Riff Moonraker said:
I dont find these pictures to be creepy, or eerie, at all. I find them sad. My "coming of age" decade was the 80s, where the whole mall thing was a huge freaking deal, and seeing these pictures as well as seeing the same thing happening at the mall in my hometown just saddens me to no end. Its just another reminder of how much financial trouble this country is really in, and why we absolutely have got to figure out a way to fix it. Hint... its not going to be our government that fixes this, but rather the people. What the government needs to do is stop hitting its people below the belt and allow them the breathing room to work our magic again. Man, these pictures really bummed me out.
Well, there is a lot more to it than what's being presented here. A lot of the urban blight has been caused by the "Big Box" stores like Wal*Mart and their few competitors (K-Mart, Target). Basically Malls succeeded by playing home to specialty stores where each store would focus in one product, or type of product, and be able to provide lower prices than department stores (which pre-dated them) by buying the products in larger bulk and then being able to lower the price per unit and undercut the competition. Wal*Mart was pretty much the department store striking back, learning lessons from how the originals died, and instead buying EVERYTHING in bulk and having enough stores to distribute it, and then undercutting what even specialty stores could do. Wal*Mart also engaged in predatory pricing where it was willing to take a loss in the short term to undercut competition in each area until everything was out of business. People commented on this as it was going on, and the malls were getting hammered, people were warned about the blight this would bring, but all they cared about was that it was $1 less on a product. Not to mention of course that as big as they are, your typical "superbox" is still a smaller area than a mall, and as a result people have to walk less to get what they need, not to mention only having to check out once (as opposed to visiting half a dozen different stores, waiting and checking out in each one, and of course they might be in radically different sections of a mall involving a lot of walking and moving up and down between levels).
The big question of course is whether specialty stores will in turn go through an era of striking back, at which point the smaller stores will of course want to organize into malls and such again.
E-business has also had a huge effect as well, the simple convenience of ordering through something like "Amazon" and just having it delivered. Given that the big online retailers also buy in huge bulk like "Wal*Mart" they can set similar prices. Not to mention that with the rising prices of gas and such, it actually becomes more efficient this way because you might spend more on gas to travel to and from a store (depending on where you are) than you'll spend in shipping and waiting a day or two.
In short, while the US economy is a mess, it should be noted that a lot of this is also due to the way business is done changing radically. Whether it's for the better or not is debatable. I myself as a child of the 80s and 90s mourn for the mall, as well as other institutions like the video store (I used to love browsing a video store, grabbing a couple of movies and some Chinese Takeout and heading home). Of course at the same time when you look back with nostalgia you tend to forget how much time you spent waiting in lines, trying to find a table at a food court, or all about how much of a pain in the arse it was to take your movies back to Blockbuster where they had something of a god complex.