I can’t tell you when the last time was that I set foot in an actual shopping mall. You know, the kind where everything is indoors and it’s usually in some sort of cross arrangement. Certainly it’s been at least three years, I can tell you that. I have a feeling I’m not the only one.
Mall culture today is, essentially, dead. You can get pretty much anything you need online now, and that means the hassle of going to a mall just isn’t worth it. A lot of folks used to shop for clothes at the local mall, but that sort of thing has gone online and to “big box” type stores. Still, it makes me kind of sad when I see a video like this one, from YouTuber “Retail Archaeology”:
In it, he takes a walk through the Puente Hills Mall, which served as the “Twin Pines Mall” in Back to the Future. I have been to this mall myself, although I want to say it was about 7 years ago. Seems to me that I bought the Blu-ray Disc box set of the BTTF trilogy there, just because I was fairly nearby and it seemed like a cool nerdy thing to do. Back then it was still in good shape. Judging from this video, it isn’t anymore.
The halcyon past of the shopping mall
If you search, you can find plenty of videos showing malls that are in far worse shape than this one. Many of them have been abandoned and left to the elements. But this is Fun Friday after all, and I don’t want to dwell on that. I want to look back at the glorious 1980s, heyday of the shopping mall.
If you were a young person in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, you remember the days when the mall was the center of your life. Malls, to start with, were air conditioned. Chances are your house wasn’t. So a couple hours spent at the mall was an easy and cheap way to cool off. All your friends were there, too. Chances are you’d run into someone you were attracted to, and there was always the chance they’d agree to have an Orange Julius with you.
In the days before online shopping, the mall really was where it all happened. It’s where you heard the hot new music. It’s where your mom took you for school clothes (usually at Sears.) It’s where you dumped quarter after quarter into the latest video games, and maybe even found a book to read.
Flash forward to now. Of course you hear the hot new music on your phone. You shop for school clothes on your phone. You play games on your phone. You read on your phone. You even might run into someone you’re attracted to on your phone, but they can’t meet you at Orange Julius. Those stores are gone.
The real deal
Here’s real footage of real people walking through a real mall in 1989. It’s a pretty good simulation of the experience, and you get to see how much of a social center malls were. This video does a great job of giving you those random moments you’d be likely to experience. It also gives you the cross-generational appeal of the mall. It’s not all about teens. Older folks shopped there too.
But of course it takes a real artist to give you the emotion of a mall. Luckily, a little film like Fast Times at Ridgemont High exists. Its opening credits really show off the way the mall felt in the early 1980s.
The film’s opening was shot on location at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. That mall, at least in the form you see there, is long gone. It collapsed in an earthquake in 1994. I’m sure most if not all of the people you see in this opening are extras, but it really feels like that’s what it looked like. I do think the stores shown are the ones that were actually there, though.
The Galleria looked like more or less every mall in America at that time. We didn’t care that every city had almost the same stores. In fact we kind of thought it was cool. Those of us who grew up outside major cities thought it was really great to have a Chess King or something national like that.
Malls may never come back. It’s also pretty hard to imagine people getting nostalgic for shopping online. There’s just no communal component to it. No, I’d say mall culture is just a relic now, much like the malls themselves.
