“The Egyptians have pyramids, the Chinese have the Great Wall, the British have immaculate lawns, the Germans have castles, the Dutch have canals, the Italians have grand churches. And Americans have shopping centers.” wrote Kenneth T. Jackson in his 1996 article “The World’s a Mall.” Jackson, an eminent historian of New York City, turned his gaze to the suburban phenomenon of the American mall and found it to be a striking synecdoche for a particular epoch in American history. And he wouldn’t be wrong. The mall––in its sameness, and abundance, its hidden seediness and advertised cleanliness––captures the ethos of capitalist post-war America and the rise of neoliberalism. But as time churned on and neoliberalism became the defining structural tenet of American life, even the mall’s half-hearted attempt at creating public space was cannibalized by a system orchestrated under one flag: profit maximization.
The hold that capitalist imaginaries had over working- and middle-class lives was especially strong in the Midwest, the birthplace of the mall, because of the region’s own history as a place managed from the outside and structural atomization facilitated by the suburbs.
The first mall cropped up in the midst of post-war America’s white flight, which rapidly populated the suburbs. The confluence of G.I. bills available to white families provided access to home ownership, widespread automobile ownership1, a newfound consumer role for men carved out by cultural institutions like Playboy, the return of many American women to the home, and disposable income, all of which created a perfect storm for a new uniquely suburban shopping experience. Only nine years after Levittown cracked ground, the first mall cropped up in Southdale, Minnesota, in 1956.
While there have been shopping centers for as long as there have been settled societies with merchants, Southdale Mall boasted the first temperature-controlled indoor mall that relied on consumers who drove their own automobiles to enjoy the abundance. Southdale Mall promised Minnesotans refuge from the harsh winter, ensuring that every day was a perfect day, just like the last. Lives at the mall were perhaps overdetermined, but at least they were also pleasant.
For the first ten years that shopping malls were an American staple, Jim Crow was the stated law of the land. The appeal of the shopping malls was in part rooted in white Americans’ desire to escape the need to frequent urban neighborhoods for shopping needs, and malls rely heavily on a large security presence. These security presences are dialed down in the face of suburban white teenagers who might use the mall parking lot to experiment with drugs, or the Victoria’s Secret to experiment with petty theft, and dialed up when it comes to reinforcing racial hierarchy and surveillance. After 9/11, government agencies and corporate entities funneled money into think tank reports on reducing the risk of terrorism in malls, which served as an impetus to invest increased private and state funds in profiling and targeting patrons perceived to be Muslim. Black Americans are regularly surveilled while shopping. This racialized policing is not just a fluke; it is a feature. The imagined mall patron is a white person, and those who might make the experience even slightly inconvenient for this white patron are systematically excluded.
Context collapse of all public space under private enterprise, guarded by its own security force, renders the public space of the busy city and the unsurveilled space of the countryside irrelevant. Suburbanites no longer had to think about the maintenance of urban districts, as they had no need to traverse them for leisure. They could avoid seeing minorities through rigid policing of their retail space. The promise of the mall was that it could prop up public life on the back of retail space, a private-private partnership. Suburbs car-centric design already facilitated familial atomization and a reliance on planned institutions such as school clubs and formally organized social and sports groups. By 1980, nearly 50% of Americans lived in suburbs, and even the technologies of leisure—gardening, home playgrounds, patios—reflected an individualist relationship between people and their surroundings, and a closed-offness from chance connection or mingling.
Neoliberal austerity facilitated this increasing privatization of leisure, as money was increasingly funneled into maintaining an economically laissez-faire police state concerned with broken windows policing. While the brunt of this policing was geared towards punishing populations deemed surplus, it also fundamentally structured the lives of the intended benefactors. As gathering space became an insurmountable hurdle for group activity, the mall became the most viable “third place” for many Americans––a place that was neither home nor work where they could spend their time. Of course, they were spending time and money in equal measure.
It feels like no small coincidence that the first mall, and many quintessential malls during their golden period, were distributed across the Midwest. In Midwest Futures, his thoughtful collection of essays about the region’s history and identity, Phil Christman describes how the Midwest was first incorporated into the United States through surveyors’ eyes. These surveyors saw the forceful dislocation of indigenous Americans as a step in clearing land that would function as a fund for their economically struggling government trying desperately to find a way to pay off their debts. “Not a place—a fund,” Christman writes.
Department store companies, and their associated developers like the Homart Development Company of Sear’s, eyed the suburbs with the same dollar signs in their eyes. Every mall, thus, has a similar layout, anchored by several department stores that are essential to the dollar-per-square foot calculus of the shopping center. Though obviously not exclusive to the Midwest, the mall carries a Midwest sensibility wherever it goes. See also: the sneering way many New Yorkers describe the mallification of the SoHo area and the city more broadly, by which they mean: sameness, rising rent and securitization for the comfort of white people who grew up in suburbs; a one stop shop to identity as commodity.
