bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

A Tesla Dealership, huh! I think that Tesla will soon go the way of the closed malls!

bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

A very powerful movie, which portrays Mother Cabrini, wanting to establish schools and orphanages and hospitals throughout the world, trying to do good for the Italian migrants, who in the 19th century were considered by the USA to be the scum of the earth... all while facing much opposition from Politicians, Bankers, Police, and yes even the Vatican. It's also a real tear-jerker, as my wife showed the tears throughout.

bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

Ah! The Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner salesman!

True Story: Back in the 1950s in Queens NY, a vacuum cleaner door-to-door salesman came to our door to try to sell his product. Mom let him in. His demonstration included putting some soot on our carpet, and showed how the vacuum cleaner sucked it up. Then he proceeded to jump on the vacuum cleaner to show how strong it was. Then, I, as a young 5-year-old whippersnapper proceeded to follow him up on that. I jumped on the vacuum cleaner and broke it. The salesman left without a sale.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Hilarious! Yeah, they had all sorts of silly tricks to entertain you. It probably wasn't a good idea for him to demo that way! My Mom had one of those for a while. She got tired of dragging all that weight around. Those canisters were heavy. The dirt bags were fun to blow up with firecrackers, though!

adm

There are a few reasons for the decline of the mall. The first has to do with the decline of retail stores in general, which have been replaced to a large extent by Amazon and other online shopping. Enclosed malls are also hotbeds for crime and gangs. At least open air malls are easier to police. Finally, malls were overbuilt in the 70s and 80s. Malls have been in decline for at least the last decade but they will probably never disappear completely. My medium sized city (Albuquerque, NM) is still able to support two enclosed malls, although the one on the west side, which opened in 1996, has a significant number of vacancies. (But actually fewer than five years ago.) The oldest of the enclosed malls here (Winrock Center) has been transformed into an open air mall.

Harry02 Loc: Gardena, CA

All the above.
Private Equity came in, raised the rents and costs and fees to have a store.
I was a "mall walker". we'd walk a lap or two, stop at an eatery to talk, and go.
New mall owners- kops and security aholes liked to stop us. "where you going, where you coming from?
If you're not buying you're trespassing". Carrying shopping bags worked for a little while.
Store folk liked us. We were nice, clean, friendly and would show up later with family to shop.
Then the "investors" added draconian taxes on profits. It wasn't worth it to be too successful.
Just more bad management. The Americans found other places to go.

bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

In the early 21st century, the UK malls had a big problem with teenagers gathering at malls and making their mischief and hurting sales. So the mall owners used a device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying"), which emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away. Store owners in the mall were happy. For the details, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito

bobbyjohn Loc: Dallas, TX

Not all malls are suffering. Wife and I today went to a restaurant in Frisco, TX. After the meal, we decided to stop in the nearby Stonebriar Mall to do a comparison to what we saw at the Music City mall in Lewisville, TX. Well, gotta tell you, the Stonebriar mall was hopping, much like we remember all malls in the past. Stonebriar has more than 160 stores and restaurants, and in our walking the entire mall, top and bottom floors, we saw only 3 storefronts boarded up...but each with a sign announcing the "opening soon" of a specific new store coming to that spot. Doing the math, that means 98% current occupancy.