May 28, 2019 • 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
Guess what, Mengo, what's that? Well, all right, 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. Sure, mall walkers.
It's like half the country's grandparents at least, and as
(00:25):
you mentioned, it's especially popular with senior citizens. But they're
actually not the only ones doing this. There was this
two thousand 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. How weird is this?
It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on
mall walking? Well, this isn't a small report either. It's
(00:48):
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 actually turns out that most mall walkers don't actually
(01:08):
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. And
that actually puts mall walkers 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
(01:30):
actually envisioned the mall as a place to quote find
opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment.
That's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything,
mall walkers are really the only ones doing mall's right. Yeah.
I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but
definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind
(01:51):
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
answer today. So let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners,
(02:30):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and it's
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 staples. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm
a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here. I know,
Mrs Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon, a pretzel
from Anti Ads, and a huge orange Julius to wash
(02:53):
it all. Man, it's like a trip to the mall
in food form. But from what it sounds like, that
wasn't exactly Victor grew his vision of them all. No,
I don't think so. But to understand what his vision
did entail, we should first talk about who Gruin 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
(03:15):
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 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 growing,
(03:36):
I feel like too good for Hitler should be on
all their t shirts. Well. Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't
the only point of overlap between Victor Gruin's life and
Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi Germany annexed Austria back in
nineteen thirty eight, grew And 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
(03:58):
side facts about all these people that I like them. Well,
leaving was easier said than done, so Grewin turned to
one of his theater buddies for help with the escape,
and it's actually kind of remarkable. His friend, dressed up
as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Grewin and his wife to
the airport and then made sure they were allowed to
board a plane to Zurich. So from there the couple
(04:19):
made their way to England, where they found passage on
his ocean liner and traveled over to New York City.
So Growin later looked back on this journey and he
said that he had arrived quote with an architect's degree,
eight dollars and no English. Pretty tough. Yeah, I mean,
that's an incredible story. So how do you make it work? Well?
He once again turned to the art scene. He joins
up with some other German immigrants and together they formed
(04:42):
what they called the Refugee Artist 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
the next summer the group was a the Stage, an
original Broadway show, and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight,
(05:04):
which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving
with eight dollars and howevery much longer later, the guy's
putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks.
It's not bad, you know. So so things were going
well for Grwin, but his architecture career had you know,
suffered since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown,
grew In bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna,
(05:26):
was this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to
open this leather good store on Fifth Avenue, and he
asked Grewing to help him design it, and so Grewin agreed,
and what he ultimately came up with with something of
a game changer for American store design. So rather than
build the entrance flush, you know, with the street like
(05:46):
all the other shops in the area, Grewin 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 glass ceiling, a
slew of bright spotlights that sort of reflected these display cases,
(06:09):
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 of this, Gruin was
swamped with job offers. I mean he was going to
these upscale design stores all around the city and beyond
(06:32):
getting these offers. 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. Maybe so,
But keep in mind that Gruin 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,
(06:54):
malls as we know them really didn't exist, so there
wasn't any stigma that we might associate with them today.
