Speaker 1: Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Guess what, Mango? What's that?
Speaker 1: Will?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 3: I know you love shopping malls, so I'm sure you've
Speaker 3: noticed these people, but you know the people who like
Speaker 3: to exercise by walking back and forth through the mall.
Speaker 1: Sure, mallwalkers. It's like half the country's.
Speaker 3: Grandparents at least, and as you mentioned, it's especially popular
Speaker 3: with senior citizens. But they're actually not the only ones
Speaker 3: doing this. There was this twenty fifteen report from the
Speaker 3: CDC that shows that shopping malls are now the second
Speaker 3: most popular place to go for a walk, just behind neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: How weird is this?
Speaker 1: It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on mallwalking?
Speaker 3: Well, this isn't a small report either. It's actually fifty
Speaker 3: six pages long and I'm reading every word of it
Speaker 3: is just riveting. But to be fair, taking walks is
Speaker 3: a way to prevent certain diseases, and the CDC is
Speaker 3: actually the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And I
Speaker 3: bet you forgot that silent p at the end of
Speaker 3: the CDC. There's one funny thing that I learned. It
Speaker 3: actually turns out that most mallwalkers don't actually shop at
Speaker 3: the mall. At most they might buy a coffee at
Speaker 3: the food court or something like that. But according to
Speaker 3: the CDC report, they really just want the camaraderie, you know,
Speaker 3: to spend some time strolling and socializing.
Speaker 2: And that actually puts.
Speaker 3: Mallwalkers right in line with the original idea for shopping malls.
Speaker 3: So the architect who designed the first mall in America's
Speaker 3: name is Victor Gruen. He actually envisioned the mall as
Speaker 3: a place to quote find opportunities for social life and
Speaker 3: recreation and a protected pedestrian environment.
Speaker 1: Ah, that's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything,
Speaker 1: mallwalkers are really the only ones doing malls right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but
Speaker 3: definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind
Speaker 3: for shopping malls than what they would ultimately become. But
Speaker 3: what exactly did he envision, why didn't it work out?
Speaker 3: And most importantly, is there still a chance that his
Speaker 3: high hopes for shopping malls could still be fulfilled? Those
Speaker 3: are just a few of the questions we'll try to
Speaker 3: answer today. So let's dive in Hey their podcast listeners,
Speaker 3: Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
Speaker 3: always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer
Speaker 3: And on the other side of that soundproof glass, just
Speaker 3: tucking into a feast of food court stables. That's our
Speaker 3: friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm
Speaker 3: a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here.
Speaker 1: I know, Missus Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon,
Speaker 1: a pretzel from Auntie Ann's, and a huge orange Julius
Speaker 1: to wash it all down. Man, it's like a good
Speaker 1: trip to the mall in food form. But from what
Speaker 1: it sounds like, that wasn't exactly Victor grusion of them all.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so.
Speaker 3: But to understand what his vision did entail, we should
Speaker 3: first talk about who Grewen was and where he came from.
Speaker 3: So he was born in nineteen oh three in Vienna, Austria.
Speaker 3: He grew up in a middle class Jewish family, fell
Speaker 3: in love with the city's thriving art scene, and this
Speaker 3: was at a pretty young age. So in the nineteen
Speaker 3: twenties he spent many of his evenings performing satirical theater
Speaker 3: at various cafes, and then during the day he studied architecture.
Speaker 3: And this was at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts,
Speaker 3: so it was actually the same school that had rejected
Speaker 3: Adolf Hitler just a few years earlier. Just a little
Speaker 3: fun factor thrilling.
Speaker 1: I feel like too good for Hitler should be on
Speaker 1: all their t shirts.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't the only point of overlap
Speaker 3: between Victor Grewen's life and Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi
Speaker 3: Germany annexed Austria back in nineteen thirty eight, Grewin knew
Speaker 3: it was time to leave his country behind, and weirdly,
Speaker 3: he left the same week as Sigmund Freud. I keep
Speaker 3: throwing in these little side facts about.
Speaker 2: All these people I like him.
Speaker 3: Well, leaving was easier said than done, so grew And
Speaker 3: turned to one of his theater buddies for help with
Speaker 3: the escape.
Speaker 2: And it's actually kind of remarkable.
