Selects: Live From San Francisco: How Malls Work

In this classic show recorded live on January 5, 2017 at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, Josh and Chuck delve into the history and the heyday of the church of consumerism and what it means for local communities and our capitalist society at large when malls die.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. This is your co host of
Stuff you Should Know here, Chuck Bryant, and I'm gonna
recommend that you listen to this week's select episode live
from San Francisco, colin How Malls Work. This was in
February of twenty seventeen, February nineteenth specifically, and this was
our Sketch Fest performance for that year. And I'm not

(00:26):
sure how many times we did this topic live that year,
but I just wanted to kind of put this in
as a Saturday Select as a way of saying, hey,
here's what our live shows sound like, and they are
a lot of fun, and there's even a lot more
fun that gets edited out of these. So we're going
on the road this year, as you know, and we're
gonna hit probably six or seven more cities before it's

(00:48):
all said and done in twenty twenty three. So I
wanted to throw a live show in there to show
you what was all about. So please to enjoy this
week's Select live episode How Malls Work. Welcome to Stuff
you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome

(01:14):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brian,
We're in beautiful San Francisco, California, at the Castro Theater.
You should thank you. It's wonderful, our biggest, our biggest

(01:48):
show to date. Seriously today, yep, on a Sunday afternoon.
Ye who knew San Francisco sketch Fest. All right, So
we're talking today everybody about a little something called the
Mall And I'm not joking. Yeah, that's what I have.

(02:13):
So that's good. So we've been wanting to do something
on the mall for years now and years and years,
and we thought, well, what does San Francisco if not
the Mall? Right, they're gonna love this one, and I
guess we were wrong. Now, you guys will love it.
I promise it's just like um, like the Grass episode.

(02:33):
You may have been like, I'm not listening to that,
and then you finally ran out of episodes. Listen to
the Grass episode and you're like, that wasn't as bad
as I thought it was gonna be. This will be
similar to that experience, okay, except the Grass episode was free.
I promise we will give it our all. I don't

(02:55):
know why we're selling it like this is going downhill
so fast. That's great, okay, so uphill, shall we get
in the way back machine? Ooh, which is imaginary? Oo.

(03:16):
So when you think of shopping mall, you think of
the mall. Right, everybody knows what the mall is. If
there's somebody who doesn't know what the mall is, raise
your hand, and whoever sitting next to that person, punch
him in the arm really hard, be like, come on,
you know what the mall is. I assume San Francisco
has malls somewhere. Oh yeah, they've got mall. I've never
seen one. They're probably out a bit. It's not like
a mall in the middle of the mission, or is there.

(03:39):
I don't think so. Right, Okay, there's a few. Oh
you did, I did a little They pop up here
or there. You guys will know, because I'll be like,
so if we're we're all in the way back machine,
and we're going all the way back back back back
to ancient Rome where the actual the first what you
could consider a shopping center appears, and it was called

(04:02):
Trajan's Market. And Trajan's Market was built in something like
one oh seven. I think, yeah, that's early. I think
its anchor store was Trajan's Horse that was okay. Sorry.
If I had a store back there, that would have
totally called it Trajan's Horse. Yeah yeah, And it's known

(04:24):
as the world's oldest shopping center for good reason. Again.
It was built in one oh seven and right now
it's in ruins. There's some guy who sells those little
balls with the raccoon tails on the end of them
on a tray, but he's technically outside of the mall
so it doesn't really count to the mall's closed. It
has been for several millennia now, but the oldest continually

(04:50):
operated what you would might call an outdoor market or mall,
is the Grand Bazaar with an A three. A's actually two,
now there's three. You've been drinking, Yeah, just not together
be a z a r oh oh gotcha, yeah, I
guess if I'm not gonna checking his math checks out,

(05:10):
that's a joke from Fletch. If I'm not mistaken, I
don't like all right, deep cut the Grand Bizarre Istanbul.
Between fourteen fifty five and fourteen sixty one is when
that was built, and it is still an operation today.
About five thousand coboard shops still gets about a quarter
million visitors a day. So it's still rocking day. Yeah, yeah,

(05:31):
a lot of folks. So you've got what medieval market
towns kind of started to come later, seaports, all these things,
these commercial districts where people went to shop. They all
had to kind of be centered in an area together
because people rode horses, or they walked, or they were
chased by their people, whatever. But you had to go

(05:52):
and get all your shopping done at one place. Right,
And that's just kind of a very ancient idea, and right,
it's wonderful. By the turn of the twentieth century here
in the US, we had something we still do. It
hasn't gone away. Pre mall. We had the department store.
And I think I even mentioned this on another show.
It didn't dawn on me, you know how, like the

(06:12):
simplest words dawn on you late in life, like what
it really means. I just always said, Hey, a department store.
It really just occurred to me a couple of years ago, like, oh,
it's a store full of many departments. Right, never really
thought about it. Do you ever have those? It's kind
of nice department stores thirteen stories high in Chicago, the

(06:33):
Marshall end Field Company and Marshall Field, Marshall Field and Company.
And then in Detroit there was one called J. L.
Hudson's that was twenty five floors of department store, twenty
five floors of retail space. And this thing took up
like a whole block. Yeah, and there's nineteen eleven, so
there's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff.

(06:55):
In eighteen twenty eight, though, if you back up a
little bit, the first sort of enclosed shopping center that
you might kind of consider a mall mall even though
we really don't, as you'll see, because it didn't have
an arcade, even though it is it's called the Westminster Arcade,
fun ironically didn't have an arcade. And Providence, Rhode Island.
Has anyone ever been to this place? Yeah? I've been?