So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing
came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like
in America pre mall? 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,
(07:14):
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
Gruen's big idea was to put all of these stores
and walkways under 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
(07:36):
given the location of Gruen's first mall. This was the
Southdale Shopping Center and Adena, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis,
where the winters are obviously frigid. 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 unsigned on for was meant to address the residents
demand for a temperate place to be able to shop,
(07:59):
and one where they wouldn't have to brave the cold
if they wanted to visit a different store after they've
gone to the first one. Yeah, that makes a ton
of sense. So what about this bigger idea he had
of them all being kind of the social hub. 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,
(08:20):
you think about the number of stores in Southdale, it
was actually meant to house seventy two stores plus these
two big anchor department stores. So making your way from
one end to the other would have felt, you know,
like forever just to get there, so instead Grewing opted
for this two story design. They were linked by escalators,
of course, and now we're all envisioning kind of the
(08:42):
modern shopping center. So not only did this break up
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 the
most prominent example of his people first design is what
he put in the middle of it. It was kind
of an indoor garden court, I guess they called it,
(09:04):
complete with the 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 ft tall
cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds. And so it
was basically Gruin's ode to the European piazzas that he
had grown up within Vienna, and he wanted to bring
(09:27):
some of that old world European charm to the American
shopping scene, which he kind of saws characterized by urban
sprawl and tacky design. So you fast forward a few
years later where in nineteen sixty at this point, and
Gruen wrote a book in which he outlined his hope
and belief that the malls could really be more like
a town square. And you know Greek Agora's of the Past,
(09:48):
which is not exactly what we think of malls today, 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 dram list from every publication from Newsweek
to the New York Times, the Women's Wear Daily. In fact,
my favorite review though, comes from Time, which heralded Gruin's
(10:09):
mall as quote, the pleasure dome with parking. You know,
it's just it's such a great quote. 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. Right. So, a month
after the mall opened, and you know, it's gotten all
(10:31):
this national press, right made the pilgrimage to Minnesota to
see it for himself, and he was not impressed at all.
So after his visit, right Penn the 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
(10:52):
none of its charm. I love that the way he
really criticized it was by calling it a railroad station.
You really really burned them with that. 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. I mean
the design was such a success that it became really
(11:13):
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 south
Dale 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 Gruin's
(11:34):
view of his work soured in the nineties, sixties and
in the seventies, is more malls began to dominate the landscape.
I mean they popped up everywhere, and worst of all,
these copycat malls were built with tweak 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
(11:56):
visited some later in life, he wrote of the quote
severe emotional old shock, heat experience, and the ugliness and
discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that sprang up
around me. 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,
(12:16):
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 out of business.
And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in a piece for
The New York Or, quote Victor Gruin invented the shopping
mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He
ended up making Vienna more like America. That's awful, But
(12:37):
you know, I'm a little confused it. It It sounds like
Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots, so were
though something that was added later and and not a
part of his original design. Yeah, that's actually pretty right.
I mean, Gruin's mall designs included a much more modest
parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we're
used to associating with malls today. And in fact, when
Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed it
(13:00):
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 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
(13:22):
them ever adapted Gruen's multi use approach to these developments.
That that is a shame. You know. 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. Yeah, it is weird to kind of
resent the thing that's held up as the biggest achievement
(13:45):
of your life right for both these and 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, grew And 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
(14:06):
this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I
refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed
our city. Okay, well, and now that we've unspoiled the
long and sad history behind the birth of shopping malls,
where do you say we stepped inside of one and
take a closer look at some of the behind the
scenes tricks that developers used to keep the customer shopping.
(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 used 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 always
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. Yeah,
(15:09):
but there's another dark layer to the story because despite
his principled approach to design, Grown still wound up having
a shady mall tactic named after him. So, you know,
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
(15:29):
Gruin transfer, and Grown would have hated 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 we're 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
(15:50):
with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around.
Other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part
to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can
think about things like music that's relaxing and played through
the pipe speakers or um eye catching entrance displays. And
the more time you spend in this mall days, the
(16:11):
more likely you are to make impulse buyes. Right, Like,
an article on New Scientists describes it as being quote
confused into a state of unplanned consumption. I call this
the Ikea effect. I think, and and and all. This
makes sense, And I get why they called it after Gruin,
but you know, because he helped build these malls. But
actually help me out with that last part, the word transfer. Yeah,
(16:32):
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 will 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. Okay, that makes sense,
(16:52):
but I mean I'm still curious if grew and didn't
come up with the different sales tricks that we find
in malls now than who is responsible for that? Like
it was just mall architects who followed him or what
I mean, 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 and malls actually originated
with one of Gruen's contemporaries, This Fellows storefront designer. His
(17:15):
name was A. Alfred Todman, 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, and over the next fifty years or so,
he just kept on building. So he actually passes away
in two thousand fifteen at the age of but his
company is still going strong with twenty four malls spread
(17:36):
across eleven different states plus Puerto Rico, South Korea, and China,
and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by
Todman over the years. Alright, so can can you give
me some examples of what these designs are? Yeah? I
mean this is gonna sound a little hyperbolic, which I
guess the kind of is. But a lot of Todman's
innovations were sort of like perversions of what Gruin had designed. So,
(18:00):
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 Tobman kind of took
that trick and moved the escalators 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, And Tobin's
mall has also applied the circulation theory to the exteriors.