Speaker 3: His friend, dressed up as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Gruen
Speaker 3: and his wife to the airport and then made sure
Speaker 3: they were allowed to board a plane to Zurich. So
Speaker 3: from there the couple made their way to England, where
Speaker 3: they found passage on this ocean liner and traveled over
Speaker 3: to New York City. So Grewin later looked back on
Speaker 3: this journey and he said that he had arrived quote
Speaker 3: with an architect's degree, eight dollars and no English.
Speaker 2: Pretty tough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story. So how do
Speaker 1: you make it work?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: He once again turned to the art scene. He joins
Speaker 3: up with some other German immigrants and together they form
Speaker 3: what they called the Refugee Artists Group, where Grewin did
Speaker 3: set design. So the group caught the attention of some
Speaker 3: big names in the music business. This included Al Jolson
Speaker 3: Irving Berlin, and they ended up helping them with their
Speaker 3: songs and all of that help actually paid off. So
Speaker 3: the next summer the group was a to stage an
Speaker 3: original Broadway show and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight,
Speaker 3: which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving
Speaker 3: with eight dollars and how much longer later the guy's
Speaker 3: putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks.
Speaker 3: It's not bad, you know. So things were going well
Speaker 3: for Grewin, but his architecture career had you know, suffered
Speaker 3: since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown, Grewen
Speaker 3: bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna, was
Speaker 3: this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to open
Speaker 3: this leather goods store on Fifth Avenue, and he asked
Speaker 3: grew In to help him design it, and so grew
Speaker 3: In agreed, and what he ultimately came up with with
Speaker 3: something of a game changer for American store design. So,
Speaker 3: rather than build the entrance flush, you know, with the
Speaker 3: street like all the other shops in the area, Grewen
Speaker 3: actually made this recess like arcade style entryway with the
Speaker 3: tall glass cases on either side to sort of draw
Speaker 3: in the customers. So once they came inside, these guests
Speaker 3: were just dazzled by these faux marble floors, a green
Speaker 3: glass ceiling, a slew of bright spotlights that sort of
Speaker 3: reflected these display cases, and you know, the result was
Speaker 3: a store that felt decidedly modern and unlike anything else
Speaker 3: on Fifth Avenue or really American retail in general. So
Speaker 3: it's kind of hard to imagine now, but customers and
Speaker 3: critics ate up this new design, and as a result
Speaker 3: of this, Gruin was swamped with job offers. I mean
Speaker 3: he was going to these upscale design stores all around
Speaker 3: the city and beyond getting these offers.
Speaker 1: So obviously designing these high end boutiques and then going
Speaker 1: to big, boxy shopping malls seems like quite a leap,
Speaker 1: and not exactly an upward one.
Speaker 3: Maybe so, But keep in mind that grew And was
Speaker 3: commissioned to design the country's first indoor shopping mall in
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty two and it opened in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 3: So prior to that, malls as we know them really
Speaker 3: didn't exist, so there wasn't any stigma that we might
Speaker 3: associate with them today.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing
Speaker 1: came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like
Speaker 1: in America pre mall?
Speaker 3: Well, it was, you know, mainly mail order catalogs and
Speaker 3: department stores for the most part. Outdoor shopping centers started
Speaker 3: to catch on in the nineteen twenties, but they were
Speaker 3: basically just strip malls as we think of them now,
Speaker 3: like a bunch of different stores stuck together and just
Speaker 3: happened to share a parking lot. So Grewin's big idea
Speaker 3: was to put all of these stores and walkways under
Speaker 3: one roof, and then you'd have the addition of central
Speaker 3: air and heating to make this complex sustainable year round.
Speaker 3: And that last part was especially important given the location
Speaker 3: of Gruin's first mall. This was the Southdale Shopping Center
Speaker 3: and Edina, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: Where the winters are obviously frigid.
Speaker 3: Exactly, I don't think people would want to be walking
Speaker 3: around in those parking lots in the cold of winter,
Speaker 3: and so the project grew and signed on for was
Speaker 3: meant to address the residents demand for a temperate place
Speaker 3: to be able to shop, and one where they wouldn't
Speaker 3: have to brave the cold if they wanted to visit
Speaker 3: a different store after they'd gone to the first one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what about
Speaker 1: this bigger idea he had of them all being kind
Speaker 1: of the social hub.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of that was just in how he
Speaker 3: arranged the interior. So, just as an example, most shopping
Speaker 3: centers of the era were on a single level. So
Speaker 3: you know, you think about the number of stores in Southdale,
Speaker 3: it was actually meant to house seventy two stores, plus
Speaker 3: these two big anchored apartment stores so making your way
Speaker 3: from one end to the other would have felt, you know,
Speaker 3: like forever just to get there. So instead Grewin opted
Speaker 3: for this two story design. They were linked by escalators,
Speaker 3: of course, and now we're all envisioning, you know, kind
Speaker 3: of the modern shopping center. So not only did this
Speaker 3: breakup that monotony and make for a much easier trip
Speaker 3: back to the car, but it also ensured that people
Speaker 3: would circulate better, have more opportunities to socialize. But probably
Speaker 3: the most prominent example of his people first design is
Speaker 3: what he put.
