in malls actually originated with one
of Gruen's contemporaries, this fellow storefront designer. His name was A.
Alfred Tobman, and he goes on to be a huge
mall mogul. In the late nineteen fifties, Todman followed Gruen's
lead by building his own indoor shopping mall in California,
(17:25):
and over the next fifty years or so, he just
kept on building. So he actually passes away in twenty
fifteen at the age of ninety one, but his company
is still going strong, with twenty four malls spread across
eleven different states plus Puerto Rico's, South Korea and China,
and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by
Tobman over the years.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
All right, son, can you give me some examples of
what these designs are.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, I mean this is going to sound a little hyperbolic,
which I guess it kind of is. But a lot
of Todman's innovations were sort of like perversions of what
Gruon had designed. So, you know, we talked about grew
and wanting this two level mall. It was so that
people could circulate easier and bump into more people. But
Topman kind of took that trick and moved the escalators
(18:10):
to the ends of the buildings, so you wouldn't meet
up in the center, but rather you'd have to make
the full loop around the mall and buy more as
a result. Got it, and Tobman's malls also applied the
circulation theory to the exteriors. He was actually the first
to put a circular road around the mall and add
a bunch of extra entrances so that shoppers could easily
get to any part of the building.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
That's interesting, And that bit about the moving of the escalators,
I mean, it's such a good example of how a
simple tweak can change the focus from you know, customer
comfort to something that really more benefits the sellers. And
I'm curious, did you find any other cases like that.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So another good example is what Tobman did with the lighting.
So he kept all the skylights from Gruin's design, but
he made them recessed so the sunlight would never directly
affect the storefronts. And he also added these tiny lights
around the skylights so that when the sun started to
go down, customers wouldn't take the shift in lighting as
this queue that it was time to leave. And speaking
(19:05):
of visibility, Tomman insisted on using transparent handrails in his
mall so that you could always see the stores around you,
regardless of what level you were at. I mean, apparently
it was he was trying to battle something called threshold resistance,
which I guess refers to both the physical and psychological
barriers that might prevent a customer from entering a store.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Like they could block your view and keep you from
seeing a store on the upper level that you might
otherwise go inside.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I guess, yeah, that's part of it.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about
Muzac earlier, and I have to mention this weird fact
I came across this week. So, according to a twenty
eleven report from Stanford, all the malls in America put
together consume more than a gig awot of electricity every
month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed
to make you shop more. And when you do the
(19:51):
math on this, that energy usage comes out to three
thousand metric tons of CO two added to the atmosphere
each year just from this store music.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, I mean, I guess not only as an annoying
and manipulative it's also contributing to climate change.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
To be fair, human society emits around thirty giga tons
of greenhouse gases per year, so it's not like three
thousand tons from the mall is doing that much damage.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
But I just thought that that was interesting.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
And yeah, of course, once you factor in all the
energy that malls used to heat, cool, and light these
massive interiors around the clock, their contribution actually starts to
look a bit more significant when you put it in,
you know, as a whole.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I guess, yeah, I'm sure. Actually, Gabe was telling me
about this one mall he visited in Kentucky where there
were only like two or three actual stores in the
entire complex still open, like every other one had been shuttered.
But the a seed, the lights, the escalators, the music,
you know, all of that was still going on throughout
the building. And that's actually not a one off thing.
There are hundreds of malls like that across the country.
(20:53):
I feel like you see them on YouTube a lot,
like Urban Explorers will we'll go and take videos of them.
But a lot of these dead malls, as they're call
are actually just limping along kind of on life support,
like the one he saw in Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Yeah, I feel like we should probably talk a little
bit about why that is in the state of malls
you know today, But let's take one more quick break
and then we'll get back to that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, So it's been
sixty three years since the country got its first indoor
shopping mall, and during that time, as many as fifteen
hundred more malls have been built in the US, sometimes
growing at more than twice the rate of the population.
And you can tell by those numbers that America's malls
have actually had a great run. But I want to ask,
how are they holding up in the digital age? Like,
(21:47):
do the next sixty years look as promising.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
As the first? Oh? Not even close.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
I mean it's not fall Yeah, I was going to say,
thanks for that tough question. I mean, those fifteen hundred
malls you mentioned, we're now down to about eleven hundred.
And you know, if you ask a lot of analysts,
they project that hundreds more will close over the next
decade alone.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So what do you think is behind that decline? Is
it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping or what?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Is it? All?
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Right?