(18:22):
He was actually the first to put a circular road
around them all and add a bunch of extra entrances
so that shoppers could easily get to any part of
the building. Oh, it'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
(18:42):
other cases like that? Yeah? So another good example is
what Tobman did with the lighting. So he kept all
the skylights from Gruen's design, but he made them recess
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
(19:03):
was time to leave. And uh, speaking of visibility, Topman
insisted on using transparent handrails in his malls 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, Like
(19:23):
they could block your view and keep you from seeing
a store in the upper level that you might otherwise
go inside. I guess that that's part of it. Well,
I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about music earlier,
and I have to mention this weird fact that came
across this week. So, according to a two thousand eleven
report from Stanford, all the malls in America put together
consume more than a gig a lot of electricity every
(19:45):
month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed
to make you shop more. And when you do the
math on this, that energy usage comes out to three
thousand metric tons of C O two added to the
atmosphere each year just from this open music. Yeah, I mean,
I guess not only as an annoying and manipulative it's
also contributing to climate change. Well. To be fair, human
(20:10):
society admits 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. But I just thought that
that was interesting. And you know, 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
(20:31):
you put it in, you know, as a whole. I guess, yeah,
I'm sure. I Actually, Gabe was telling me about this
one mall he was in Kentucky where there were only
like two or three actual stores, and the entire complex
still open like every other one had been shuttered. But
the A C. 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
(20:51):
hundreds of malls like that across the country. I feel
like you see them on YouTube a lot, like Urban
Explorers will will go and take videos of them. But
a lot of these dead malls, as they're called, are
actually just limping along kind of on life support, like
the one he saw in Kentucky. 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
(21:12):
back to that. 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
(21:33):
many as hundred more malls have been built in the US,
sometimes growing up more than twice the raid 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,
do the next sixty years look as promising as the first? Oh?
Not even close. I mean it's it's not. Yeah. I
(21:55):
was gonna say, thanks for that tough question. I mean,
those fifteen hundred malls you mentioned, we're now down to
about and you know, if you ask a lot of analysts,
they project that hundreds more will close over the next
decade alone. So what do you think is behind that decline?
Is it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping
or what is it? Alright, Well, maybe cover your ears,
(22:16):
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 retail game, which is something
(22:39):
they definitely wouldn't be doing if brick and mortar retail
was truly on its way out. So why are malls
closing then? Why is it so desperate? 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
(23:00):
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 than Germany.
I'm just gonna 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
(23:21):
with us. 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 I grewin 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? Yeah, I mean again, the arrival of
online shopping was kind of the tipping point in in
(23:43):
all of this, and being able to shop at home
really shine 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
upon elipse has actually been a long time coming. I mean,
the big question now is what to do with all
(24:05):
the unneeded malls that we already have. And in most cases,
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 either, Right, Well, it's
not like all the remaining malls are going to close.
From what I've read this week, the three hundred or
so of the top earning malls like they're gonna be
fine in long term. And those are the fanciest, top
(24:27):
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 if they want to
avoid being those sort of YouTube spectacles that that that
we were talking about earlier. Yeah, and you know, from
what I've seen, that's exactly what a lot of them
are doing. Some of them is just being straight up repurposed,
either as apartment complexes, churches, or schools. I even read
(24:51):
about one old mall that's been transformed into this enormous
indoor paintball park, which that could kind of sound, 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 Sears or
(25:13):
a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment options
than regular malls do. So in addition to stores and restaurants,
you might find life music venues, a bowling alley, fine
art galleries. Sometimes it 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,
(25:34):
so you get some of that main street field to them. Yeah,
I mean I've been to a few of those before that.