Speaker 2: In the middle of it.
Speaker 3: It was kind of an indoor garden court, I guess
Speaker 3: they called it, complete with a skylight, a goldfish pond,
Speaker 3: towering live trees, balconies, hanging plants, like all of this
Speaker 3: other stuff, including a bustling cafe. There was even a
Speaker 3: twenty one foot tall cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds.
Speaker 3: And so it was basically Gruin's ode to the European
Speaker 3: piazzas that he had grown up with in Vienna, and
Speaker 3: he wanted to bring some of that old world European
Speaker 3: charm to the American shopping scene, which he kind of
Speaker 3: saw is characterized by urban sprawl. And Tacki design. So
Speaker 3: you fast forward a few years later, we're in nineteen
Speaker 3: sixty at this point, and Gruen wrote a book in
Speaker 3: which he outlined his hope and belief that the malls
Speaker 3: could really be more like a town square and Greek
Speaker 3: Agoras of the past, which.
Speaker 1: Is not exactly what we think of malls today.
Speaker 3: Right, definitely not so. When Southdale opened in October of
Speaker 3: nineteen fifty six, it was met with this glowing praise
Speaker 3: from shoppers as well as jerm from every publication from
Speaker 3: Newsweek to the New York Times to Women's Wear Daily.
Speaker 3: In fact, my favorite review though, comes from Time, which
Speaker 3: harolded Gruin's mall as quote the pleasure dome with parking.
Speaker 2: You know, ally, it's just it's such a great quote.
Speaker 3: But with all that said, there was at least one
Speaker 3: person who absolutely detested the Southdale Shopping Mall, and that
Speaker 3: was none other than the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. So,
Speaker 3: a month after the mall opened, and you know, it
Speaker 3: had gotten all this national press, right made the pilgrimage
Speaker 3: to Minnesota to see it for himself and he was
Speaker 3: not impressed at all. So after his visit, Right penned
Speaker 3: this scathing article for the Star Tribune, writing quote, what
Speaker 3: is this a railroad station or a bus station? You've
Speaker 3: got a garden court that has all the evils of
Speaker 3: the village street and none of its charm.
Speaker 1: I love that. The way he really criticized it was
Speaker 1: by calling it a railroad station.
Speaker 2: He really really burned with that.
Speaker 1: So I'm guessing even in the minorities, since you know,
Speaker 1: every mall seems to have cred most of his design
Speaker 1: from Gruin's, I mean, somebody must have liked these, right,
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 3: I mean the design was such a success that it
Speaker 3: became really the de facto blueprint for indoor malls throughout
Speaker 3: the rest of the twentieth century. And Gruin embraced all
Speaker 3: the love at first, and for about a decade after
Speaker 3: the Southdale Mall opened, he gave speeches, he wrote books
Speaker 3: about his creation, and really kind of pondered what he
Speaker 3: hoped it would do for American society. But sadly though,
Speaker 3: Gruin's view of his work soured in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 3: and in the seventies as more malls began to dominate
Speaker 3: the landscape.
Speaker 2: I mean they popped up.
Speaker 3: Everywhere, and worst of all these copycat malls were built
Speaker 3: with tweaked designs aimed at maximizing profit rather than, you know,
Speaker 3: more fostering that sense of community. So he even started
Speaker 3: to see malls that he designed himself in a new light.
Speaker 3: So when he visited some later in life, he wrote
Speaker 3: of the quote severe emotion shock he'd experience, and the
Speaker 3: ugliness and discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that
Speaker 3: sprang up around these. So it definitely changed the way
Speaker 3: he thought about them, and it was a bit disillusioned,
Speaker 3: and he decided to move home to Vienna. But when
Speaker 3: he got there, he was actually heartbroken to discover that
Speaker 3: the new shopping mall had been built just south of
Speaker 3: the old Vienna and that it was driving independent shops
Speaker 3: out of business. And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in
Speaker 3: a piece for The New Yorker, quote Victor Gruin invented
Speaker 3: the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna.
