Some of us remember the late ’70s, when shopping malls first became a big deal. Local teenagers loved them, especially in summer, as most homes back then didn’t have air-conditioning. The malls did, and could be a comforting place to hang out when the temps and humidity were both in the 90s. A lot of us even found jobs therein; I spent my last two years of high school and my first year after graduating working in the Woolco store that anchored one end of the College Square Mall in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Now, it seems that the whole thing is dying, and a major example is the San Francisco Center Mall, formerly the Westfield Mall. A recent piece from the Daily Mail on the lack of shoppers in that mall reveals a lot of empty stores.
A once-iconic mall that used to be a holiday shopping hotspot appeared creepily empty in the days leading up to Christmas.
The San Francisco Centre, formerly known as the Westfield Mall, bustled with eager customers scoping out pricey items from the luxury retailers that filled the nine-level complex in its prime.
But now, the roughly 1.5 million-square-foot mall – the largest in San Francisco – sits nearly vacant, with about 93 percent of its storefronts empty.
Video from inside the shopping center just five days before Christmas showed the mall’s drastic decline. It’s unclear what time it was when the video was filmed.
The mall has been struggling since the COVID pandemic, as consumers turned toward online shopping.
Surging crime in San Francisco’s downtown did not help matters either, with the mall’s value plummeting.
Surging crime, yes, and at least some of the criminality is coming from San Francisco’s and California’s governments, which have insisted on making it more and more difficult to do business in the once-Golden State. With any luck, that will scotch any presidential ambitions on the part of California’s impeccably coiffed Governor Newsom, but that remains to be seen.
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I suspect, though, there’s a simpler explanation, and it’s touched on by the linked article above: The rise of online shopping. COVID may have turbocharged that transition by keeping people locked in their homes for months on end, but this would likely have happened in any case. It’s too easy and too convenient just to bring up Amazon or Walmart on a phone, a tablet, or a laptop, find what you want, and have it brought to your front door, sometimes even on the same day.
That’s a genie that’s not going back in the bottle. And, yes, it’s going to be murderous on real estate values for these huge shopping centers that are now going the way of the dodo. But that’s capitalism for you; the principle of creative destruction. Henry Ford put buggy-makers out of business, and now Amazon and Walmart are putting the big brick-and-mortar shopping centers out of business. This was inevitable.
While these malls are struggling, though, many more people are suddenly finding shopping much, much more convenient. We’re 70 miles away from anything you might call a mall here in our little Susitna Valley community, but when you go to the post office, half the patrons are picking up boxes from Walmart and Amazon. Suddenly, life out here “in the borough” has become a lot more convenient.
These big shopping centers, yes, are suffering from the stupid policies of local politicians. But they are also suffering from the unforgiving advancement of online shopping. That’s just how it’s going to be.
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