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Well, maybe cover your ears, because predictable or not, the
rise of online shopping has definitely done some serious damage
to the mall industry. And that said, the demise of
brick and mortar retail has been greatly exaggerated though, because
according to the Atlantic, it's actually growing at a rate
of three percent per year. Even e commerce space companies
like Amazon and Apple, they've doubled down on the physical
(22:37):
retail game, which is something they definitely wouldn't be doing
if brick and mortar retail was truly on its way out.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So why are malls closing then? Why is it so desperate?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Well, to put it simply, our country devotes way way
too much space to retail stores. So forty eight square
feet per person, to be exact, that is twice as
much retail space per capita than any other country in
the world, and a lot more than that in some cases,
four times more than Japan and France, six times more
than England, nine times more than Italy, eleven times more
(23:09):
than Germany. I'm just going to keep going. I've got
fifty seven more of these. But a retail analyst told
CNBC that America is quote the most overstored place in
the world, and when you look at the numbers, it's
hard to disagree with us.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So obviously this isn't a new development. We've been hearing
about urban sprawl for years now, and it was a
big part of why Gruin turned his back on malls
entirely in the seventies. So why is the rug being
pulled out now? Like, did it just take a while
for the effects of all that retail expansion to manifest?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah, I mean again, their arrival of online shopping was
kind of the tipping point in all of this, and
being able to shop at home really shined a spotlight
on just how out of control retail construction had grown.
So suddenly you had all these empty stores, malls without customers.
So we may have just started seeing the effects recently,
but the so called retail upoclypse has actually been a
(24:01):
long time coming. I mean, the big question now is
what to do with all the unneeded malls that we
already have, And in most case, tearing down a failed
mall is considered too expensive to be a real option.
But leaving them there to just decay, like that's not
an appealing strategy.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Either, Right, Well, it's not like all the remaining malls
are going to close. From what I read this week,
the three hundred or so of the top earning malls
like they're going to be fine in the long term.
And those are the fanciest, top tier malls that sit
in wealthy areas and still bring in a lot of money.
But the other eight hundred or so lower tier malls,
you know, you might have to get creative with, like
if they want to avoid being those sort of YouTube
(24:38):
spectacles that we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, and you know, from what I've seen, that's exactly
what a lot of them are doing. Some of them
are just being straight up repurposed, either as apartment complexes, churches,
or schools. I even read about one old mall that's
been transformed into this enormous indoor paint ball park.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Which actually kind of sounds kind of amazing.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, but plenty of other malls are being inverted into
what are called lifestyle centers, So that's kind of a
more hip or more upscale take on a mall, with
specialty stores like Creighton Barrel or Pottery Barn in place
of the more traditional department store anchors like a Seer's
or a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment
options than regular malls do, so in addition to stores
(25:20):
and restaurants, you might find live music venues, a bowling alley,
and art galleries, sometimes a built in movie theater. And
a lot of these lifestyle centers are open air too,
with like these facades that make stores look like row houses,
so you get some of that main street feel to them.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah. I mean, I've been to a few of those before.
There was one being built in Durham years ago, and
I remember thinking, like, you don't have to build a
mall that looks like an old tobacco warehouse when you've
got these old tobacco warehouses.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Just around the corner. But exactly what I do like.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
About this manufacturer of downtown field is that it's kind
of a throwback to what Victor Gruin wanted for malls
in the fifties, Like he wanted to bring a touch
of culture and character to the suburbs by just giving
people a nice place to gather and socialize and of
course shop as well.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
I think that's right, And actually in the book I
quoted earlier, grew and wrote that quote. By affording opportunities
for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment,
by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill
an existing void. That's while the classed uplook of a
lifestyle center might seem like the first time malls have
(26:27):
come close to delivering on that promise, I'd actually argue
that even the crasses most commercial malls still did manage
to fill an important void for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
So what do you mean by that, Well, think back to.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
When malls were at their peak in the nineteen eighties
and even the early nineties. So back then there was
really some social benefit to going to the mall. When
you think about rural and suburban areas, there just weren't
enough people to have the kind of daily interactions that
you know, so commonplace in cities. So in that sense,
malls were a way to get people into close for
(27:00):
proximity to one another really more prompted this meaningful chance
encounters for people who might not have met otherwise. And
you know, aside from accessibility to humans, there's also accessibility
to products that malls provided. If you think back in
the dark days before the internet, just so scared even
think about, you know, someone in a place like Minnesota,
(27:20):
they would have very limited selection of clothing and books
and music to choose from, and any kind of international
products would have been next to impossible. But with these
malls coming along, you know, suddenly products from all over
the country and all over the world really were available
under one gigantic roof.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Which is a good point. And speaking of mall and
nostalgia and how different it is from a world where
we're getting marketed to from our phones and our computers
and just NonStop. I have a quote here that I
wanted to share from an author named Ian Bogost, and
he wrote a great article for the Atlantic that kind
of served as an elegy for shopping mall culture, and
this is what he writes, quote, days of hating the
(28:01):
mall are numbered. When it gets replaced by appletown squares,
Walmart supercenters, and the online offline sleurry of and ever
rising Amazon, we will miss those zoos of capitalism, those
prisons of commerce where consumersm roared and swelled, but inevitably
remained contained.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
I guess you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Well, we can't dwell in the past forever. So what
do you say we head into the fact off and
share a few of the crazier mall stories we found
this week?