Speaker 3: He ended up making Vienna more like America.
Speaker 1: Oh that's awful, But you know, I'm a little confused.
Speaker 1: It sounds like Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots.
Speaker 1: So were those something that was added later and not
Speaker 1: a part of his original design.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's actually pretty right.
Speaker 3: I mean, Gruen's mall designs included a much more modest
Speaker 3: parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we
Speaker 3: were used to associating with malls today. And in fact,
Speaker 3: when Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed
Speaker 3: it in the center of this four hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: three acre plot, and to fill all that surrounding space,
Speaker 3: he drew up designs for apartment buildings and schools and
Speaker 3: a park and actually even a man made lake. But
Speaker 3: unfortunately none of that ever came to pass, and instead
Speaker 3: the space was used to make this massive parking lot.
Speaker 3: And of course future malls followed suit, and very few
Speaker 3: of them ever adapted Gruin's multi use approach to these developments.
Speaker 1: That is a shame.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: The whole story kind of reminds me of what happened
Speaker 1: with the inventor of the TV file of Farnsworth. You know,
Speaker 1: he was another guy who saw his invention grow up
Speaker 1: in a way he wasn't expecting and grew to kind
Speaker 1: of hate it over time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is weird.
Speaker 1: To kind of resent the thing. That's held up as
Speaker 1: the biggest achievement of your life. Right for both these Yeah, and.
Speaker 3: In Gruen's case, he actually took his distaste even further
Speaker 3: than Farnsworth by completely disowning his creation. So two years
Speaker 3: before his death, which was in nineteen eighty, Grewin gave
Speaker 3: a speech in London and he washed his hands of
Speaker 3: malls entirely. Here's what he told the crowd. I'm often
Speaker 3: called the father of the shopping mall. I would like
Speaker 3: to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all.
Speaker 3: I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They
Speaker 3: destroyed our city.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, and now that we've unspooled the long and
Speaker 1: sad history behind the birth of shopping malls, what do
Speaker 1: you say we step inside of one and take a
Speaker 1: closer look at some of the behind the scenes tricks
Speaker 1: that developers use to keep the customer shopping.
Speaker 3: Sounds good, but before we get to that, let's take
Speaker 3: a quick break. You're listening to Part Time Genius and
Speaker 3: we're talking about all the sort of devious design tricks
Speaker 3: that shopping malls use to empty our wallets. But to
Speaker 3: be clear, none of the stuff we're about to talk
Speaker 3: about came from Victor Gruin. As you can probably guess
Speaker 3: by now, he was fundamentally opposed to any design aimed
Speaker 3: at manipulating customers into spending more money. I think he
Speaker 3: would have felt like he was betraying that sense of
Speaker 3: community that he was hoping to instill in these malls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's another dark layer to the story because
Speaker 1: despite his principal approach to design, Gruon still wound up
Speaker 1: having a shady mall tactic named after him. So you
Speaker 1: know how sometimes you get disoriented in a mall or
Speaker 1: a big store, like you're just walking through this giant
Speaker 1: maze and you kind of lose track of where you
Speaker 1: are in the building or how long you've been there.
Speaker 1: That's known as Gruin transfer, and Gruon would have hated
Speaker 1: the name, but the effect is a real thing, and
Speaker 1: stores actually put a lot of effort and thought into
Speaker 1: how to best trigger this reaction in their customers. So
Speaker 1: Victor Gruen might have wanted malls that were easy to navigate,
Speaker 1: but future designers learned that confused shoppers actually spend more money,
Speaker 1: and that's why so many malls have these maze like
Speaker 1: layouts with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around,
Speaker 1: other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part
Speaker 1: to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can
Speaker 1: think about things like musac that's relaxing and played through
Speaker 1: the pipe speakers, or eye catching entrance displays. And the
Speaker 1: more time you spend in this mall days, the more
Speaker 1: likely you are to make impulse buys. Right, Like, an
Speaker 1: article on New Scientists describes it as being quote confused
Speaker 1: into a state of unplanned consumption.