(07:18):
Have you really? Yes? I didn't know that. Yeah, you
didn't type in here I've been there. Yeah, all right,
I didn't know I needed to say that. Well, it
was assumed. It's a pretty cool place. So if you
look it up online, it doesn't look like the mall
that you would consider a mall. Looks like sort of
like a Greek revival building and it's like a big

(07:41):
ceiling Yeah, it's really nice. It's got three it sort
of looks like a train station. It's kind of three floors.
And recently they were going to demolish it, but someone
swooped in and built micro apartments. Now you can live
in there and they're really kind of cool. And I
was gonna explain again what a micro apartment was, but
I forgot where I am. Yeah, so you all know,

(08:02):
isn't that like a dresser drawer? Yes, and you walk
through the little thing that's like, oh my god, I
love living in thirty square feet and it's just some
guy standing in a broom cloth pretty much. Uh, screw

(08:23):
this up, herbs. Wait even well, even back further than this,
Russia should get its due right, even even before them,
even before the the the Westminster Arcade, there is this
thing called the ghost veted Voor. And I looked at
the pronunciation, but I should qualify that I looked up

(08:46):
the pronunciation on the same site that I looked up
the pronunciation on Disha chain, which I called dixiea chain
throughout the entire Underground City episode. So so take that
for what it. I was about to say, all our
Asian friends, let us know that was wrong, but really
everyone of every race let us know that was wrong,

(09:09):
Thank you dummies. After World War two, things really kind
of evolved with the shopping center though. That's when things
kind of started going in In nineteen fifty Seattle's Northgate
Center was But I feel like we say several times,
the first thing we think of a zamal. I guess
it was just part of the evolution, right. Southdale was

(09:29):
the first real mall. All right, so Southdale we're gonna
pick up with Southdale. Southdale was in Edina, Minnesota. A dinah,
thank you live corrections very nice? Where were you? And
I was saying Dixie a chance over and over and over. Deal. Well,

(09:55):
previous to that, boy, we're jumping all around this designer
and really the man who were gonna either thank for
the mall or blame for the mall, depending on how
you feel about malls is a gentleman named Victor Gruen.
Anyone want to correct me on that. He's an Austrian
architect and he designed Northland Center in Michigan. Is that correct? Yes?

(10:19):
And it was. Northland Center is in Southland, Michigan. Now
it's so confusing, it's terrible. It had a what was known,
and I said anchor store earlier, and this is what
malls have. They have these anchor stores which are still
to this day, mainly department stores. And that anchor store
was Hudson's Department Store, had about one hundred and ten

(10:39):
other stores. But it still wasn't a real mall mall
because it wasn't as you'll see, introverted, correct, and it
wasn't enclosed. It was open air. Yeah, like you know
when you go to those outlet malls today where it's
just all you're walking around outside like an idiot. You know,
this is kind of like what Southfield was like get

(11:00):
and that's what all shopping malls were like up to
that point. They weren't enclosed. It was nineteen fifty six
in a Dina, Minnesota when the first enclosed mall like
we think of it today came about. Yeah, and I
actually looked up the previous Northland. They did close that
in in the seventies and it finally shuddered for good
a couple of years ago, and I found this website
that said twelve weirdest things left behind in the Northland

(11:23):
Center And it wasn't that exciting, but there was one
the group to tension room and I started thinking, holy crap,
malls had jails. Yeah, And I looked it up and
someone said I went to Yahoo. Answers like, where else
do you go to get the real truth? And the
number one voted up answer said, it's not a real cell.

(11:46):
It's just a small dark room with no windows, in
a chair and a camera in it that you're not
allowed to leave. It's like and this one I took
micro department basically, this one had changed on the benches
and I was like, nah, that's a jail cell. Yeah.
So I saw that too. There was like a target
cart under a spotlight. I think. I thought that was beautiful. Yeah,

(12:08):
it was very arty, haunting. I'm with you, lady, all right.
So jumping back forward again to Minneapolis. Outside of Minneapolis
is it Adena, Diana, Thank you, nineteen fifty six Southdale,
twenty million bucks. The anchor store was Donaldson's and Dayton's, right,

(12:33):
who can forget Donaldson's? I did, okay, And Dayton's actually
commissioned this mall to be built because they were building
a new outpost in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And it
wasn't just by coincidence that a Diana was ten miles
away from downtown Minneapolis, because again this is nineteen fifty six,
so it's during the Cold War, and that's actually right

(12:55):
outside the eight mile blast radius of atomic bomb were
it to be dropped on Minneapolis. Because of course that's
what the Ruskies were thinking, We're going from Minneapolis first.
But they've built a mall outside of the blast radius,
so I guess we'll just give up. So the original

(13:16):
idea for them all from Victor Gruin, was too he
wanted to kind of, you know how they have these
mixed use centers. Now, he had this idea way back
then and he wanted people to live there and kind
of congregate there. And we'll get a little more to
this later, but it sort of ended up just being
a shopping mall, to his disappointment. But he modeled it
on Northgate in Seattle, and sort of the big idea

(13:37):
was that you go to these department stores because that's
where people were used to. But how do you get
them to these other stores? Was the big question, right,
how do you get them chopping? Oh at the mall? Yeah,
like they're there because people went to department store. So
if you put a department store out in the suburbs.
They'll go to the department store. They're like, oh, I
thought I was supposed to take a left, Now I'm
taking a right. I'm at the department store. Who cares. Right.

(14:00):
The problem is is if you put one hundred and
ten other stores coming off of that department store, they
just go to the department store and leave. Not good,
right if you're one of these other stores. So what
Northgate figured out, and what is mind numbingly obvious but
really works, is you just take this department store, put

(14:21):
another department store, and then put the shops in between them,
and then the people take a rite. But they should
take a left. But they're fine, they're going to the
department store. Oh, if there's another department store, well, I'll
just walk past this. Maybe i'll buy that, I'll buy
a little bit of this. Sure, i'll take a feather
boa And then they walk into the other department store
and consumerism is saved. That's right. It was revolutionary at

(14:45):
the time. So he built he was commissioned at least
by Dayton's department store to build this kind of advanced
shopping center. They didn't call them malls at the time.
They called them advanced shopping centers, and that's so high tech.
He actually added space for a competitor at the other end,
because you had this idea like how to keep people there,
And I don't know how he talked Dayton's into it.

(15:06):
Were like wait, wait, yeah, like hold on a second, no, no,
we're paying you to do this, and you want to
put a competitor's store in there. He's like, yeah, it'll work,
trust me. So a few minutes ago I mentioned that
it was introverted. My uncle's still texting me, still looking
for parking, just circling the castro at this point. So

(15:31):
we mentioned introverted and extroverted. Malls previous to this were outdoor,
and like we said, they were extroverted. So in other words,
you walk the perimeter and the stores faced the outside
and they had doors on them that you would walk
into if you wanted to shop. So he had this
idea like, wait, let's reverse all that. Let's turn it
all inside. Where you walk into this huge building. You

(15:54):
got these two stores on both ends, and there are
no doors. They might have a gate they lower it night,
but it's just open. Like people will just walk through
this little concourse and all the stores are wide open
for everyone. It's air conditioned, it's heated, not at the
same time, at appropriate times, especially in a place like Minneapolis,
it's probably a nice place to go in the wintertime. Yeah,

(16:16):
it was a big deal. He introverted them is what
they're called, right where they look in on themselves, and
they're enclosed as well. So for the first time ever,
you could just walk around this beautiful place with trees,
and he put like a twenty foot bird cage, and
there were goldfish ponds and all of this stuff. And
it'd be the middle of winter and you could walk
around in short sleeves and be like, I live in