Speaker 3 (28:26):
All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get a
start and let's see. Well, remember how I said that
America has twice as much retail space per person compared
to the rest of the world. Well, our record is
even worse when it comes to parking spaces. In total,
(28:49):
the United States has roughly two billion parking spots and
only about two hundred and fifty million cars to park
in them. That evens out to eight parking spots for
every car in the country, And one of the biggest
contributors to this over supply of parking is, of course,
the giant parking lot that circles the thousand plus shopping
malls that we have been talking about today. In fact,
(29:11):
there are more than twelve and a half thousand at
the Mall of America.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one person who
always comes out ahead at malls, no matter what the circumstance,
and that is Santa Claus. So according to a magazine
you might be familiar with mental floss. Being a mall
Santa is a salaried position and can net first timers
around ten thousand dollars per six week season. And if
you're a Santa with a little bit more experience under
(29:37):
your belt, you might actually be able to earn closer
to thirty thousand dollars per season. Of course, any would
be Santa's listening should keep in mind most malls typically
require their Santas to have natural beards, so no false
is allowed.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Ah okay, all right, well here is a kind of
a weird one. So malls may be on the decline
in the US, but the business is still booming in
many Asian countries, particularly in China. The only problem is
that a lot of the men there don't seem to
enjoy shopping nearly as much as their wives do. So
to get around this, some Chinese malls have begun offering
(30:10):
complimentary lounges, specifically for board husbands who would have rather
stayed home. The name for these facilities literally translates to
husband cloak room, which I kind of love. But it
sounds like they offer way more amenities than the average
code check. I mean this varies from all to mall,
but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like
Wi Fi, snacks, big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I love that, and I love the idea of like
a wife dropping off their husband and claiming a tag
and then like maybe forgetting to come and get on
at the end of the day exactly. So this is
a pretty odd fact. Six malls in southern California now
feature funeral home kiosks, where shoppers can pick out coffins
or earned and plan their own funerals. Apparently they even
have a cremation earned with the La Dodgers logo on it.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
So nice.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
So far. The funeral industry seems to view this whole
thing as a major win in terms of reaching the
audience where they're at. There's this one director of International
Cemetery Creation and Funeral Association who said quote nobody gets
up on a Saturday morning and says, Gee, it's a
nice day. I wonder if I can go out and
get myself a burial plot. But if they're surrounded by happy,
(31:18):
lively people and maybe clutching a bag of missus Field's cookies,
the thought is they'll feel differently.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I'm not sure that I agree with that, but it
is pretty interesting, and I guess.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
There's a reason they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
But all right, with the risk of seeming obsessed here,
I'm going to steer us back to the exciting world
of mall parking lots, but for good reason. Here because
I want to share a tip that I came across
for how to easily find an open space. According to
mathematician Joe Pagano, all you need to do is find
anile close to the mall entrance, get about twenty full
spaces in your site, and then just stop and wait
(31:53):
six minutes.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I love the idea of just stopping like that's not
upset anyone behind you, But why sex men?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
According to Joe, the average shopper spends one hundred and
twenty minutes in the mall. So if you divide one
hundred and twenty minutes. By the twenty spaces you've zeroed
in on, then you get six minutes. And that's how
long it should take for a shopper to return to
one of those spaces. So if you follow Joe's method,
that should be the max amount of time you'll spend
hunting for a spot.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Well, I do like that one, and I'm going to
have to try it out the next time I'm craving
an orange. Julius, I think you end up with the
trophy for this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
All Right, well, I think that does it for today's
Part Time Genius from Gabe, Tristan, Mangesh and me.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
We'll be back soon with another episode.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
The continu
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Guess what, Mango? What's that?
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Will?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
All right?
Speaker 3 (00:13):
I know you love shopping malls, so I'm sure you've
noticed these people, but you know the people who like
to exercise by walking back and forth through the mall.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Sure, mallwalkers. It's like half the country's.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Grandparents at least, and as you mentioned, it's especially popular
with senior citizens. But they're actually not the only ones
doing this. There was this twenty fifteen report from the
CDC that shows that shopping malls are now the second
most popular place to go for a walk, just behind neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
How weird is this?
Speaker 1 (00:41):
It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on mallwalking?
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Well, this isn't a small report either. It's actually fifty
six pages long and I'm reading every word of it
is just riveting. But to be fair, taking walks is
a way to prevent certain diseases, and the CDC is
actually the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And I
bet you forgot that silent p at the end of
the CDC. There's one funny thing that I learned. It
(01:06):
actually turns out that most mallwalkers don't actually shop at
the mall. At most they might buy a coffee at
the food court or something like that. But according to
the CDC report, they really just want the camaraderie, you know,
to spend some time strolling and socializing.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
And that actually puts.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Mallwalkers right in line with the original idea for shopping malls.
So the architect who designed the first mall in America's
name is Victor Gruen. He actually envisioned the mall as
a place to quote find opportunities for social life and
recreation and a protected pedestrian environment.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Ah, that's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything,
mallwalkers are really the only ones doing malls right.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but
definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind
for shopping malls than what they would ultimately become. But
what exactly did he envision, why didn't it work out?