There was one being built in Dirham 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 just around the corner. But
exactly what I do like about this Manufacturer downtown field
is that it's kind of a throwback to what Victor
(25:56):
Gruen 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. Yeah. 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, potestrian environment, by incorporating
(26:17):
civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void.
That's while the classed up look of a lifestyle center
might seem like the first time malls have 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. So what
(26:37):
do you mean by that, Well, think back to when
malls were at their peak of the nineteen eighties and
even the early nineties. So back then there was really
some social benefit to going to the mall. 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
(26:58):
a way to get people into close for 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 to even think about,
(27:19):
you know, someone in a place like Minnesota, they would
have very limited selection of clothing and books and music
to choose from, and 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, which is a good point. And speaking
(27:40):
of mall on nostalgia and how different it is from
a world where we're getting marketed to from our phones
and our computers and just non stuff. I have a
quote here that I wanted to share from an author
named Ian bo Ghost and 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, America,
days of hating them all are numbered? When it gets
(28:02):
replaced by Apple town squares, Walmart, supercenters and the online
offline slurry of an ever rising Amazon. We will miss
those zoos of capitalism, those prisons of commerce where consumerism
roared and swelled but inevitably remained contained. I guess you
don't know what you've got till it's gone. Well, we
can't do it on the past forever. So what do
you say we head into the fact off and share
(28:24):
a few of the crazier mall stories we found this week.
All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get us started.
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
(28:46):
when it comes to parking spaces. In total, 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
(29:09):
we have been talking about today. In fact, there are
more than twelve and a half thousand at the Mall
of America alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one
person who always comes out ahead at malls, no matter
what the circumstances, 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
(29:30):
net first timers around ten thousand dollars per six weeks season,
and if you're a Santa with a little bit more
experience under 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 required their Santa's to have natural beards, so
no false is allowed. Okay, all right, well here is
(29:52):
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 complimentary lounges specifically for board husbands who
(30:14):
would have rather stayed home. The name for these facilities
literally translates to husband cloak room, which I kind of love.
It sounds like they offer way more amenities than the
average code check. I mean this varies from all the mall,
but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like WiFi, snacks,
big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs. I love that,
(30:35):
And I love the idea of like a wife dropping
off their husband and claiming a tag and then like,
maybe we're getting to come get them at the end
of the day exactly. So this is a pretty odd fact.
Six malls in southern California now feature funeral home chios
where shoppers can pick out coffins are earned and plan
their own funerals. Apparently they even have a cremation earned
with the l A Dodgers logo on it. So so far,
(30:58):
the funeral industry seems to view this whole thing is
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, lively
(31:18):
people and maybe clutching a bag of Mrs Field's cookies,
the thought is they'll feel differently. I'm not sure that
I agree with that, but it is pretty interesting and
I guess there's a reason they're doing it. 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
(31:40):
find an open space. According to mathematician Joe Pagano, all
you need to do is find in how close to
the mall entrance, get about twenty full spaces in your sight,
and then just stop and wait six minutes. I love
the idea of just stopping like that's not gonna upset
anyone behind you, But why six that's According to Joe,
(32:02):
the average shopper spends a hundred and twenty minutes in
the mall. So if you divide a hundred and twenty
minutes by the twenties 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. Well,
I do like that one, and I'm gonna have to
try it out the next time I'm craving and range. Julius,
(32:24):
I I think you end up with the trophy for
this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much. All Right, well,
I think that does it for today's Part Time Genius
from Gabe, Tristan Manguesh and me. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius
(32:50):
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The critic in the p
Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio.