(16:38):
a Dinah, not a dina. The other thing he kind
of nailed right out of the gate was previous to this,
shopping malls were usually or shopping centers are on one floor,
and they were spread out over this big, broad area
and you had to enter from the outside and walk
around the cold and it was all this one big,

(17:00):
single level. And he said, how about this, how about
we stack it, because this is a genius. Everyone put
a store on one end, put a store on the
other end. You stack him on top of each other.
You put escalators on both sides. You park in this side,
you go into your department store, you walk down on
the first level to get to the other department store,
you get down the escalator, and then you walk back

(17:20):
on the other level to get to your car. And
you've seen every store, right, and it was genius. It
was retail genius, exactly pretty amazing. And again we take
this for granted now, but at the time everyone's like, hum,
I never thought of that. Well, the point that we
take this for granted, like all of this sounds brain dead.
All of this came essentially from this one guy, this

(17:41):
dude named Victor Grewitt, who was kind of like a
high artsy Fartsia society type from Austria who fled the
Nazis in nineteen thirty eight and was a self taught
architect right who just started designing them all and he
invented the mall, and he got basically everything right out
of the gate, actually amazing. The Economist has a really

(18:03):
great quote about him. They say that he it was
as if Orville and Wilbur Wright invented not just manned
flight but also tray tables and duty free service. Not bad.
The other thing he got right right out of the
gate was these low balconies. You know, if you'd ever

(18:24):
go into them all. You know, if you're on that
top floor, you can look down and say, I gotta
go into Chess King and get some parachute pants. Or
if you're down on that bottom floor, you can look
up and you can see I gotta go to Marry
Go Around and check out the ladies. Merry Go Around. Man.
That takes me back right. There will be a bit
of nostalgia peppered in here and there. Actually, I don't

(18:45):
even think I put Marry Go Around. I put Camelot
music is what I have in my Camelot music everyone.
And the joke I have was the Duran Duran kissingle.
Oh my god, the kissingle. It's like I just ate
a whole bunch of member berries or something of what
member berries. I don't know. It's a whole South Park thing. Okay, Yeah,

(19:11):
Well three other people love that joke. So more than
seventy five thousand people. Seventy five thousand people turned out
on the grand opening day of Southdale Mall, and not
just local press, Life Magazine, Time Magazine, New York Times,
Business Week, Newsweek, They all came out and said things

(19:34):
like it's the splashiest center in the US, as a
goldfish pond, birds art, ten acres of stores, and all
under one Minnesota roof. It's a pleasure dome with parking,
said Time magazine. But one guy got it right. One
guy said Southdale has become an integral part of the
American Way, and this is the first mall. And some

(19:55):
journalist points to it and says, this is how things
are from now on. And this is the page that
is very hard for me to read because, as you
can see, I crumpled it up. Well, hold on, so
if we're going to release this, we should probably take
an ab break. Huh oh yeah, sure, Okay, you're ready,
so we'll be right back, and we're back, all right.

(20:38):
I'm glad you thought of that. You guys get to
see how the sausage. So, as I was saying before
the break, I don't know if you can see it there,
but this is crumpled up and very hard to read.
Because Josh sent a new version and I in the
hotel room, I said great, I printed it out, rumpled

(21:00):
up the wrong one and threw it away, and right
before I came I was searching through the trash and
here it is. It's not that bad actually, So we're
gonna entitle this next section the golden age of the
mall was you have to go like this one. It
wouldn't be a live show if we didn't have a
golden age of skyjacking, Golden age of pr golden age

(21:21):
of grave robbing, and now the golden age of them
all right. I was about to say golden age of
Rodney Dangerfield, but it was all golden age for that guy.
So the mall had its golden age. Between nineteen fifty
six and two thousand and five, fifteen hundred malls or
America were built, possibly two thousand, possibly three thousand, what

(21:43):
no one knows. They just stopped counting pretty much. They're like,
forget it. We'll say seven thousand. Who cares. Million. A
million malls were built between that time in the US.
So there's a woman named Lisa Sharon who wrote a
book called America at the Mall Colon, because every book
has to have a colon if you're smart. The cultural

(22:06):
role of retail utopia. And she said, for the children seventies, eighties,
and nineties, the shopping mall was the place to be,
a space where we defined as our own. The mall
taught us how to fit in, how to be a consumer,
ultimately how to be an American. So who I mean,
we don't. You don't have to say how old you are.
But if you grew up in sort of the seventies
and the eighties, you know that the mall and into

(22:28):
the nineties. Of course, sure, the shopping mall was like
it's different than it is today. Like families used to
go to the mall for the day. You'd pick a Saturday,
and you'd all pile in the car. You go to
the mall. You maybe go see a movie, the kids
would go to the arcade. Mom and dad would do
some shopping, and you would literally spend like six and

(22:48):
eight hours as a family outing at a mall. Right,
pretty unbelievable to think about that. Now you gather around
the laptop and go on the Amazon dot com. Yeah,
and I'll sit around and stare at your phones and
ignore you. Just say, yes, I would like to get
into fermenting pickles. I could use some fermentation weights. Thanks
for suggesting that Amazon. Interesting. You just changed my life.

(23:11):
But it was a big deal. You would spend family
Day at the mall. And in the eighties it was
just it was a part of America as anything else.
There were restaurants in the food court at the mall
that didn't exist outside of them all. They were born
in the mall, like Cinnabon. Someone gasped, that's it, we

(23:33):
can go home now, we're ever working toward as a
gasp from somebody. Orange Julius that was another one. And
Express was only in malls for a long time. And
apparently Sbarrow. Everyone knows of Sbarrow, right. It was so
tied to malls that when Sabarrow filed for bankruptcy in
twenty fourteen, they cited unprecedented decline in mall traffic in

(23:56):
their filing. There's like, no one likes the mall anymore.
We're borrow, We're dead. Yeah, word good Chick fil A too.
You guys don't have Chick fil A here, do you? Oh?
You do you do well? Long before we knew the chicken,
it was back when everyone just thought it was delicious

(24:18):
and juicy and crispy, not filled with homophobia. Yeah, but no, no,
they've they've since walked it back. So it's all fine. Yeah,
we're just not open on Sundays. Uh. Chick fil A
would used to only be in the mall. I think
there was one original Chick fil A store in Georgia.
I think that's where it was born. But aside from that,

