The Decline of The Mall Utopia
Push through the glass doors. The skylight glows like stained glass. In the 80s and 90s, this was a civic square: Sears at one end, JCPenney at the other, neon stitched between them. Families arrived in weekend uniforms, teenagers in packs, retirees looping like monks.
Blink. The corridor thins. Planters gather dust, storefronts are sealed. Entire malls have gone dark. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of malls fell about 16 percent per year. Thousands more are set to vanish in 2025.
You walk further. Abercrombie’s cologne fog, Hollister’s surf videos, Hot Topic’s spikes, all gone. In their place: QR codes and cardboard boxes. Identity once tried on under fluorescent lights now arrives at your door, polyester already unraveling.
The food court smells linger longest in memory. Sbarro slices, Panda Express orange chicken, Auntie Anne’s pretzels. And at the center, Sarku Japan, offering teriyaki cubes on toothpicks like communion bread. A ritual of grease and strangers at plastic tables. Blink again. The chairs are gone. A row of lockers dispenses meals ordered on apps. Communion continues, but alone, with a convenience fee.
The tech wing hums with memory. RadioShack drawers, GameStop demos, Sharper Image plasma globes. The future was once something you could touch, sometimes even break. Today it is flattened into a video of someone else unboxing what you might one day buy.
At the atrium, fountains and choirs once filled the air. Now the same skylight shines on pallets. Dead malls have become fulfillment centers, clinics, even churches. In some cities, apartments sprout inside old anchors, two thousand a month to live inside the corpse of leisure.
Near the entrance, a sign offers Data Center Tours, Visitors Welcome. For a fee, you can walk sanitized corridors that once held retail. Take a photo of your reflection on a glossy cabinet. No touching allowed.
The mall never was paradise. It was drywall and neon dressed as community. What made it powerful was that it felt like more.
We do not gather around fountains anymore. We gather around feeds. The water is infinite. The feeling is not. Communion still happens. It just arrives lukewarm, delivered alone, and always with a convenience fee.
---
This is the short version. The full essay takes the complete walk, with more history, numbers, and ghosts of food courts past. Read the full piece here →