Guess what, Mengo, what's that? Well, all right, 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. Sure, mall walkers.
It's like half the country's grandparents at least, and as
(00:25):
you mentioned, it's especially popular with senior citizens. But they're
actually not the only ones doing this. There was this
two thousand 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. How weird is this?
It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on
mall walking? Well, this isn't a small report either. It's
(00:48):
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 actually turns out that most mall walkers don't actually
(01:08):
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. And
that actually puts mall walkers 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
(01:30):
actually envisioned the mall as a place to quote find
opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment.
That's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything,
mall walkers are really the only ones doing mall's right. Yeah.
I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but
definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind
(01:51):
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
answer today. So let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners,
(02:30):
Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and it's
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 staples. That's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm
a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here. I know,
Mrs Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon, a pretzel
from Anti Ads, and a huge orange Julius to wash
(02:53):
it all. Man, it's like a trip to the mall
in food form. But from what it sounds like, that
wasn't exactly Victor grew his vision of them all. No,
I don't think so. But to understand what his vision
did entail, we should first talk about who Gruin 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
(03:15):
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 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 growing,
(03:36):
I feel like too good for Hitler should be on
all their t shirts. Well. Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't
the only point of overlap between Victor Gruin's life and
Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi Germany annexed Austria back in
nineteen thirty eight, grew And 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
(03:58):
side facts about all these people that I like them. Well,
leaving was easier said than done, so Grewin turned to
one of his theater buddies for help with the escape,
and it's actually kind of remarkable. His friend, dressed up
as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Grewin and his wife to
the airport and then made sure they were allowed to
board a plane to Zurich. So from there the couple
(04:19):
made their way to England, where they found passage on
his ocean liner and traveled over to New York City.
So Growin later looked back on this journey and he
said that he had arrived quote with an architect's degree,
eight dollars and no English. Pretty tough. Yeah, I mean,
that's an incredible story. So how do you make it work? Well?
He once again turned to the art scene. He joins
up with some other German immigrants and together they formed
(04:42):
what they called the Refugee Artist 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
the next summer the group was a the Stage, an
original Broadway show, and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight,
(05:04):
which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving
with eight dollars and howevery much longer later, the guy's
putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks.
It's not bad, you know. So so things were going
well for Grwin, but his architecture career had you know,
suffered since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown,
grew In bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna,
(05:26):
was this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to
open this leather good store on Fifth Avenue, and he
asked Grewing to help him design it, and so Grewin agreed,
and what he ultimately came up with with something of
a game changer for American store design. So rather than
build the entrance flush, you know, with the street like
(05:46):
all the other shops in the area, Grewin 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 glass ceiling, a
slew of bright spotlights that sort of reflected these display cases,
(06:09):
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 of this, Gruin was
swamped with job offers. I mean he was going to
these upscale design stores all around the city and beyond
(06:32):
getting these offers. 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. Maybe so,
But keep in mind that Gruin 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,
(06:54):
malls as we know them really didn't exist, so there
wasn't any stigma that we might associate with them today.