(24:41):
it was only in the mall. And I remember going
to the mall. Remember when malls used and they may
still do this. I don't go to malls. There's a
shop on Amazon dot com. Um. Malls used to have
events like a world record Sunday ice cream Sunday or
something to get people there. I went to Chick fil
A when I was about ten at Northlake Mall, which
was my them all because they had the world's largest

(25:03):
cup of lemonade on a Saturday afternoon. My mom took
me and I drank from that spigot among the thousands
of other people, and it was not even that impressive,
Like I thought it was giant, but now that I'm adult,
it was probably like eight feet high. Right now it
was sixty four ounces. But they were just the first
ones to try, so whatever they did was the world's

(25:25):
biggest cup of lemonte. That was a mall event that
I went to. What was your mall? I had two
because we moved a very formative time in my life.
I had Southwick Mall untiledo. Yeah, and then over a clause, Okay,
I had a town center mall in Atlanta. No, okay,

(25:46):
you guys haven't been a town center mall. Believe me,
I would recognize you. Were you a mall rat. No, no,
not necessarily. No, I would not call myself a mall
rat because I wasn't. I didn't like sell or consume
drugs at the mall, so I wasn't a mall rat.
I was like there legitimately, like I was there to

(26:07):
visit the led Zeppelin box set on cassette that I
was saving up to buy, just to make sure it
was still there, you know, Or like I would go
to Spencers and like put my hand on the plasma ball.
Let's be like, oh, you guys have Spencer Gifts. Well
I say that like you're from here. I know that,
like eight people are from San Francisco in this room.
You know, Spencer Gifts. Okay, okay, very titillating place for

(26:31):
a young Baptist is because after because the one section
you know what I'm talking about, plus the posters too. Yeah.
But it's funny now as an adult, the one section
I just thought it was like, oh man, and then
there are some children here just you don't know what
I'm talking about. Maybe may maybe she's used to pick lad.
I don't know how to do that. It was, but

(26:53):
for a young Baptist kid, I was just like I would.
I would. I would walk by it and I would
pretend like I'm looking at other things and just look
in that section to see what I was in it.
I remember, and now it was so dumb the stuff
that was in that secure Yeah. Yeah, it's like a
stud collar. I was like, who cares. By the time
you're like, oh cool, I got it checking me out
yesterday was wearing one and nothing else. Yeah, maybe a

(27:15):
condom with bells and that's it. So silly. I remember
walking past Victoria's Secret like I was not doing that
on purpose, but just kind of like like I could
actually I trained my right eye to go like I
took a lot of exercise, a lot of work, a
lot of muscle relaxers, but I got it down path.

(27:40):
Oh that's good. And that was pret cell phone when
you couldn't fake like you were doing something else. Right,
good work, that's very impressive. You trained it back and
everything I did now I can't do it anymore, or
else I show you guys, I don't know where I was.
I got so sidetracked by North Lake Mall. Oh and
the gold mine was my arcade at the mall. Sure wonderful.

(28:02):
You can get like twenty tokens for a dollar on
a Wednesday, and now games cost like a dollar fifty
to play one game. Yeah, a progress. That's what else
said they have back in those days? You made a
list Chess king. Of course, Mary go Around, I mentioned
contempo casuals, ladies, deb knew. This section was all into

(28:24):
that county seat. Remember county seat. Oh, that's that is
a deep cut where you could go get gene blue.
But it was like when the gap used to be
like sweatsirts and blue jeans before they rebranded. Right, you
should go back to that, Mary go Around. Can want music?
What else? Oh? Well, bookstores? You could just say bookstore

(28:45):
and that would be novel be Dalton, Yeah, Waldon books,
Walden Books. I think I consumed every single volume of
truly tasteless jokes and those without buying a single one. Man,
I remember those, God, those are great, Yeah, Pet Doctor,
the cruel List, cutest store of all the time, Remember
like the mall pet Store. It was like this, hamps
are so cute and then it died like an hour

(29:07):
later from Nigglay. They just shuffle it out and put
a new one in. There's a trap door. Nice John
Hodgeman want to hate this show dripping with nostalgia. He's
here in this town. He refused to come because he
knew or are you kidding? He'd already be up here, like, Oh,

(29:34):
Nostalgia's toxic. The mall became a prominent fixture in movies
of the day, of course, the Sherman Oaks Galleria and California,
which is where we are, Yeah, California here. That was
the mall in Fast Times at Ridge Mount High, one
of the great mall movies, and full Mall movie, but
you can tell it's short. It also appeared prominently in Commando,

(29:56):
where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up like a ton of guys
at the mall, same mall. Nine of the comment you
mentioned anyone, I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking,
because you know the here if you haven't seen the movie,
this comment comes and destroys like everyone at night. Yeah,

(30:16):
and everyone has these comment parties to watch the comment
but it kills everybody except for the two really hot
teenage girls that didn't watch the comment and then a
few other people. And what do they do. They go
to the mall shop because it's abandoned. And I remember
being a kid and thinking that would be the dopest
thing ever to just go in an empty mall and

(30:36):
it's all yours, or to order to live at Restoration Hardware.
I wore to run into Spencer Gifts into that section. Yeah,
collar just like pass out from pleasure. That's what a
wayed you and you missed your chance. You could be
walking around the castro right right kind of look out

(30:58):
and there's this creepy guy with a wandering staring at
me and who knew? Who knew? What else? The Blues
Brothers had a very famous mall scene. Yeah, they went
through the Dixie Square mall, sorry, the Decius Square mall
that where they were like, this place has got everything.

(31:22):
And maybe one of the most famous mall parking lots
of all time the Twin Pines Mall from Back to
the Future, which was actually the Quinte Heels Mall. Heels
that was possibly appropriate maybe, which I don't even know
where that is. I mean it's in LA obviously, but
I'm not sure it's a it's in City of Industry,

(31:42):
which is that the name for a town? Everybody, No,
it's outside of LA. I looked it up. And of
course mall Rats, which we don't need to talk about
too much because it was a little Really that was
Kevin Smith. Here's a really high voice. No, I'm Vin Smith.

