journal features

farewell shopping malls

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2016.04.28

I learned today that traffic at shopping malls has fallen by 50% since 2008. Good riddance! Who wants to spend time traipsing around looking for something that might or might not be in stock when everyone and their brother will sell you something and have it shipped in a couple of days. For instance, it's time to buy a new "noseless" seat for my bike. Why would I not buy such a thing online! It's like looking for my size 16EE shoes, or clothes to fit my 6'5" frame: malls just aren't interested unless they can sell a vast quantity at minimum effort. The only thing I buy that way is groceries, and I don't go to a mall for that.

Another interesting wrinkle: at least one of the Canadian banks is considering having their retail "partners" use their branches as pick up spots for shipped goods. I think that makes a *lot* of sense, given that the banks already have to build secure sites, and are otherwise becoming lower-traffic sites themselves, these days.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)