Speaker 3: I call this the Ikea effect, I think, and all
Speaker 3: this makes sense. I get why they called it after Gruin,
Speaker 3: but you know, because he helped build these malls, but
Speaker 3: actually helped me out with that last part, the word transfer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what's actually being transferred is the desire to
Speaker 1: have a specific item. So you go to the mall
Speaker 1: to buy a sweater, and it's only a sweater that
Speaker 1: you're looking for, But if the designers play their cards right,
Speaker 1: you'll be so dazzled by the time you get to
Speaker 1: the store that your desire for a sweater will already
Speaker 1: have been transferred to a bunch of different items that
Speaker 1: you never planned on buying.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, that makes sense, But I mean, I'm still curious.
Speaker 3: If Gruin didn't come up with the different sales tricks
Speaker 3: that we find in malls now, then who is responsible
Speaker 3: for that? Like it was just mall architects who followed
Speaker 3: him or what I mean.
Speaker 1: That's where some of the ideas came from and new
Speaker 1: methods were added over the years. Certainly, but a lot
Speaker 1: of the common features in malls actually originated with one
Speaker 1: of Gruen's contemporaries, this fellow storefront designer. His name was A.
Speaker 1: Alfred Tobman, and he goes on to be a huge
Speaker 1: mall mogul. In the late nineteen fifties, Todman followed Gruen's
Speaker 1: lead by building his own indoor shopping mall in California,
Speaker 1: and over the next fifty years or so, he just
Speaker 1: kept on building. So he actually passes away in twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen at the age of ninety one, but his company
Speaker 1: is still going strong, with twenty four malls spread across
Speaker 1: eleven different states plus Puerto Rico's, South Korea and China,
Speaker 1: and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by
Speaker 1: Tobman over the years.
Speaker 3: All right, son, can you give me some examples of
Speaker 3: what these designs are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this is going to sound a little hyperbolic,
Speaker 1: which I guess it kind of is. But a lot
Speaker 1: of Todman's innovations were sort of like perversions of what
Speaker 1: Gruon had designed. So, you know, we talked about grew
Speaker 1: and wanting this two level mall. It was so that
Speaker 1: people could circulate easier and bump into more people. But
Speaker 1: Topman kind of took that trick and moved the escalators
Speaker 1: to the ends of the buildings, so you wouldn't meet
Speaker 1: up in the center, but rather you'd have to make
Speaker 1: the full loop around the mall and buy more as
Speaker 1: a result. Got it, and Tobman's malls also applied the
Speaker 1: circulation theory to the exteriors. He was actually the first
Speaker 1: to put a circular road around the mall and add
Speaker 1: a bunch of extra entrances so that shoppers could easily
Speaker 1: get to any part of the building.
Speaker 3: That's interesting, And that bit about the moving of the escalators,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's such a good example of how a
Speaker 3: simple tweak can change the focus from you know, customer
Speaker 3: comfort to something that really more benefits the sellers. And
Speaker 3: I'm curious, did you find any other cases like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So another good example is what Tobman did with the lighting.
Speaker 1: So he kept all the skylights from Gruin's design, but
Speaker 1: he made them recessed so the sunlight would never directly
Speaker 1: affect the storefronts. And he also added these tiny lights
Speaker 1: around the skylights so that when the sun started to
Speaker 1: go down, customers wouldn't take the shift in lighting as
Speaker 1: this queue that it was time to leave. And speaking
Speaker 1: of visibility, Tomman insisted on using transparent handrails in his
Speaker 1: mall so that you could always see the stores around you,
Speaker 1: regardless of what level you were at. I mean, apparently
Speaker 1: it was he was trying to battle something called threshold resistance,
Speaker 1: which I guess refers to both the physical and psychological
Speaker 1: barriers that might prevent a customer from entering a store.
Speaker 3: Like they could block your view and keep you from
Speaker 3: seeing a store on the upper level that you might
Speaker 3: otherwise go inside.
Speaker 2: I guess, yeah, that's part of it.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about
Speaker 3: Muzac earlier, and I have to mention this weird fact
Speaker 3: I came across this week. So, according to a twenty
Speaker 3: eleven report from Stanford, all the malls in America put
Speaker 3: together consume more than a gig awot of electricity every
Speaker 3: month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed
Speaker 3: to make you shop more. And when you do the
Speaker 3: math on this, that energy usage comes out to three
Speaker 3: thousand metric tons of CO two added to the atmosphere
Speaker 3: each year just from this store music.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I guess not only as an annoying
Speaker 1: and manipulative it's also contributing to climate change.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: To be fair, human society emits around thirty giga tons
Speaker 3: of greenhouse gases per year, so it's not like three
Speaker 3: thousand tons from the mall is doing that much damage.