And most importantly, is there still a chance that his
high hopes for shopping malls could still be fulfilled? Those
are just a few of the questions we'll try to
(02:06):
answer today. So let's dive in Hey their podcast listeners,
(02:30):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer
And on the other side of that soundproof glass, just
tucking into a feast of food court stables. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm
a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
I know, Missus Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon,
a pretzel from Auntie Ann's, and a huge orange Julius
to wash it all down. Man, it's like a good
trip to the mall in food form. But from what
it sounds like, that wasn't exactly Victor grusion of them all.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
No, I don't think so.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
But to understand what his vision did entail, we should
first talk about who Grewen was and where he came from.
So he was born in nineteen oh three in Vienna, Austria.
He grew up in a middle class Jewish family, fell
in love with the city's thriving art scene, and this
was at a pretty young age. So in the nineteen
twenties he spent many of his evenings performing satirical theater
(03:23):
at various cafes, and then during the day he studied architecture.
And this was at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,
so it was actually the same school that had rejected
Adolf Hitler just a few years earlier. Just a little
fun factor thrilling.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I feel like too good for Hitler should be on
all their t shirts.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Well.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't the only point of overlap
between Victor Grewen's life and Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi
Germany annexed Austria back in nineteen thirty eight, Grewin knew
it was time to leave his country behind, and weirdly,
he left the same week as Sigmund Freud. I keep
throwing in these little side facts about.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
All these people I like him.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Well, leaving was easier said than done, so grew And
turned to one of his theater buddies for help with
the escape.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
And it's actually kind of remarkable.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
His friend, dressed up as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Gruen
and his wife to the airport and then made sure
they were allowed to board a plane to Zurich. So
from there the couple made their way to England, where
they found passage on this ocean liner and traveled over
to New York City. So Grewin later looked back on
this journey and he said that he had arrived quote
(04:29):
with an architect's degree, eight dollars and no English.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Pretty tough.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story. So how do
you make it work?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Well?
Speaker 3 (04:36):
He once again turned to the art scene. He joins
up with some other German immigrants and together they form
what they called the Refugee Artists Group, where Grewin did
set design. So the group caught the attention of some
big names in the music business. This included Al Jolson
Irving Berlin, and they ended up helping them with their
songs and all of that help actually paid off. So
(04:58):
the next summer the group was a to stage an
original Broadway show and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight,
which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving
with eight dollars and how much longer later the guy's
putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks.
It's not bad, you know. So things were going well
for Grewin, but his architecture career had you know, suffered
(05:19):
since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown, Grewen
bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna, was
this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to open
this leather goods store on Fifth Avenue, and he asked
grew In to help him design it, and so grew
In agreed, and what he ultimately came up with with
something of a game changer for American store design. So,
(05:43):
rather than build the entrance flush, you know, with the
street like all the other shops in the area, Grewen
actually made this recess like arcade style entryway with the
tall glass cases on either side to sort of draw
in the customers. So once they came inside, these guests
were just dazzled by these faux marble floors, a green
(06:03):
glass ceiling, a slew of bright spotlights that sort of
reflected these display cases, and you know, the result was
a store that felt decidedly modern and unlike anything else
on Fifth Avenue or really American retail in general. So
it's kind of hard to imagine now, but customers and
critics ate up this new design, and as a result
(06:25):
of this, Gruin was swamped with job offers. I mean
he was going to these upscale design stores all around
the city and beyond getting these offers.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
So obviously designing these high end boutiques and then going
to big, boxy shopping malls seems like quite a leap,
and not exactly an upward one.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
Maybe so, But keep in mind that grew And was
commissioned to design the country's first indoor shopping mall in
nineteen fifty two and it opened in nineteen fifty six.
So prior to that, malls as we know them really
didn't exist, so there wasn't any stigma that we might
associate with them today.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing
came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like
in America pre mall?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Well, it was, you know, mainly mail order catalogs and
department stores for the most part. Outdoor shopping centers started
to catch on in the nineteen twenties, but they were
basically just strip malls as we think of them now,
like a bunch of different stores stuck together and just
happened to share a parking lot. So Grewin's big idea
was to put all of these stores and walkways under
(07:27):
one roof, and then you'd have the addition of central
air and heating to make this complex sustainable year round.
And that last part was especially important given the location
of Gruin's first mall. This was the Southdale Shopping Center
and Edina, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Where the winters are obviously frigid.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
Exactly, I don't think people would want to be walking
around in those parking lots in the cold of winter,
and so the project grew and signed on for was
meant to address the residents demand for a temperate place
to be able to shop, and one where they wouldn't
have to brave the cold if they wanted to visit
a different store after they'd gone to the first one.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what about
this bigger idea he had of them all being kind
of the social hub.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Well, a lot of that was just in how he
arranged the interior. So, just as an example, most shopping
centers of the era were on a single level. So
you know, you think about the number of stores in Southdale,
it was actually meant to house seventy two stores, plus
these two big anchored apartment stores so making your way
from one end to the other would have felt, you know,
(08:32):
like forever just to get there. So instead Grewin opted
for this two story design. They were linked by escalators,
of course, and now we're all envisioning, you know, kind
of the modern shopping center. So not only did this
breakup that monotony and make for a much easier trip
back to the car, but it also ensured that people
would circulate better, have more opportunities to socialize. But probably
(08:55):
the most prominent example of his people first design is
what he put.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
In the middle of it.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
It was kind of an indoor garden court, I guess
they called it, complete with a skylight, a goldfish pond,
towering live trees, balconies, hanging plants, like all of this
other stuff, including a bustling cafe. There was even a
twenty one foot tall cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds.