So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing
came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like
in America pre mall? 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,
(07:14):
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
Gruen's big idea was to put all of these stores
and walkways under 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
(07:36):
given the location of Gruen's first mall. This was the
Southdale Shopping Center and Adena, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis,
where the winters are obviously frigid. 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 unsigned on for was meant to address the residents
demand for a temperate place to be able to shop,
(07:59):
and one where they wouldn't have to brave the cold
if they wanted to visit a different store after they've
gone to the first one. Yeah, that makes a ton
of sense. So what about this bigger idea he had
of them all being kind of the social hub. 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,
(08:20):
you think about the number of stores in Southdale, it
was actually meant to house seventy two stores plus these
two big anchor department stores. So making your way from
one end to the other would have felt, you know,
like forever just to get there, so instead Grewing opted
for this two story design. They were linked by escalators,
of course, and now we're all envisioning kind of the
(08:42):
modern shopping center. So not only did this break up
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 the
most prominent example of his people first design is what
he put in the middle of it. It was kind
of an indoor garden court, I guess they called it,
(09:04):
complete with the 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 ft tall
cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds. And so it
was basically Gruin's ode to the European piazzas that he
had grown up within Vienna, and he wanted to bring
(09:27):
some of that old world European charm to the American
shopping scene, which he kind of saws characterized by urban
sprawl and tacky design. So you fast forward a few
years later where in nineteen sixty at this point, and
Gruen wrote a book in which he outlined his hope
and belief that the malls could really be more like
a town square. And you know Greek Agora's of the Past,
(09:48):
which is not exactly what we think of malls today, 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 dram list from every publication from Newsweek
to the New York Times, the Women's Wear Daily. In fact,
my favorite review though, comes from Time, which heralded Gruin's
(10:09):
mall as quote, the pleasure dome with parking. You know,
it's just it's such a great quote. 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. Right. So, a month
after the mall opened, and you know, it's gotten all
(10:31):
this national press, right made the pilgrimage to Minnesota to
see it for himself, and he was not impressed at all.
So after his visit, right Penn the 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
(10:52):
none of its charm. I love that the way he
really criticized it was by calling it a railroad station.
You really really burned them with that. 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. I mean
the design was such a success that it became really
(11:13):
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 south
Dale 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 Gruin's
(11:34):
view of his work soured in the nineties, sixties and
in the seventies, is more malls began to dominate the landscape.
I mean they popped up everywhere, and worst of all,
these copycat malls were built with tweak 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
(11:56):
visited some later in life, he wrote of the quote
severe emotional old shock, heat experience, and the ugliness and
discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that sprang up
around me. 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,
(12:16):
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 out of business.
And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in a piece for
The New York Or, quote Victor Gruin invented the shopping
mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He
ended up making Vienna more like America. That's awful, But
(12:37):
you know, I'm a little confused it. It It sounds like
Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots, so were
though something that was added later and and not a
part of his original design. Yeah, that's actually pretty right.
I mean, Gruin's mall designs included a much more modest
parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we're
used to associating with malls today. And in fact, when
Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed it
(13:00):
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 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
(13:22):
them ever adapted Gruen's multi use approach to these developments.
That that is a shame. You know. 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. Yeah, it is weird to kind of
resent the thing that's held up as the biggest achievement
(13:45):
of your life right for both these and 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, grew And 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
(14:06):
this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I
refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed
our city. Okay, well, and now that we've unspoiled the
long and sad history behind the birth of shopping malls,
where do you say we stepped inside of one and
take a closer look at some of the behind the
scenes tricks that developers used to keep the customer shopping.
(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 used 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 always
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. Yeah,
(15:09):
but there's another dark layer to the story because despite
his principled approach to design, Grown still wound up having
a shady mall tactic named after him. So, you know,
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
(15:29):
Gruin transfer, and Grown would have hated 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 we're 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
(15:50):
with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around.
Other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part
to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can
think about things like music that's relaxing and played through
the pipe speakers or um eye catching entrance displays. And
the more time you spend in this mall days, the
(16:11):
more likely you are to make impulse buyes. Right, Like,
an article on New Scientists describes it as being quote
confused into a state of unplanned consumption. I call this
the Ikea effect. I think, and and and all. This
makes sense, And I get why they called it after Gruin,
but you know, because he helped build these malls. But
actually help me out with that last part, the word transfer. Yeah,
(16:32):
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 will 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. Okay, that makes sense,
(16:52):
but I mean I'm still curious if grew and didn't
come up with the different sales tricks that we find
in malls now than who is responsible for that? Like
it was just mall architects who followed him or what
I mean, 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 and malls actually originated
with one of Gruen's contemporaries, This Fellows storefront designer. His
(17:15):
name was A. Alfred Todman, 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, and over the next fifty years or so,
he just kept on building. So he actually passes away
in two thousand fifteen at the age of but his
company is still going strong with twenty four malls spread
(17:36):
across eleven different states plus Puerto Rico, South Korea, and China,
and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by
Todman over the years. Alright, so can can you give
me some examples of what these designs are? Yeah? I
mean this is gonna sound a little hyperbolic, which I
guess the kind of is. But a lot of Todman's
innovations were sort of like perversions of what Gruin had designed. So,
(18:00):
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 Tobman kind of took
that trick and moved the escalators 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, And Tobin's
mall has also applied the circulation theory to the exteriors.