Speaker 2: But I just thought that that was interesting.
Speaker 3: And yeah, of course, once you factor in all the
Speaker 3: energy that malls used to heat, cool, and light these
Speaker 3: massive interiors around the clock, their contribution actually starts to
Speaker 3: look a bit more significant when you put it in,
Speaker 3: you know, as a whole.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, I'm sure. Actually, Gabe was telling me
Speaker 1: about this one mall he visited in Kentucky where there
Speaker 1: were only like two or three actual stores in the
Speaker 1: entire complex still open, like every other one had been shuttered.
Speaker 1: But the a seed, the lights, the escalators, the music,
Speaker 1: you know, all of that was still going on throughout
Speaker 1: the building. And that's actually not a one off thing.
Speaker 1: There are hundreds of malls like that across the country.
Speaker 1: I feel like you see them on YouTube a lot,
Speaker 1: like Urban Explorers will we'll go and take videos of them.
Speaker 1: But a lot of these dead malls, as they're call
Speaker 1: are actually just limping along kind of on life support,
Speaker 1: like the one he saw in Kentucky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like we should probably talk a little
Speaker 3: bit about why that is in the state of malls
Speaker 3: you know today, But let's take one more quick break
Speaker 3: and then we'll get back to that.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, So it's been
Speaker 1: sixty three years since the country got its first indoor
Speaker 1: shopping mall, and during that time, as many as fifteen
Speaker 1: hundred more malls have been built in the US, sometimes
Speaker 1: growing at more than twice the rate of the population.
Speaker 1: And you can tell by those numbers that America's malls
Speaker 1: have actually had a great run. But I want to ask,
Speaker 1: how are they holding up in the digital age? Like,
Speaker 1: do the next sixty years look as promising.
Speaker 2: As the first? Oh? Not even close.
Speaker 3: I mean it's not fall Yeah, I was going to say,
Speaker 3: thanks for that tough question. I mean, those fifteen hundred
Speaker 3: malls you mentioned, we're now down to about eleven hundred.
Speaker 3: And you know, if you ask a lot of analysts,
Speaker 3: they project that hundreds more will close over the next
Speaker 3: decade alone.
Speaker 1: So what do you think is behind that decline? Is
Speaker 1: it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping or what?
Speaker 3: Is it? All?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Well, maybe cover your ears, because predictable or not, the
Speaker 3: rise of online shopping has definitely done some serious damage
Speaker 3: to the mall industry. And that said, the demise of
Speaker 3: brick and mortar retail has been greatly exaggerated though, because
Speaker 3: according to the Atlantic, it's actually growing at a rate
Speaker 3: of three percent per year. Even e commerce space companies
Speaker 3: like Amazon and Apple, they've doubled down on the physical
Speaker 3: retail game, which is something they definitely wouldn't be doing
Speaker 3: if brick and mortar retail was truly on its way out.
Speaker 1: So why are malls closing then? Why is it so desperate?
Speaker 3: Well, to put it simply, our country devotes way way
Speaker 3: too much space to retail stores. So forty eight square
Speaker 3: feet per person, to be exact, that is twice as
Speaker 3: much retail space per capita than any other country in
Speaker 3: the world, and a lot more than that in some cases,
Speaker 3: four times more than Japan and France, six times more
Speaker 3: than England, nine times more than Italy, eleven times more
Speaker 3: than Germany. I'm just going to keep going. I've got
Speaker 3: fifty seven more of these. But a retail analyst told
Speaker 3: CNBC that America is quote the most overstored place in
Speaker 3: the world, and when you look at the numbers, it's
Speaker 3: hard to disagree with us.
Speaker 1: So obviously this isn't a new development. We've been hearing
Speaker 1: about urban sprawl for years now, and it was a
Speaker 1: big part of why Gruin turned his back on malls
Speaker 1: entirely in the seventies. So why is the rug being
Speaker 1: pulled out now? Like, did it just take a while
Speaker 1: for the effects of all that retail expansion to manifest?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean again, their arrival of online shopping was
Speaker 3: kind of the tipping point in all of this, and
Speaker 3: being able to shop at home really shined a spotlight
Speaker 3: on just how out of control retail construction had grown.
Speaker 3: So suddenly you had all these empty stores, malls without customers.