And so it was basically Gruin's ode to the European
(09:23):
piazzas that he had grown up with in Vienna, and
he wanted to bring some of that old world European
charm to the American shopping scene, which he kind of
saw is characterized by urban sprawl. And Tacki design. So
you fast forward a few years later, we're in nineteen
sixty at this point, and Gruen wrote a book in
which he outlined his hope and belief that the malls
(09:44):
could really be more like a town square and Greek
Agoras of the past, which.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
Is not exactly what we think of malls today.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Right, definitely not so. When Southdale opened in October of
nineteen fifty six, it was met with this glowing praise
from shoppers as well as jerm from every publication from
Newsweek to the New York Times to Women's Wear Daily.
In fact, my favorite review though, comes from Time, which
harolded Gruin's mall as quote the pleasure dome with parking.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
You know, ally, it's just it's such a great quote.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
But with all that said, there was at least one
person who absolutely detested the Southdale Shopping Mall, and that
was none other than the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. So,
a month after the mall opened, and you know, it
had gotten all this national press, right made the pilgrimage
to Minnesota to see it for himself and he was
(10:38):
not impressed at all. So after his visit, Right penned
this scathing article for the Star Tribune, writing quote, what
is this a railroad station or a bus station? You've
got a garden court that has all the evils of
the village street and none of its charm.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I love that. The way he really criticized it was
by calling it a railroad station.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
He really really burned with that.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So I'm guessing even in the minorities, since you know,
every mall seems to have cred most of his design
from Gruin's, I mean, somebody must have liked these, right,
Oh absolutely.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I mean the design was such a success that it
became really the de facto blueprint for indoor malls throughout
the rest of the twentieth century. And Gruin embraced all
the love at first, and for about a decade after
the Southdale Mall opened, he gave speeches, he wrote books
about his creation, and really kind of pondered what he
hoped it would do for American society. But sadly though,
(11:33):
Gruin's view of his work soured in the nineteen sixties
and in the seventies as more malls began to dominate
the landscape.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I mean they popped up.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
Everywhere, and worst of all these copycat malls were built
with tweaked designs aimed at maximizing profit rather than, you know,
more fostering that sense of community. So he even started
to see malls that he designed himself in a new light.
So when he visited some later in life, he wrote
of the quote severe emotion shock he'd experience, and the
(12:02):
ugliness and discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that
sprang up around these. So it definitely changed the way
he thought about them, and it was a bit disillusioned,
and he decided to move home to Vienna. But when
he got there, he was actually heartbroken to discover that
the new shopping mall had been built just south of
the old Vienna and that it was driving independent shops
(12:24):
out of business. And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in
a piece for The New Yorker, quote Victor Gruin invented
the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna.
He ended up making Vienna more like America.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Oh that's awful, But you know, I'm a little confused.
It sounds like Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots.
So were those something that was added later and not
a part of his original design.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Oh yeah, that's actually pretty right.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean, Gruen's mall designs included a much more modest
parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we
were used to associating with malls today. And in fact,
when Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed
it in the center of this four hundred and sixty
three acre plot, and to fill all that surrounding space,
he drew up designs for apartment buildings and schools and
(13:10):
a park and actually even a man made lake. But
unfortunately none of that ever came to pass, and instead
the space was used to make this massive parking lot.
And of course future malls followed suit, and very few
of them ever adapted Gruin's multi use approach to these developments.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
That is a shame.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
The whole story kind of reminds me of what happened
with the inventor of the TV file of Farnsworth. You know,
he was another guy who saw his invention grow up
in a way he wasn't expecting and grew to kind
of hate it over time.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, it is weird.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
To kind of resent the thing. That's held up as
the biggest achievement of your life. Right for both these Yeah, and.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
In Gruen's case, he actually took his distaste even further
than Farnsworth by completely disowning his creation. So two years
before his death, which was in nineteen eighty, Grewin gave
a speech in London and he washed his hands of
malls entirely. Here's what he told the crowd. I'm often
called the father of the shopping mall. I would like
to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all.
(14:10):
I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They
destroyed our city.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Okay, well, and now that we've unspooled the long and
sad history behind the birth of shopping malls, what do
you say we step inside of one and take a
closer look at some of the behind the scenes tricks
that developers use to keep the customer shopping.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
Sounds good, but before we get to that, let's take
a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and
we're talking about all the sort of devious design tricks
(14:48):
that shopping malls use to empty our wallets. But to
be clear, none of the stuff we're about to talk
about came from Victor Gruin. As you can probably guess
by now, he was fundamentally opposed to any design aimed
at manipulating customers into spending more money. I think he
would have felt like he was betraying that sense of
community that he was hoping to instill in these malls.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, but there's another dark layer to the story because
despite his principal approach to design, Gruon still wound up
having a shady mall tactic named after him. So you
know how sometimes you get disoriented in a mall or
a big store, like you're just walking through this giant
maze and you kind of lose track of where you
are in the building or how long you've been there.