A mall, no matter how much it laudes itself as one, is not a town square. Orchestration from the outside became a defining tenet of Midwestern life. The region took shape as an area where industries “make places, rather than picking from among pre-existing sites. So the place was planned and settled in batches… Towns often arose before settlers came to live in the surrounding hinterlands, rather than springing into existence as trading outposts for initially isolated farmers… A new town always needs a little of everything, so agriculture, industry, processing, transit, and farm tech also grew up together.”
Malls rapidly cropped up in communities at the behest of a number of retail giants who hoped to seize more Americans leisure time, thereby becoming an integral structuring institution of their time and space. Another way to frame the oft-mentioned “third place” dimension of the mall is that the mall created a space where every part of identity and every aesthetic experience was a result of or resulted in a consumption choice. That is, the mall was a space in which every part of identity and every aesthetic experience was planned, down to the rips in the Hot Topic jeans.
In the model of post-war abundance and the shift to America as a commercial society, the mall offers the middle class not only physical objects, but the means of social reproduction and identity formation. Just as the single-family home models the horizons of possibility for intimacy, the mall created a blueprint for a certain kind of social interaction, especially for teens. In Rax King’s essay collection Tacky, she captures the affective power of the mall for young people: “[When we went to the mall, w]e wrote scripts and novellas about ourselves by living them; we taught ourselves about the humanity in each other by exploiting the social tension that bound us all. Entering a shopping mall was like walking onto the stage of a great opera. We knew our roles and how to play them. We played out the great love stories of the world in cruel, petty simulacra.” The set dressing of the mall provided a backdrop to the epic highs and lows of the teenage years, shaping the desires, neuroses, and relationships to a generation’s consumption. It absorbed, and in turn created, norms of sociality that could then be reproduced outside the mall. I, an older member of Gen Z, often marvel at how people in the past used to meet much more in public––my parents met in a hotel bar!
The mall provided a testing ground for the state of public sociality many young people find ourselves in now. This state of sociality is birthed by the suburbs’ planning, and accelerated by “stranger danger” mentalities, helicopter parenting, the increasing share of 18-to-29 year olds who live with their parents, and rising rates of social anxiety. Public gathering, instead of being a site for serendipitous connection, is a way to rehearse out interaction with a group of people you already know from somewhere else (maybe school, or work, or Tinder); attempts at connection from those not already deemed “safe” are an interruption to this psychodrama.
The psychodrama’s script was not only written by actual social interactions, but by media representations of the mall. These media representations popped up in many of the quintessential American movies of the 1990s. Films like Pretty Woman, Clueless, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and many more lent an eroticism and fantasy to the mall, and presented it as a site to stunt existing capital, mingle with people who might otherwise be out of reach, or accrue new social clout. One quintessential mall movie, Mean Girls, posited the mall’s common space as an animalistic free-for-all where teens could enact their basest instincts. Social capital was conferred through Regina George’s simple call: "get in loser, we’re going shopping."
When you were at the mall, you could be anybody because you could buy any type of outfit. This is especially true under neoliberalism, where large amounts of money are funneled into convincing people that identity is about language and consumption choices. Suburban teenagers, whose securitized upbringings often didn’t allow them to interact with subcultures, might do something like buy a rainbow flag shirt from a company actively lobbying against LGBT rights. The mall likely had a role in defanging a number of counter-cultural movements in the suburbs by selling an imagined “punk” outfit next to a “hippie” one next to a t-shirt that said “Feminist AF.” This isn’t to blame the people who bought these things. Teenagers who don’t have a lot of options for plugging into movement politics or for feeling connected to people through sharing public space would obviously want to broadcast the affinity they have for those politics in any way they can.
It seems no coincidence that “alt” fashion posited as such, which largely regurgitated the same too-polished imitations of punk and goth signifiers like high, striped socks, mini skirts with chains on them, and platform boots, took off during the pandemic on TikTok. One viral online trend that juxtaposed “my fashion last year” (bad) with “my fashion now” (good) consisted mostly of white teenagers and young women who wore avante basic trends one year ago wearing fishnet tights and chains in 2021. The re-emergence of mall-core scene inspired looks gave even the most mainstream teens a way to position themselves against the norm as they felt increasingly unmoored from their typical sites of social reproduction, just as the promise of Hot Topic’s t-shirt wall did for teens in the aughts. Also, some of that shit looked cool as hell. I still have a necklace that says “feminist killjoy” that I think I bought at the mall when I was like sixteen, before I had read any Sara Ahmed or willfully participated in any real activities one might consider “feminist.” Being able to adopt countercultural signifiers without any linkages to the history of these countercultures, whether they be punk rejection of consumerism or feminist attempts at reconfiguring love and power, is a critical component of neoliberal identity formation, and perhaps nowhere is this more explicit than in a mall setting. It wasn’t just countercultural identities that experienced context collapse in the mall; lower middle-class people who wanted to tie their identity to the myth of meritocracy could easily walk into a Hollister and begin to dress “preppy.'' Never mind that preparatory school tuition regularly clocks in higher than the median household income of the United States of America. The outfits (and options) are disappearing, though: in early 2021, regional malls had a vacancy rate of 11.4%. Teens are more likely to find their alt fits on Amazon, the most prominent surveyors of online consumerism, creating their own personalized Amazon storefronts to suggest purchases to others and reap a small amount of the profit.
