Ep. 1830 - We Investigated The Collapse Of The American Mall

**Ryan Reynolds** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
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**Matt Walsh** (0:30)
If you're listening to this podcast in America, the odds are overwhelming, actually about 70% that you live within an hour of a rundown or abandoned mall. The vast majority of Americans can name at least one mall nearby that's either growing tumbleweeds or has a very high vacancy rate and low customer traffic along with in almost every case, a high crime rate. And these things are obviously related. If you're one of the few Americans who can't name a mall that's failing, then in all likelihood, that will change very soon. Half of the malls in the United States have closed since the 1980s. By the end of the decade, projections suggest 87% of the existing large shopping malls in this country will also shut down. So we'll have just a few hundred malls by 2030, along with a lot of creepy, dangerous, dilapidated buildings where malls used to be. But on the bright side, we'll also have a lot more vape shops and pawnbrokers. Now at the same time, bizarrely, a handful of malls are actually doing very well right now. Some of them are expanding while 90 percent of the industry is shrinking or disappearing entirely. Why is that happening?
Well, it's hard to explain, at least on the surface. Off the top of your head, you could probably identify several different reasons for the collapse of America's malls from the convenience and lower cost of online shopping. That's the big one that comes to mind. Also the COVID lockdowns, the priorities of private equity firms, to the rise of social media and the decline of interpersonal interaction in general. We'll talk about all those causes in a moment.
To one extent or another, they're all true in ways that you probably don't even realize. But the most important part, for the most part, the decline of malls, while a small number of malls are thriving, has been seen as a straightforward economic problem, as a matter of supply and demand. Malls in general don't interest people anymore, so they're dying. They're obsolete, so they're gone now. That's how it works. No further explanation is required.
Is that analysis wrong? Well, no, not really, but it's also incomplete. And for one thing, it ignores the cultural significance of the American mall and how malls were central to the social lives of millions of young people. Now, for me personally, when I was a kid, like a lot of kids in the 90s, our local mall was the hangout spot. And now the idea of going and hanging out at a mall all day is totally foreign, not even possible for most people. My parents used to drop me off at the mall, like when I was 11 or 12, they'd just drop me off. I'd hang out there for several hours with my friends. And now every part of that seems alien. Hanging out at a mall for several hours, actually hanging out anywhere in a physical location for several hours, dropping your child off at a place without direct adult supervision, having actual friends in real life. I mean, the whole thing is bizarre, like something out of an alternate universe.
It's so bizarre that it triggers kind of an existential crisis. If you want to understand the popularity of movies like Back Rooms, this offers a pretty good explanation. Young people are genuinely disturbed by the amount of empty space they see everywhere, to the point that they're wondering if malls are even real, or just like a Psyop of some kind. Watch.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:38)
So I'm in the mall.
This place, so coming to the mall makes me realize we're living in a simulation, like this can't be real. Like, you're telling me, you're telling me this place right here that has two people working in there, they're selling enough hats, they're selling enough hats just to pay two employees. No, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. It's not real. Also, like, some of these stores, like, okay, like, maybe, right? Like, women's lingerie, underwear, whatever, the buckle, I don't know. People still shop in there. I don't even know.