That's known as Gruin transfer, and Gruon would have hated
(15:33):
the name, but the effect is a real thing, and
stores actually put a lot of effort and thought into
how to best trigger this reaction in their customers. So
Victor Gruen might have wanted malls that were easy to navigate,
but future designers learned that confused shoppers actually spend more money,
and that's why so many malls have these maze like
layouts with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around,
(15:54):
other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part
to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can
think about things like musac that's relaxing and played through
the pipe speakers, or eye catching entrance displays. And the
more time you spend in this mall days, the more
likely you are to make impulse buys. Right, Like, an
article on New Scientists describes it as being quote confused
(16:17):
into a state of unplanned consumption.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
I call this the Ikea effect, I think, and all
this makes sense. I get why they called it after Gruin,
but you know, because he helped build these malls, but
actually helped me out with that last part, the word transfer.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Yeah, so what's actually being transferred is the desire to
have a specific item. So you go to the mall
to buy a sweater, and it's only a sweater that
you're looking for, But if the designers play their cards right,
you'll be so dazzled by the time you get to
the store that your desire for a sweater will already
have been transferred to a bunch of different items that
you never planned on buying.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
Oh okay, that makes sense, But I mean, I'm still curious.
If Gruin didn't come up with the different sales tricks
that we find in malls now, then who is responsible
for that? Like it was just mall architects who followed
him or what I mean.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
That's where some of the ideas came from and new
methods were added over the years. Certainly, but a lot
of the common features in malls actually originated with one
of Gruen's contemporaries, this fellow storefront designer. His name was A.
Alfred Tobman, and he goes on to be a huge
mall mogul. In the late nineteen fifties, Todman followed Gruen's
lead by building his own indoor shopping mall in California,
(17:25):
and over the next fifty years or so, he just
kept on building. So he actually passes away in twenty
fifteen at the age of ninety one, but his company
is still going strong, with twenty four malls spread across
eleven different states plus Puerto Rico's, South Korea and China,
and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by
Tobman over the years.
Speaker 3 (17:45):
All right, son, can you give me some examples of
what these designs are.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, I mean this is going to sound a little hyperbolic,
which I guess it kind of is. But a lot
of Todman's innovations were sort of like perversions of what
Gruon had designed. So, you know, we talked about grew
and wanting this two level mall. It was so that
people could circulate easier and bump into more people. But
Topman kind of took that trick and moved the escalators
(18:10):
to the ends of the buildings, so you wouldn't meet
up in the center, but rather you'd have to make
the full loop around the mall and buy more as
a result. Got it, and Tobman's malls also applied the
circulation theory to the exteriors. He was actually the first
to put a circular road around the mall and add
a bunch of extra entrances so that shoppers could easily
get to any part of the building.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
That's interesting, And that bit about the moving of the escalators,
I mean, it's such a good example of how a
simple tweak can change the focus from you know, customer
comfort to something that really more benefits the sellers. And
I'm curious, did you find any other cases like that.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So another good example is what Tobman did with the lighting.
So he kept all the skylights from Gruin's design, but
he made them recessed so the sunlight would never directly
affect the storefronts. And he also added these tiny lights
around the skylights so that when the sun started to
go down, customers wouldn't take the shift in lighting as
this queue that it was time to leave. And speaking
(19:05):
of visibility, Tomman insisted on using transparent handrails in his
mall so that you could always see the stores around you,
regardless of what level you were at. I mean, apparently
it was he was trying to battle something called threshold resistance,
which I guess refers to both the physical and psychological
barriers that might prevent a customer from entering a store.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Like they could block your view and keep you from
seeing a store on the upper level that you might
otherwise go inside.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
I guess, yeah, that's part of it.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Well, I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about
Muzac earlier, and I have to mention this weird fact
I came across this week. So, according to a twenty
eleven report from Stanford, all the malls in America put
together consume more than a gig awot of electricity every
month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed
to make you shop more. And when you do the
(19:51):
math on this, that energy usage comes out to three
thousand metric tons of CO two added to the atmosphere
each year just from this store music.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, I mean, I guess not only as an annoying
and manipulative it's also contributing to climate change.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well.
Speaker 3 (20:09):
To be fair, human society emits around thirty giga tons
of greenhouse gases per year, so it's not like three
thousand tons from the mall is doing that much damage.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
But I just thought that that was interesting.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
And yeah, of course, once you factor in all the
energy that malls used to heat, cool, and light these
massive interiors around the clock, their contribution actually starts to
look a bit more significant when you put it in,
you know, as a whole.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I guess, yeah, I'm sure. Actually, Gabe was telling me
about this one mall he visited in Kentucky where there
were only like two or three actual stores in the
entire complex still open, like every other one had been shuttered.
But the a seed, the lights, the escalators, the music,
you know, all of that was still going on throughout
the building. And that's actually not a one off thing.
There are hundreds of malls like that across the country.