Mall nostalgia is nostalgia for a moment of strongly felt American dominance––the specter of online retail is not just the loss of public shopping, but its replacement by retailers who engage largely in drop shipping products from China. White American nostalgia is neurotically fixated on social constructions that are imagined dead even as they become stronger and stronger. These nostalgias become a mechanism by which its practitioners eliminate or challenge remaining threats to hegemony. And so, what is the ethos of society inscribed by the tragedy of the mall?
When a system whose defining feature is profit maximization cannibalizes its own institutions, it disciplines its populace into understanding that the limits of people’s ability to control the spaces they frequent are the limits of their consumption. This is how we see, even in moments of literal riots across the country about state-sanctioned brutality, the call to “support local business.” It’s how we convince ourselves that buying products from wealthy people who share identities with the populations eugenically designated for confinement and death is a way out of that confinement and death. It says that if we want things to exist, we have to earn them through working enough and fight for them through buying enough, and maybe even go into debt for the privilege of public space. It affirms that the people managing our lives are far away from us, planning our next move, and if they find a way to cut some corners they will still offer identity maintenance, no matter how gutted of material fodder that identity is.
And as the mall ends, there is some sense that something has been lost, a deep nostalgia intertwined with an understanding that the past was unsustainable.
The average person who misses the mall likely doesn’t miss a time when profit margins were higher for retail giants. Many people’s mall nostalgia is built on a very simple premise: we used to have a place to go and hang out and have fun and spend our time and didn’t have to pay for if we really didn’t want to or couldn’t, and now we have less of that. Retail is disaggregating from physical space, but maybe that’s okay. The Juicy Couture sweat suit was never really what made an after-school mall trip special. Public nostalgic energy for the mall would be better directed at creating or demanding spaces that facilitate connection. Augosto Boal argues that theater—and therefore, in this argument, planning––is a site for imagining and rehearsing for the society we want to live in. Maybe there were parts of the mall that really didn’t work: racial inequality, the way that a huge underpaid labor force across the globe toils to support white middle-class teen identity formation, a level of consumerism that we have all understood is completely unsustainable.
The mall is a tragic hero in the American metanarrative. We are spectating its denouement. The pandemic made in-person retail a minefield of risk for many, and the need for the constant churn of new purchases halted as many people found themselves at homes more. In-person retail actually still accounts for a significant majority of purchases. Under a profit-driven model, though, 14% of overall sales lost is as good as dead.
If you weren’t at the mall already, you would never know that people are still going. In the Wikipedia page for the mall, the death of the mall makes it into the first two paragraphs. Searching “mall” on Youtube will yield a large crop of “dead mall” videos, as well as videos from outlets and individual creators theorizing the rise and fall of the American shopping mall. And articles arguing that malls need a new life and place in the public imaginary––maybe even as fulfillment centers for online retail––are published regularly. So maybe the mall is on its way out, but we speak of it as if it is long gone. One does wonder how much of the mall’s public death is part of a cyclical routine of reinvestment in propping up the bloated corpse of industry through bail outs at the expense of any last semblance of the economic viability of the middle class.
The mall is dead. Long live the mall. For over a decade now, the American mall has been in decline. We see it in the imminent closure of 380 malls deemed “non-viable,” in the ever-expanding two-day delivery dystopia, in the increasing digitization of retail life. Of the various post-war American institutions eroding steadily since the late twentieth century, the mall perhaps warrants a less frantic attempt at a recapture than, say, access to medical care or a place to live.
Youtuber Natalie Wynn, in her video on opulence, suggests that dead mall media takes on a gothic romantic character. Like a gothic castle, a dead mall is a big, empty space whose emptiness is evidence of a rupture. The fascination with the death of the mall is a fascination with the fact that we once believed in the prospect of what Lauren Berlant would call “the good life,” the life of relative comfort characterized by homeownership, a car, 2.5 children, and a white picket fence. Mall gothic as a genre understands the world of the mall to be dying. And, as we have seen, the world of the mall was the world of identity, of abundance, and consumerism as a monument to American exceptionalism.
Just as Ancient Greek theater was planned both structurally and narratively by its ruling class, the mall, or the Midwest––is planned, it reflects those who planned it. This is especially true when things are funded and organized from without; a system created by a funder who does not participate in that system reflects how the powerful think others ought to live. And when failure is involved, whether it be the eventual disinvestment of the mall or the tragic hero’s final moments, it reflects the limits of those planners’ desires, imaginations, and value systems.
If, as Augosto Boal says, a classic tragic arc is about reinscribing the ethos of the powerful, let’s entertain that the arc of the present, too, is about how lives and institutions are planned. In the face of abandonment by the forces that planned our connection for us, perhaps we can start to plan something else.