(32:03):
You can't leave out Moon Unit. Zappa dude, Oh well, yeah,
of course. Valley Girl. Yeah, she had a hit single,
Valley Girl, and her father, Frank Zappa hated the Valley Girls, right,
and while it kind of blew up in his face
when he released a song with his daughter about how
stupid valley Girls were, that it actually popularized Valley Girls
and made him cool in America. Yeah, so eat that,

(32:25):
Frank Zappa. He's past eat that. In musical heaven, so um.
Alls started to really grow, not only in popularity but
in size, to the point, as Josh says, of sheer
absurdity in Canada because they have malls too, I should say, yeah, yeah,

(32:50):
we have some Canadians here, and yet no one from Toledo.
The West Edmonton mall really all right opened and no
one from Toledo, anyone from Elm Street in Edmonton. Yeah,
that's what I thought. It was open in nineteen eighty two,

(33:11):
had an ice skating rink, It had sea lions in
a pool boo, and an indoor bungee jumps to tempt
fate for shoppers right over the sea lions. It's just
scared than Oh my god, sea lions hate being jumped over.
And the developers knew it too. And of course the

(33:34):
Mall of America, perhaps the most famous mall in Minnesota.
They were going to build a roller coaster there. They
did when they decided to build three roller coasters there.
I've never been there. Have you been there in the
Mall of America? No? I haven't anyone been there? Oh wow,
all right, huge? Right, it's outside of a dinah, so actually,

(33:57):
you know, really it's like seven miles from a dinah.
That's true. Should we go to the mall walkers, Yeah,
I think so. This may be one of my favorite
sections of any show we've ever done, because I love
mall Walkers. Didn't know it existed until I worked at them. All.
I worked. I think I mentioned on the show I
worked at the Gap for a month in college over

(34:19):
Christmas break and I was a champion folder and I
still have those skills today. Were you really you know
I actually quit working in the Gap is because they
got mad that I wouldn't recommend socks and belts as
they checked out, And I said, I think if they
wanted socks and belts, they would get socks and belts.
And my manager said, you know, I don't know if

(34:39):
the Gap is right for you. I think you might
be right. I took off my little pen and I
handed it to him, and me and my mock turtlenecks
strolled right on at it and that was it. That's
the only retail job I've ever I did. But anyway,
a long way of getting to mall walkers. I remember

(35:00):
showing up for work one morning to open and there
were these old people walking around and I thought, does
anyone know that they're in here because the mall's not
open yet, And someone said they live here. Yeah, they yeah,
they live in and merry go round and come out
at night from the giant pants they just sprouted out

(35:20):
of the legs. But they explained to me what a
mall walker was, and even at a young age, I
was like, that's wonderful. It wore my heart and it
became a legit, real American thing. It did. Apparently the
CDC did a report on this, because if you can't
study gun violence, might as well study mall walking out

(35:42):
sing And in twenty fifteen they said malls are right
behind neighborhoods for popularity of walking. They just went to
bed after that, but they did a little more digging
and they said the reason people love malls is because

(36:03):
there's restrooms, water fountains, benches, and level surfaces. And this
is one of my favorite quotes from any CDC rapport ever.
They said that quote, the latest fashionable workout attire is
not a requisite for malwalking, And no truer words have
ever been spoken. You won't find any yoga pants on

(36:25):
the mallwalkers. As a matter of fact, I would imagine
you would be ostracized if you did just kind of
gussy up, like you're putting on airs or something new.
They don't play that in a dinah. Yeah. Actually, you
know what malwalkers were, those those workout pants that look
like waded up paper. You know, what I'm talking about.
It's like this wrinkly, weird material. I don't even know

(36:46):
what it's made of. Fish skin? What, Yes, all right,
we're gonna talk about all right, we'll talk about it later.
Let's hang on to this page to remind us to
talk about it. Well, that's fish skin, but you mean clothing.
That's totally weird, but it makes sense in a way.
Uh So, these these generally elderly folks are walking around malls,

(37:08):
and at the Mall of America, they have a PR
coordinator there named Tara Neebling, and she says, we love
our wall markers, mall walkers. They're very special to us.
And they even have a program there is so adorable
where they give them little swipe cards. It keeps track.
It's sort of like a fitbit, but they can't wear
a fitbit, I guess because I don't even know why

(37:30):
they can't figure it out or something. That's a very
agist and is going to be against the wall for
that joke later on. But they give them these little
swipe cards that lets them track how much they're walking
and how much exercise they're getting. They have monthly breakfast
meetings where they have health experts come in and talk
about stuff. We should all go there right now. And

(37:53):
all this is in exchange for a fifteen dollars annual
fee if you want to officially be a member. But
don't feel bad, sir, because like I was, like, what
a rip. They said they welcome unofficial mall walkers aka
the old dudes who refused to pay the fifteen dollars
aka Society's leeches. That would be me. I'm not paying

(38:18):
fifteen dollars. That's me and about oh ten or fifteen years. Anyway,
I think it's adorable. And the whole thing about mall
walkers is they it was a problem at first because
they didn't used to open malls to allow this. They
just came to the mall when it was open and
they would walk around and they said that there was
a quote in here they said they thought it would
upset the regular shoppers to have them just exercising among them.

(38:42):
And they're like, you know what do we do? We
can't kill them. They got our they have our arms
behind our backs, like they really have us over a barrel.
We can't kill them, can we? We could wait for
them to die, And I guess this is that they're
really healthy because all mall owners gets together year. Yeah. Yeah,

(39:02):
like CAP's red satin inside black on the own. So
they decided to open them all just for them to
walk around before the store is open, which is just adorable,
I think. And speaking of the Mall of America, Douglas Copeland,
I don't know if any of you have read Generation X.
It's a really great book, but he basically coined the name.

(39:23):
Apparently no one's read it. Douglas Copeland, Wow, this really
would work so much better if you guys knew what
Generation X was. Yeah, we wrote it. So he wrote
the book literally Generation X, and like just set the
tone for the whole thing. And he was actually at
the opening of Mall of America on August eleven, nineteen

(39:44):
ninety two, and he was up there on stage with
the local radio affiliate, and he said that everybody was
walking by with what he called country fair face, where
they were like google eyed and eating ice cream, couldn't
believe this mall. It was the most amazing thing they'd
ever seen. And he said that the inner viewer just
assumed he was going to be like a slacker, ironic
wise ass and said, you know, I bet you think

(40:06):
this whole mall is very hokey and trashy, and Douglas
Copeland said, actually not at all, Chuck. Where should I
start here? Oh? Oh, sorry, I can't finish my part.
Then the radio guy was like, what, Chuck, and he said, quote,
I mean that. I feel like, I mean another era
that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn't, not yet.

