Shopping malls are not doing super well here in the United States at the moment.

For younger listeners of the show, I should probably explain that a shopping mall is a place

where people used to go to hang out and buy things, great big buildings filled with food and

drink offerings, and dozens or hundreds of stores and kiosks, offering everything from

household goods to sunglasses to electronics,

to graphic t-shirts, and bed linens. Young people in particular would hang out at these massive

consumption hubs, window shopping, gorging on unhealthy snacks, and generally engaging in the free

market in one of numerous available ways. There were a lot of ways to spend money, and generally engaging in the free market in one of numerous available ways.

There were a lot of ways to spend money, and this milling about was often encouraged as a result of that.

More time spent wandering the mall meant more money spent in all of those stores.

Malls were the original American third space, not home, not school, but a generally

well-maintained space where you could get together with your friends, hang out, and buy stuff

that you probably didn't need. Now, I don't know if you've been to a mall recently, but

things have changed pretty radically in the past decade or so. The last mall that I visited was a hollowed-out husk of its previous glory.

The expansive, mostly empty parking lot looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic film,

and new, mostly experience-based businesses were opening up in the steeply discounted real estate that had become available.

At first slowly, and then as the anchor stores, the Macy's, the JCPennings, the Dillards, as they all left,

so too did the Gadzukes, the Radio Shacks, the Brookstones. And instead, now there are a few

recently installed arcades, a few optometrist offices,

a couple of escape rooms. The previously manned hallway kiosks are now more frequently booked by

billboard-like advertisements and small, lonely collections of gumball and candy machines. Many of the

systems that initially allowed malls to flourish in the United States

...