(18:22):
He was actually the first to put a circular road
around them all and add a bunch of extra entrances
so that shoppers could easily get to any part of
the building. Oh, it'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
(18:42):
other cases like that? Yeah? So another good example is
what Tobman did with the lighting. So he kept all
the skylights from Gruen's design, but he made them recess
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
(19:03):
was time to leave. And uh, speaking of visibility, Topman
insisted on using transparent handrails in his malls 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, Like
(19:23):
they could block your view and keep you from seeing
a store in the upper level that you might otherwise
go inside. I guess that that's part of it. Well,
I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about music earlier,
and I have to mention this weird fact that came
across this week. So, according to a two thousand eleven
report from Stanford, all the malls in America put together
consume more than a gig a lot of electricity every
(19:45):
month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed
to make you shop more. And when you do the
math on this, that energy usage comes out to three
thousand metric tons of C O two added to the
atmosphere each year just from this open music. Yeah, I mean,
I guess not only as an annoying and manipulative it's
also contributing to climate change. Well. To be fair, human
(20:10):
society admits 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. But I just thought that
that was interesting. And you know, 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
(20:31):
you put it in, you know, as a whole. I guess, yeah,
I'm sure. I Actually, Gabe was telling me about this
one mall he was in Kentucky where there were only
like two or three actual stores, and the entire complex
still open like every other one had been shuttered. But
the A C. 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
(20:51):
hundreds of malls like that across the country. I feel
like you see them on YouTube a lot, like Urban
Explorers will will go and take videos of them. But
a lot of these dead malls, as they're called, are
actually just limping along kind of on life support, like
the one he saw in Kentucky. 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
(21:12):
back to that. 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
(21:33):
many as hundred more malls have been built in the US,
sometimes growing up more than twice the raid 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,
do the next sixty years look as promising as the first? Oh?
Not even close. I mean it's it's not. Yeah. I
(21:55):
was gonna say, thanks for that tough question. I mean,
those fifteen hundred malls you mentioned, we're now down to
about and you know, if you ask a lot of analysts,
they project that hundreds more will close over the next
decade alone. So what do you think is behind that decline?
Is it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping
or what is it? Alright, Well, maybe cover your ears,
(22:16):
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 retail game, which is something
(22:39):
they definitely wouldn't be doing if brick and mortar retail
was truly on its way out. So why are malls
closing then? Why is it so desperate? 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
(23:00):
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 than Germany.
I'm just gonna 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
(23:21):
with us. 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 I grewin 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? Yeah, I mean again, the arrival of
online shopping was kind of the tipping point in in
(23:43):
all of this, and being able to shop at home
really shine 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
upon elipse has actually been a long time coming. I mean,
the big question now is what to do with all
(24:05):
the unneeded malls that we already have. And in most cases,
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 either, Right, Well, it's
not like all the remaining malls are going to close.
From what I've read this week, the three hundred or
so of the top earning malls like they're gonna be
fine in long term. And those are the fanciest, top
(24:27):
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 if they want to
avoid being those sort of YouTube spectacles that that that
we were talking about earlier. Yeah, and you know, from
what I've seen, that's exactly what a lot of them
are doing. Some of them is just being straight up repurposed,
either as apartment complexes, churches, or schools. I even read
(24:51):
about one old mall that's been transformed into this enormous
indoor paintball park, which that could kind of sound, 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 Sears or
(25:13):
a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment options
than regular malls do. So in addition to stores and restaurants,
you might find life music venues, a bowling alley, fine
art galleries. Sometimes it 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,
(25:34):
so you get some of that main street field to them. Yeah,
I mean I've been to a few of those before that.