(40:28):
I think we might one day look back on photos
of today and think to ourselves, you know, those people
were living in golden times and they didn't even know it.
Communism was dead, the economy was good, and the future,
with all of its accompanying technologies, hadn't crush society's mojo
like a bug drop the mica and they said, well,

(40:50):
that's really not good for the mic, and we're please, please,
don't do that anymore. And he goes on to say
it's true. He says that technology hadn't hallowed up the
middle class and turned to all into like laptop click chunkies.
He didn't say that there were no He said there
were no new boogeymen hiding in the closet. He said,
we may look at the nineties as the last good
decade and all of this came to him at the mall,

(41:16):
so they didn't get their snarky quote after all, which
is kind of ironic in a way. So he really
did zing them, but it was a meta zinc So
if you want to talk to the psychology of malls,
we need to go back to Victor Gruen, and he
has a quote where he said shoppers will be so
bedazzled by the store surroundings they'll be drawn unconsciously continually

(41:38):
to shop. And this kind of goes against his ethos.
He wasn't some big He wasn't like the pr guy.
I can't think of his name. We did that like
twelve times. He wasn't like Ed Burney's. He didn't have
this thing where he was like, yes, we need to
get people to shop, but he was commissioned to do
so and he did a good job. He thought the

(41:59):
mall would be a little bit more like a sort
of like they had in Europe, like a public meeting space,
and that's why you build these atriums in the middle
of the skylights in the fountain, and he thought people
would go there and hang out and talk politics and
maybe even stand up and like speak about things publicly.
To people, because that's what happens at the mall. Right, Instead,
the developers are like, you go over there, you're done,

(42:21):
you did your damage. Right. We're actually going to go
so far as to name a psychological effect after you,
something called the grew In transfer, which is where you
walk into the mall and you're like, I'm going to
buy a Hello Kitty pen and that is it. And
you get through the mall and you're like, oh my god,
there's a water fountain. Oh my god, there's old people
walking around. There's just amazing stuff going on here at

(42:44):
the mall. I forgot what I was going to get,
and now I have a compulsion to get an Orange
Julius with drugs in it. And you forget what you're doing,
and all of a sudden you're shopping in general rather
than purposefully shopping. That is called the grew In trans
for the grew In effect, and Victor Grewhim probably would
not be very happy to know that that was the case. No,

(43:05):
And as we'll see later, he in fact was not
happy about that. So Malcolm Gladwell, Josh's mortal enemy. He
did an interview with a Alfred Taubman and he said
it's called threshold resistance, he said. People assume that we
enclose the space because of air conditioning and climate control.
He said, what it really did was allow us to

(43:26):
open the store to the customer. Just what we talked about,
that introverted thing. All of a sudden, you're in this
huge retail utopia. All the doors are open at all time,
and you're just strolling through the mall, and you walk
by Niketown and they have like looks like a nightclub
in there, so you're just sort of unconsciously drawn inside there,
like I'd like to make some new friends, all right, truly,

(43:47):
I can't Niketown. Back in the day in shopping centers,
they used to have live bands, and that was replaced,
of course, with muzak later on, which is you know,
you'd take like a normal song like breads, I want
to make it with you, and then you remove the lyrics,
the percussion or place it all with strings, and all

(44:08):
of a sudden people are just walking around like bye bye.
It works really well, so much so that the people
at malls who are typically in charge of the music
were the same people who were in charge of the
heat and the lighting. The facilities manager that's how much
music meant to It was like part of the building.
But at the same time, you can't really call it music,

(44:30):
you know. In fact, you'd probably call it something weird
like muzac. Yeah, you think about the coolest DJ. I'm
not hip on that scene. Steve Ioki. Okay, the facilities
manager is the opposite of Steve Ioki. But they're sitting
in their room and and they're controlling the music and

(44:51):
the lights and the sounds of the mall all in
that little room. Dead mouse, Oh, I know what that is.
But the s is a number five? Right, Yeah, so hip,
so hip, I'm not old scrilling scrillis. I know that
guy too. So we talked a little bit earlier about

(45:15):
the the cycle of the mall, the two story layout.
And while you can go to malls where there are
three stories, most of the malls i've been to that
have a third story. It's not the entire mall. There'll
be like a section with a third story. I don't
know if they built it on or what, but generally
you see a two story mall because you had that

(45:36):
cycle the across, down, across, up back to your car, right,
and you've seen all the stores, right, But if you
had a third level, you go across, down, across. My
car should be here. But now I have a third
level and I'm stuck. I'm just gonna wander around in
this corner until some people come get me. And as
a matter of fact, Valco Mall had three levels. Look

(45:56):
what happened to it? What mall? It's a local mall.
Oh and the fourteen people from San Francisco applied, right, yeah,
Oh it's in San Jose. It's like the same place.
Come on, I think you could default to Bay Area

(46:17):
and you do yourself a lot of favors. You're hearing
this from like the guy who took off an Infinity
scarf right before he came on stage because he was
told like, it's not cool anymore. I don't even know
what that is. So your burn does not work? No, no,
I was talking about myself burning you, buddy. I wasn't
burning you, all right, burn? Yeah, it's an Infinity scarf.

(46:38):
It's a stupid What else did they figure any when
you're fine? Lady? Your Infinity scarf is fine? Is that
a that's lovely? Can you come up here and show
everyone when an Infinity scarf I'm kidding. No, everyone stopped
now because we thought about adding runway modeling to our shows.

(47:00):
Sure that would be a great time. Sorry about the
infanty scarf joke. Now I feel terrible. Is anyone drinking
nothing but soilent right now? I should have made that
joke Instead, I'm looking over my glasses for more clothes.
I can make fun of Tyler Murphy. That beard is

(47:21):
something else. He died of blue. Everybody, all right, this
is another part that's gonna be edited out later, So
Tyler say whatever you want. So the other thing they
figured out with keeping people in the mall, which is
a big goal, is that people like to shop with

(47:43):
other people, but sometimes the people that you bring to
shop with you, namely husbands, don't like to be at
the mall. So they said, well, let's put comfy areas
in the mall, like chairs. And in fact, there was
a quote that said a chair says we care, Yeah,
a famous mall designer. But it really means is a
chair says we can keep your wife here longer than
you would like to be here. Right. The husband's like, Oh,

(48:06):
I just want to lay down and die on my
floor at home. Can I just go home. You can
lay down and die here, sir, right lay there, shut up.
So the ironies are grewing. We said earlier. I don't
think we specifically said he was a socialist now, so

(48:27):
it's really weird for a socialist to be the father
of the shopping mall, wouldn't you think. And his original
idea was that people could go there and espouse their views,
and that maybe happened once in nineteen seventy six, until
the Supreme Court came in and said, in the case
of Hudgins versus Natural Relations Labor Relations Board, basically, these