(20:53):
I feel like you see them on YouTube a lot,
like Urban Explorers will we'll go and take videos of them.
But a lot of these dead malls, as they're call
are actually just limping along kind of on life support,
like the one he saw in Kentucky.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
Yeah, I feel like we should probably talk a little
bit about why that is in the state of malls
you know today, But let's take one more quick break
and then we'll get back to that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, So it's been
sixty three years since the country got its first indoor
shopping mall, and during that time, as many as fifteen
hundred more malls have been built in the US, sometimes
growing at more than twice the rate of the population.
And you can tell by those numbers that America's malls
have actually had a great run. But I want to ask,
how are they holding up in the digital age? Like,
(21:47):
do the next sixty years look as promising.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
As the first? Oh? Not even close.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
I mean it's not fall Yeah, I was going to say,
thanks for that tough question. I mean, those fifteen hundred
malls you mentioned, we're now down to about eleven hundred.
And you know, if you ask a lot of analysts,
they project that hundreds more will close over the next
decade alone.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So what do you think is behind that decline? Is
it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping or what?
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Is it? All?
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Right?
Speaker 3 (22:14):
Well, maybe cover your ears, because predictable or not, the
rise of online shopping has definitely done some serious damage
to the mall industry. And that said, the demise of
brick and mortar retail has been greatly exaggerated though, because
according to the Atlantic, it's actually growing at a rate
of three percent per year. Even e commerce space companies
like Amazon and Apple, they've doubled down on the physical
(22:37):
retail game, which is something they definitely wouldn't be doing
if brick and mortar retail was truly on its way out.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
So why are malls closing then? Why is it so desperate?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Well, to put it simply, our country devotes way way
too much space to retail stores. So forty eight square
feet per person, to be exact, that is twice as
much retail space per capita than any other country in
the world, and a lot more than that in some cases,
four times more than Japan and France, six times more
than England, nine times more than Italy, eleven times more
(23:09):
than Germany. I'm just going to keep going. I've got
fifty seven more of these. But a retail analyst told
CNBC that America is quote the most overstored place in
the world, and when you look at the numbers, it's
hard to disagree with us.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So obviously this isn't a new development. We've been hearing
about urban sprawl for years now, and it was a
big part of why Gruin turned his back on malls
entirely in the seventies. So why is the rug being
pulled out now? Like, did it just take a while
for the effects of all that retail expansion to manifest?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah, I mean again, their arrival of online shopping was
kind of the tipping point in all of this, and
being able to shop at home really shined a spotlight
on just how out of control retail construction had grown.
So suddenly you had all these empty stores, malls without customers.
So we may have just started seeing the effects recently,
but the so called retail upoclypse has actually been a
(24:01):
long time coming. I mean, the big question now is
what to do with all the unneeded malls that we
already have, And in most case, tearing down a failed
mall is considered too expensive to be a real option.
But leaving them there to just decay, like that's not
an appealing strategy.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
Either, Right, Well, it's not like all the remaining malls
are going to close. From what I read this week,
the three hundred or so of the top earning malls
like they're going to be fine in the long term.
And those are the fanciest, top tier malls that sit
in wealthy areas and still bring in a lot of money.
But the other eight hundred or so lower tier malls,
you know, you might have to get creative with, like
if they want to avoid being those sort of YouTube
(24:38):
spectacles that we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 3 (24:41):
Yeah, and you know, from what I've seen, that's exactly
what a lot of them are doing. Some of them
are just being straight up repurposed, either as apartment complexes, churches,
or schools. I even read about one old mall that's
been transformed into this enormous indoor paint ball park.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Which actually kind of sounds kind of amazing.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, but plenty of other malls are being inverted into
what are called lifestyle centers, So that's kind of a
more hip or more upscale take on a mall, with
specialty stores like Creighton Barrel or Pottery Barn in place
of the more traditional department store anchors like a Seer's
or a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment
options than regular malls do, so in addition to stores
(25:20):
and restaurants, you might find live music venues, a bowling alley,
and art galleries, sometimes a built in movie theater. And
a lot of these lifestyle centers are open air too,
with like these facades that make stores look like row houses,
so you get some of that main street feel to them.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah. I mean, I've been to a few of those before.