Speaker 3: So we may have just started seeing the effects recently,
Speaker 3: but the so called retail upoclypse has actually been a
Speaker 3: long time coming. I mean, the big question now is
Speaker 3: what to do with all the unneeded malls that we
Speaker 3: already have, And in most case, tearing down a failed
Speaker 3: mall is considered too expensive to be a real option.
Speaker 3: But leaving them there to just decay, like that's not
Speaker 3: an appealing strategy.
Speaker 1: Either, Right, Well, it's not like all the remaining malls
Speaker 1: are going to close. From what I read this week,
Speaker 1: the three hundred or so of the top earning malls
Speaker 1: like they're going to be fine in the long term.
Speaker 1: And those are the fanciest, top tier malls that sit
Speaker 1: in wealthy areas and still bring in a lot of money.
Speaker 1: But the other eight hundred or so lower tier malls,
Speaker 1: you know, you might have to get creative with, like
Speaker 1: if they want to avoid being those sort of YouTube
Speaker 1: spectacles that we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, from what I've seen, that's exactly
Speaker 3: what a lot of them are doing. Some of them
Speaker 3: are just being straight up repurposed, either as apartment complexes, churches,
Speaker 3: or schools. I even read about one old mall that's
Speaker 3: been transformed into this enormous indoor paint ball park.
Speaker 1: Which actually kind of sounds kind of amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but plenty of other malls are being inverted into
Speaker 3: what are called lifestyle centers, So that's kind of a
Speaker 3: more hip or more upscale take on a mall, with
Speaker 3: specialty stores like Creighton Barrel or Pottery Barn in place
Speaker 3: of the more traditional department store anchors like a Seer's
Speaker 3: or a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment
Speaker 3: options than regular malls do, so in addition to stores
Speaker 3: and restaurants, you might find live music venues, a bowling alley,
Speaker 3: and art galleries, sometimes a built in movie theater. And
Speaker 3: a lot of these lifestyle centers are open air too,
Speaker 3: with like these facades that make stores look like row houses,
Speaker 3: so you get some of that main street feel to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I've been to a few of those before.
Speaker 1: There was one being built in Durham years ago, and
Speaker 1: I remember thinking, like, you don't have to build a
Speaker 1: mall that looks like an old tobacco warehouse when you've
Speaker 1: got these old tobacco warehouses.
Speaker 2: Just around the corner. But exactly what I do like.
Speaker 1: About this manufacturer of downtown field is that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a throwback to what Victor Gruin wanted for malls
Speaker 1: in the fifties, Like he wanted to bring a touch
Speaker 1: of culture and character to the suburbs by just giving
Speaker 1: people a nice place to gather and socialize and of
Speaker 1: course shop as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I think that's right, And actually in the book I
Speaker 3: quoted earlier, grew and wrote that quote. By affording opportunities
Speaker 3: for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment,
Speaker 3: by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill
Speaker 3: an existing void. That's while the classed uplook of a
Speaker 3: lifestyle center might seem like the first time malls have
Speaker 3: come close to delivering on that promise, I'd actually argue
Speaker 3: that even the crasses most commercial malls still did manage
Speaker 3: to fill an important void for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: So what do you mean by that, Well, think back to.
Speaker 3: When malls were at their peak in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 3: and even the early nineties. So back then there was
Speaker 3: really some social benefit to going to the mall. When
Speaker 3: you think about rural and suburban areas, there just weren't
Speaker 3: enough people to have the kind of daily interactions that
Speaker 3: you know, so commonplace in cities. So in that sense,
Speaker 3: malls were a way to get people into close for
Speaker 3: proximity to one another really more prompted this meaningful chance
Speaker 3: encounters for people who might not have met otherwise. And
Speaker 3: you know, aside from accessibility to humans, there's also accessibility
Speaker 3: to products that malls provided. If you think back in
Speaker 3: the dark days before the internet, just so scared even
Speaker 3: think about, you know, someone in a place like Minnesota,
Speaker 3: they would have very limited selection of clothing and books
Speaker 3: and music to choose from, and any kind of international
Speaker 3: products would have been next to impossible. But with these
Speaker 3: malls coming along, you know, suddenly products from all over
Speaker 3: the country and all over the world really were available
Speaker 3: under one gigantic roof.