(48:47):
union dudes wanted to pick it inside the mall and
they did so they got kicked out. They sued, and
the Supreme Court said, actually, his private property, and you
can't bring your picket signs in here. And the picks
who are like, wait, wait, wait, the mall is the
new heart, the new civic center of American life, and
the Supreme courtment, don't be an idiot, it's a place

(49:10):
to shop, dummy, and everyone when I didn't hear what
you just said, we're gonna just keep pretending like the
mall is the hardest civic life. So it was a
big problem for grew and actually he also hated cars.
He was big into walking. He was in favor of pedestrianism,
and yet you have to drive a car to get

(49:31):
to the mall. And not only that, you have to park,
like some of his creations. I think Southdale had like
two point eight million square feet of parking, and he
called these things like land wasting seas of parking lots.
So as he's as he's designing these things, he's like,
I'm not very happy about this, and they would go
do it anyway, even the stuff he scratched out. They're like, no,

(49:52):
this is a good idea. We're gonna go with this.
And he had like, no, say whatsoever. After a while, no,
and he got a pretty disc a gusted, and he
left the United States forever. In the nineteen sixties, went
back to Europe and said in nineteen seventy eight, a
couple of years before his death, he gave a speech
in London and said, I am often called the father
of the shopping mall. I would like to take this

(50:14):
opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse
to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.
And they said, sir, we have the paternity tests and
you are the father, right He said, no, I'm not, No,
you really are. Yeah, we used luminal and everything. Maybe

(50:39):
we should take another ad break. Yeah, let's take another
ad break. We'll be back right after this. And we're back.

(51:11):
We should, I guess move on to the death of
the mall. Yeah, because I don't know if you guys
know this or not, but malls are not doing very
well these days. I know some couple of all clap well,
you'll probably like the rest of this episode. The mall
actually peaked in nineteen ninety at sixteen million square feet
of new space opened in that year, and it's been

(51:32):
tapering off ever since. And here's a little staggering statistic
for you. Since in nineteen fifties, when the first mall
was built, there was at least one mall built every
single year until two thousand and seven, usually many, many mall,
well up to a million from what I hear, I
mean that's an estimate, but yeah, yeah, So two thousand

(51:53):
and seven marked the first year that a new mall
wasn't built, and I think there were no new malls
built until two twelve. In the United States two thousand
and eight recession, the Great Recession had a really big
impact on retail. Yeah, that's there's like a bunch of
different reasons people put for what killed the mall. Right,
the mall has long been known for killing the American downtown. Right,

(52:18):
the mall moved out to the suburbs and the downtown
just kind of went away. Right, So reason number one
is that the Great Recession killed the mall. And this
is true to a pretty large extent actually, Like from
World War Two until I think two thousand and nine,
every single year Americans spent more money than they had

(52:39):
the year before, which is nuts. Right. Then two thousand
and nine comes and we stopped, and not only did
we stop, we actually declined tremendously. We stopped spending by
something like ten percent. And then the money that we
did spend, we started spending at Target in Walmart, not
at the mall, or at places like J. C. Pennies
or Sears who tried to keep these malls propped up

(53:01):
and who malls depended on. Because again, remember if you
go to a mall, the whole reason the mall exists
is for the department stores to spread their traffic out
to the smaller stores. And if the department stores are hurting,
which they were, then the smaller stores hurt as well.
So as these big, large anchor stores started to go under,
the malls did as well. But people said, the Great

(53:22):
Recession was pretty bad. It's probably not the only reason
that the mall is dying. Yeah, we mentioned Amazon dot
Com earlier, and they're not the only online retailer, of course.
And you can tell we're not from the area because
we say dot com after it. We just want to
make sure you guys know what we're talking about. We're
trying to communicate with you. I can't believe I said that.

(53:45):
How nerdy we would both of us have said it
like five or six times. Yes, stuff, you should know
dot com. Well, there's dot orgs and dot nets do yeah, Amazon,
dot EDUS, dot UK's specificity is a soul of narrative.

(54:06):
Oh good one, thank you. Take that, everybody, thank you.
In twenty fourteen, traditional retailers for the very first time
generated about half their sales from the web. But you
can't like I do all my shopping online now, I
literally haven't been. I think I went to the mall
last year for something and asked my wife. She's out there.

(54:28):
I was miserable. I hated it, but we had to
go for some reason or another I can't remember, probably
to stay in line for our stupid phone. I'm just
kidding out and do that either, thank you. But I
almost stood in line for breakfast this morning right here
in San Francisco, because that's the thing. Jeez. Yeah, but

(54:49):
online retailing isn't that big of a thing yet. Even
if it hits the fifteen percent annual growth over the
next three years that they project by twenty nineteen, it'll
still will only be about two point four I'm sorry,
twelve point four percent of retail, which is not enough
to kill them all. No, but it's a factor. No.
And plus, you can kind of find this weird confidence

(55:11):
in the idea that malls may continue limping along if
you're into that kind of thing, by the fact that
Amazon dot Com open a brick and mortar store a
bookstore to help boost their online sales, which is mind boggling,
but they did it in Seattle. But more than anything,
perhaps the reason the malls died, it's because they were

(55:32):
never meant to live forever. And this next part is
about the economics of malls, and specifically it sounds so
boring tax loopholes concerning malls, and Josh is going to
explain it. Okay, So if you build a building somewhere,

(55:57):
and I should say, hats off to Gladwell for planning
this too. This comes largely from him. But if you
build a building somewhere and say, like nineteen fifty, the
government said, you know what, your building's not going to
hold up forever, so you can deduct a certain percentage
of your building's value every year and put it aside
tax free to replace that building eventually. And at the

(56:21):
time when shopping malls first started to come about in
the early fifties, the deduction for this wear and tear
was one fortieth, right, Like, you had a forty years
to deduct this value of your building. Yeah, this is
not going well. No, that's perfect so far. I'm checking
him for accuracy. Okay, all right, I feel like like

(56:43):
my fingernails are bleeding. So every year, right, if you
went and built a shopping mall, you could deduct one
fortieth of the value of the shopping mall. Not a
huge deduction, but it was something it's called depreciation. The
problem is is this depreciation deduction was? It was something,
but it wasn't enough. If you built a shopping mall

(57:05):
in the early fifties, you were really asking for trouble
because they were hugely expensive. They cost like twenty million
or thirty million, which are on par to one hundred
and eighty or two hundred million dollars today, right, and
you were going to make your money back very very slowly.
But then, and I think nineteen fifty four, yes, the
US government said, you know what, we really want to

(57:26):
kind of get things going on building and construction. We
want to make sure Josh and Chuck have something interesting
to talk about at the end of their Malls episode
years from now. So we're going to change the tax code.
And they did, and they created or allowed for something
called accelerated depreciation, and this changed everything, Chuck. So I'm

(57:48):
going to go back to nineteen sixty one. The Wall
Street Journal wrote a little article trying to describe this
financial situation for a real estate company named Krader Coorp.
Sound totally made up like an evil villain's business that
you would run or an std I abbreviated what does

(58:11):
that stand for? Cratter Corp? It won't go away, doc,
So I'm gonna gona million to one, I tell you.
So this was a nineteen sixty young and around the
numbers just to make it easier. So let's say Cratter Corp.

