Last week, I headed to California to visit my family. While we were there, the Santa Ana winds picked up, and as a result, the power was shut off at my parent’s house as a fire precaution for 2 days. On the second day, I was in desperate need of an outlet to charge my devices and Wi-Fi to get some work done. After searching for an outlet and a seat at multiple local coffee shops, my husband made a bold suggestion: isn’t there a café at the mall? Surely, we could find some outlets there. And it was then that our unlikely hero was found, power restored, and work completed. But it got me thinking about times past when this mall served as the center of the community, and not as a secondary thought for a place we could park ourselves for a few hours to use up some free electricity.
In mid-2023, I came across an interesting Vox article, titled “Going Shopping is Dead”, which highlighted the sad reality that people don’t just go shopping at the rates previously seen before the Covid pandemic. As a young child, I longed for Saturday, when my mom would take me to go shopping at the mall, and maybe grab a Mrs. Fields cookie to share. As a teenager, I worked at this same mall, spending my free time as a sales associate at a children’s boutique. When I wasn’t working, the mall was the cool place to be seen with your friends on a Friday night, and a place for me to spend every dollar I had made that week buying trendy clothes at the overpriced and over scented Abercrombie and Fitch (I am a millennial, after all). You went to the mall for all kinds of events: visits with the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, listening to the local elementary school choir, selling Girl Scout cookies with your troop, dinners with family and friends. It was always the place to be. Today, there are a surprising number of store vacancies for a wealthy community, and on a Thursday morning, the mall was mostly filled with stereotypical “mall walkers”, getting exercise on a day when air quality was too poor to be outside, but a very limited number of actual shoppers.
How do we get the mall back to its former glory? How do we make the mall cool again? How do we bring back shopping as a fun activity? Of course, I would be remiss to not bring up the economy. Times are hard out there for many people, and shopping is a luxury that they cannot afford. There are also things that malls need to do to bring shoppers back to the mall and keep them interested. But those of us who work in the commercial real estate industry, we need to start putting our money where our livelihoods live. Start shopping at the mall again. Make purchases in person instead of online. Brave the holiday crowds and support your local economy. If we start shopping at the mall again, and attending the events put on by our malls, it will surely make a difference in our local economies and just maybe, we can start a movement to save the malls.
As we sat and worked, I helped an older woman find a plug for her devices, moving a chair closer to an outlet for her to get some power as well. Another gentleman needed help with Wi-Fi connection. Strangers shared tables and tales of life without power (what Gary lovingly called our Amish experience). We were all in the same boat, power off for over a day, but we were the lucky ones, as a fire raged 10 miles away burning down numerous homes in the local community. That day, the mall was what it had been 20 years ago: a place for community. Let’s bring it back.
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