There was one being built in Dirham 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 just around the corner. But
exactly what I do like about this Manufacturer downtown field
is that it's kind of a throwback to what Victor
(25:56):
Gruen 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. Yeah. 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, potestrian environment, by incorporating
(26:17):
civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void.
That's while the classed up look of a lifestyle center
might seem like the first time malls have 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. So what
(26:37):
do you mean by that, Well, think back to when
malls were at their peak of the nineteen eighties and
even the early nineties. So back then there was really
some social benefit to going to the mall. 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
(26:58):
a way to get people into close for 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 to even think about,
(27:19):
you know, someone in a place like Minnesota, they would
have very limited selection of clothing and books and music
to choose from, and 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, which is a good point. And speaking
(27:40):
of mall on nostalgia and how different it is from
a world where we're getting marketed to from our phones
and our computers and just non stuff. I have a
quote here that I wanted to share from an author
named Ian bo Ghost and 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, America,
days of hating them all are numbered? When it gets
(28:02):
replaced by Apple town squares, Walmart, supercenters and the online
offline slurry of an ever rising Amazon. We will miss
those zoos of capitalism, those prisons of commerce where consumerism
roared and swelled but inevitably remained contained. I guess you
don't know what you've got till it's gone. Well, we
can't do it on the past forever. So what do
you say we head into the fact off and share
(28:24):
a few of the crazier mall stories we found this week.
All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get us started.
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
(28:46):
when it comes to parking spaces. In total, 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
(29:09):
we have been talking about today. In fact, there are
more than twelve and a half thousand at the Mall
of America alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one
person who always comes out ahead at malls, no matter
what the circumstances, 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
(29:30):
net first timers around ten thousand dollars per six weeks season,
and if you're a Santa with a little bit more
experience under 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 required their Santa's to have natural beards, so
no false is allowed. Okay, all right, well here is
(29:52):
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 complimentary lounges specifically for board husbands who
(30:14):
would have rather stayed home. The name for these facilities
literally translates to husband cloak room, which I kind of love.
It sounds like they offer way more amenities than the
average code check. I mean this varies from all the mall,
but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like WiFi, snacks,
big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs. I love that,
(30:35):
And I love the idea of like a wife dropping
off their husband and claiming a tag and then like,
maybe we're getting to come get them at the end
of the day exactly. So this is a pretty odd fact.
Six malls in southern California now feature funeral home chios
where shoppers can pick out coffins are earned and plan
their own funerals. Apparently they even have a cremation earned
with the l A Dodgers logo on it. So so far,
(30:58):
the funeral industry seems to view this whole thing is
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, lively
(31:18):
people and maybe clutching a bag of Mrs Field's cookies,
the thought is they'll feel differently. I'm not sure that
I agree with that, but it is pretty interesting and
I guess there's a reason they're doing it. 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
(31:40):
find an open space. According to mathematician Joe Pagano, all
you need to do is find in how close to
the mall entrance, get about twenty full spaces in your sight,
and then just stop and wait six minutes. I love
the idea of just stopping like that's not gonna upset
anyone behind you, But why six that's According to Joe,
(32:02):
the average shopper spends a hundred and twenty minutes in
the mall. So if you divide a hundred and twenty
minutes by the twenties 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. Well,
I do like that one, and I'm gonna have to
try it out the next time I'm craving and range. Julius,
(32:24):
I I think you end up with the trophy for
this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much. All Right, well,
I think that does it for today's Part Time Genius
from Gabe, Tristan Manguesh and me. Thanks so much for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius
(32:50):
is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
The critic in the p
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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