(58:33):
In nineteen sixty made about ten million bucks overall. Is
everyone writing this down as we're saying that you don't
need to? So deductions from operating expenses and mortgage interest
is about five million bucks. So they still make about
five million bucks. Not a bad income, but not good enough.
Then came the depreciation, accelerated depreciation to the tune of

(58:55):
about seven million dollars. So all of a sudden, Cradder,
instead of having a profit of five million dollars on
the books, has a loss of a couple of million
dollars on the books. And everyone has these huge tax
write offs. And now you fully understand, if you didn't before,
why our next president doesn't pay income tax. Right. It's

(59:16):
basically this accelerated depreciation on real estate that allows you
to write off these massive amounts of money to show
big losses where you're in fact making gains. Right, And
the big change of the tax code was to the irs.
They're still getting the same amount of taxes over the
life of the building. They just said, if you want
to deduct this depreciation at the beginning of the life

(59:38):
of the building, that's fine with us. It's all the
same to us. Well, if you were a developer, you
would build this building, deduct as much as you could
over say three four five years, maybe even break even
just from the tax deductions, and then sell that mall
for pure profit of fifty or one hundred or one
hundred and fifty million dollars and talk away laughing and

(01:00:01):
laughing and laughing and exactly wearing your cape. But here's
the thing. They wouldn't like put that money back into
the mall to make it better. They would sell it
off like you said, and just go build a bigger
mall further out. And now we'll call these excerbs. They're
not even suburbs. Because they were all about going where
the land was cheapest. Right, the mall stopped being a

(01:00:23):
place to actually service people. They would just build malls
where they could get the best deals on land and
found that people would drive to them and sometimes even
build entire towns around them. Right, yeah, let's move to
the mall. And it's true, and so under this view
when you really understand why there were two thousand or
three thousand or a million malls built in the United States, huge,

(01:00:47):
huge mall. Some cities had multiple malls. When you realize
that they were built for text breaks and not to
fulfill some consumer demand, then of course they were destined
to shrivel and die because they were part of an
official supply. And once that became exposed and the text
bricks went away, mall started going down. And it's sad

(01:01:08):
in a way when a mall goes under. People have
associations of memories with the mall, you know, like you
you think about all the mall walkers you've seen and
loved walking around the mall, and when it dies, it's
it's sad. But even more than that, it can actually,
depending on the town, can take an entire city down
with it. Yeah, there was a place north Randall, Ohio. No,

(01:01:33):
I'm satisfied. What do you mean really, I mean it's
outside of Cleveland. I figured half of Cleveland probably tried
to move to some Even Emily didn't cheer for that one. No, No,
she's from Ohio. Yeah. So they had the Randall Park
mall and it costs about one hundred and seventy five
million bucks to build in nineteen seventy five. And get this,
the grand opening, five thousand guests had champagne, twelve hundred

(01:01:57):
pounds of fresh shrimp, crab, cold roast turkey, hot corned
beef and ham, melan and cheese, small crapes filled with
chicken and spinach, coffee and dessert. It was like a
Roman orgy basically and disguise of the opening of a mall.
You got you got the world's largest cup of lemonade.
That wasn't too bad. I just hate that I put

(01:02:19):
my mouth on that thing along with the other people.
He should have at least had smaller cups or maybe
not professional swimmers inside the cup. No there were seahorses. No, no, no,
those are fine. You just they passed right through your
digestive chap. You don't metabolize this so gross. Tommy Dorsey

(01:02:45):
showed up at the grand opening of this mall with
his orchestra to play. It was a big event. But
Randall Mall has since fallen on hard times and those
two point two million square feet of retail space have
been shuttered and um almost along with it. North Randall,
Ohio as a whole. That whole town is sort of
on life support basically because of closing up the shopping malls.

(01:03:07):
Really sad. Yeah, but there are some malls that are
still doing well. Outlet malls are thriving. High end malls
in case you're wondering how they're really wealthy, are doing
pretty good. High end malls are thriving like you would
not believe. They're up by fourteen point six percent since
the economic crisis. And there's this dude. His name's Rick Caruso.

(01:03:29):
He pretended the death of the mall. Malls are dead,
They're gone unless they reinvent themselves. And it just so
happens that I build the type of mall that malls
should reinvent themselves into. So he basically is trying to
recreate downtown, but a nice, happy Disney esque downtown where
nothing ever goes wrong and everything is great, and by

(01:03:52):
the way, it's also a mall and it's outdoors. And
to follow this trend, malls are doing the exact opposite
of what they did when Gruen started designing and closed malls.
They're tearing the roofs off and following this new trend
to try to survive. Yeah, he calls them lifestyle centers.
I don't know if there's one here. There's one in
Atlanta called Atlantic Station. I hate them more than anything

(01:04:17):
has really strong opinions. At least a mall is a mall.
It's not pretending to be a small town. Yeah, that's true.
You know it's true. It's like, look, we just built
these streets and there's it looks like a stoplight, but
your your child can control it fully and no cars
are allowed. Then there's no cars with a button. So
it's like downtown USA. There's no crime anywhere, security guards everywhere,

(01:04:40):
and I'll you do a shop, shop shop. So to me,
there's like there's a certain sadness over the death of
the mall. Like for me personally, I think even for
some of the booers in here. You spent time at
the mall. The mall represented something to America. But if
you step back and look about exactly what the mall represents,

(01:05:01):
and even more to the point, with the death of
the mall represents, is it really the death of a
golden age or a golden era when things were great?
Because if you look at the mall, it's an outpost
of consumerism. It's like a church of consumption, right, So
if we've lost that, then maybe out of the ashes,
out of the things that are so broken right now,

(01:05:21):
you can find some kind of weird hope that maybe
we can rebuild in a new, better way to where
the most important part of civic life isn't the mall. Wow,
and that is mall. That's malls. Thank you everybody, you

(01:05:42):
can do that stuff you should know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts to my Heartradio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.