There was one being built in Durham years ago, and
I remember thinking, like, you don't have to build a
mall that looks like an old tobacco warehouse when you've
got these old tobacco warehouses.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Just around the corner. But exactly what I do like.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
About this manufacturer of downtown field is that it's kind
of a throwback to what Victor Gruin wanted for malls
in the fifties, Like he wanted to bring a touch
of culture and character to the suburbs by just giving
people a nice place to gather and socialize and of
course shop as well.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:06):
I think that's right, And actually in the book I
quoted earlier, grew and wrote that quote. By affording opportunities
for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment,
by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill
an existing void. That's while the classed uplook of a
lifestyle center might seem like the first time malls have
(26:27):
come close to delivering on that promise, I'd actually argue
that even the crasses most commercial malls still did manage
to fill an important void for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
So what do you mean by that, Well, think back to.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
When malls were at their peak in the nineteen eighties
and even the early nineties. So back then there was
really some social benefit to going to the mall. When
you think about rural and suburban areas, there just weren't
enough people to have the kind of daily interactions that
you know, so commonplace in cities. So in that sense,
malls were a way to get people into close for
(27:00):
proximity to one another really more prompted this meaningful chance
encounters for people who might not have met otherwise. And
you know, aside from accessibility to humans, there's also accessibility
to products that malls provided. If you think back in
the dark days before the internet, just so scared even
think about, you know, someone in a place like Minnesota,
(27:20):
they would have very limited selection of clothing and books
and music to choose from, and any kind of international
products would have been next to impossible. But with these
malls coming along, you know, suddenly products from all over
the country and all over the world really were available
under one gigantic roof.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Which is a good point. And speaking of mall and
nostalgia and how different it is from a world where
we're getting marketed to from our phones and our computers
and just NonStop. I have a quote here that I
wanted to share from an author named Ian Bogost, and
he wrote a great article for the Atlantic that kind
of served as an elegy for shopping mall culture, and
this is what he writes, quote, days of hating the
(28:01):
mall are numbered. When it gets replaced by appletown squares,
Walmart supercenters, and the online offline sleurry of and ever
rising Amazon, we will miss those zoos of capitalism, those
prisons of commerce where consumersm roared and swelled, but inevitably
remained contained.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
I guess you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
Well, we can't dwell in the past forever. So what
do you say we head into the fact off and
share a few of the crazier mall stories we found
this week?
Speaker 3 (28:26):
All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get a
start and let's see. Well, remember how I said that
America has twice as much retail space per person compared
to the rest of the world. Well, our record is
even worse when it comes to parking spaces. In total,
(28:49):
the United States has roughly two billion parking spots and
only about two hundred and fifty million cars to park
in them. That evens out to eight parking spots for
every car in the country, And one of the biggest
contributors to this over supply of parking is, of course,
the giant parking lot that circles the thousand plus shopping
malls that we have been talking about today. In fact,
(29:11):
there are more than twelve and a half thousand at
the Mall of America.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one person who
always comes out ahead at malls, no matter what the circumstance,
and that is Santa Claus. So according to a magazine
you might be familiar with mental floss. Being a mall
Santa is a salaried position and can net first timers
around ten thousand dollars per six week season. And if
you're a Santa with a little bit more experience under
(29:37):
your belt, you might actually be able to earn closer
to thirty thousand dollars per season. Of course, any would
be Santa's listening should keep in mind most malls typically
require their Santas to have natural beards, so no false
is allowed.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Ah okay, all right, well here is a kind of
a weird one. So malls may be on the decline
in the US, but the business is still booming in
many Asian countries, particularly in China. The only problem is
that a lot of the men there don't seem to
enjoy shopping nearly as much as their wives do. So
to get around this, some Chinese malls have begun offering
(30:10):
complimentary lounges, specifically for board husbands who would have rather
stayed home. The name for these facilities literally translates to
husband cloak room, which I kind of love. But it
sounds like they offer way more amenities than the average
code check. I mean this varies from all to mall,
but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like
Wi Fi, snacks, big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I love that, and I love the idea of like
a wife dropping off their husband and claiming a tag
and then like maybe forgetting to come and get on
at the end of the day exactly. So this is
a pretty odd fact. Six malls in southern California now
feature funeral home kiosks, where shoppers can pick out coffins
or earned and plan their own funerals. Apparently they even
have a cremation earned with the La Dodgers logo on it.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
So nice.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
So far. The funeral industry seems to view this whole
thing as a major win in terms of reaching the
audience where they're at. There's this one director of International
Cemetery Creation and Funeral Association who said quote nobody gets
up on a Saturday morning and says, Gee, it's a
nice day. I wonder if I can go out and
get myself a burial plot. But if they're surrounded by happy,
(31:18):
lively people and maybe clutching a bag of missus Field's cookies,
the thought is they'll feel differently.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
I'm not sure that I agree with that, but it
is pretty interesting, and I guess.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
There's a reason they're doing it.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
But all right, with the risk of seeming obsessed here,
I'm going to steer us back to the exciting world
of mall parking lots, but for good reason. Here because
I want to share a tip that I came across
for how to easily find an open space. According to
mathematician Joe Pagano, all you need to do is find
anile close to the mall entrance, get about twenty full
spaces in your site, and then just stop and wait
(31:53):
six minutes.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
I love the idea of just stopping like that's not
upset anyone behind you, But why sex men?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
According to Joe, the average shopper spends one hundred and
twenty minutes in the mall. So if you divide one
hundred and twenty minutes. By the twenty spaces you've zeroed
in on, then you get six minutes. And that's how
long it should take for a shopper to return to
one of those spaces. So if you follow Joe's method,
that should be the max amount of time you'll spend
hunting for a spot.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Well, I do like that one, and I'm going to
have to try it out the next time I'm craving
an orange. Julius, I think you end up with the
trophy for this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
All Right, well, I think that does it for today's
Part Time Genius from Gabe, Tristan, Mangesh and me.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
We'll be back soon with another episode.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
The continu
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