Speaker 1: Which is a good point. And speaking of mall and
Speaker 1: nostalgia and how different it is from a world where
Speaker 1: we're getting marketed to from our phones and our computers
Speaker 1: and just NonStop. I have a quote here that I
Speaker 1: wanted to share from an author named Ian Bogost, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a great article for the Atlantic that kind
Speaker 1: of served as an elegy for shopping mall culture, and
Speaker 1: this is what he writes, quote, days of hating the
Speaker 1: mall are numbered. When it gets replaced by appletown squares,
Speaker 1: Walmart supercenters, and the online offline sleurry of and ever
Speaker 1: rising Amazon, we will miss those zoos of capitalism, those
Speaker 1: prisons of commerce where consumersm roared and swelled, but inevitably
Speaker 1: remained contained.
Speaker 3: I guess you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
Speaker 1: Well, we can't dwell in the past forever. So what
Speaker 1: do you say we head into the fact off and
Speaker 1: share a few of the crazier mall stories we found
Speaker 1: this week?
Speaker 3: All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get a
Speaker 3: start and let's see. Well, remember how I said that
Speaker 3: America has twice as much retail space per person compared
Speaker 3: to the rest of the world. Well, our record is
Speaker 3: even worse when it comes to parking spaces. In total,
Speaker 3: the United States has roughly two billion parking spots and
Speaker 3: only about two hundred and fifty million cars to park
Speaker 3: in them. That evens out to eight parking spots for
Speaker 3: every car in the country, And one of the biggest
Speaker 3: contributors to this over supply of parking is, of course,
Speaker 3: the giant parking lot that circles the thousand plus shopping
Speaker 3: malls that we have been talking about today. In fact,
Speaker 3: there are more than twelve and a half thousand at
Speaker 3: the Mall of America.
Speaker 1: Alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one person who
Speaker 1: always comes out ahead at malls, no matter what the circumstance,
Speaker 1: and that is Santa Claus. So according to a magazine
Speaker 1: you might be familiar with mental floss. Being a mall
Speaker 1: Santa is a salaried position and can net first timers
Speaker 1: around ten thousand dollars per six week season. And if
Speaker 1: you're a Santa with a little bit more experience under
Speaker 1: your belt, you might actually be able to earn closer
Speaker 1: to thirty thousand dollars per season. Of course, any would
Speaker 1: be Santa's listening should keep in mind most malls typically
Speaker 1: require their Santas to have natural beards, so no false
Speaker 1: is allowed.
Speaker 3: Ah okay, all right, well here is a kind of
Speaker 3: a weird one. So malls may be on the decline
Speaker 3: in the US, but the business is still booming in
Speaker 3: many Asian countries, particularly in China. The only problem is
Speaker 3: that a lot of the men there don't seem to
Speaker 3: enjoy shopping nearly as much as their wives do. So
Speaker 3: to get around this, some Chinese malls have begun offering
Speaker 3: complimentary lounges, specifically for board husbands who would have rather
Speaker 3: stayed home. The name for these facilities literally translates to
Speaker 3: husband cloak room, which I kind of love. But it
Speaker 3: sounds like they offer way more amenities than the average
Speaker 3: code check. I mean this varies from all to mall,
Speaker 3: but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like
Speaker 3: Wi Fi, snacks, big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs.
Speaker 1: I love that, and I love the idea of like
Speaker 1: a wife dropping off their husband and claiming a tag
Speaker 1: and then like maybe forgetting to come and get on
Speaker 1: at the end of the day exactly. So this is
Speaker 1: a pretty odd fact. Six malls in southern California now
Speaker 1: feature funeral home kiosks, where shoppers can pick out coffins
Speaker 1: or earned and plan their own funerals. Apparently they even
Speaker 1: have a cremation earned with the La Dodgers logo on it.
Speaker 2: So nice.
Speaker 1: So far. The funeral industry seems to view this whole
Speaker 1: thing as a major win in terms of reaching the
Speaker 1: audience where they're at. There's this one director of International
Speaker 1: Cemetery Creation and Funeral Association who said quote nobody gets
Speaker 1: up on a Saturday morning and says, Gee, it's a
Speaker 1: nice day. I wonder if I can go out and
Speaker 1: get myself a burial plot. But if they're surrounded by happy,
Speaker 1: lively people and maybe clutching a bag of missus Field's cookies,
Speaker 1: the thought is they'll feel differently.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure that I agree with that, but it
Speaker 3: is pretty interesting, and I guess.
Speaker 2: There's a reason they're doing it.
Speaker 3: But all right, with the risk of seeming obsessed here,
Speaker 3: I'm going to steer us back to the exciting world
Speaker 3: of mall parking lots, but for good reason. Here because
Speaker 3: I want to share a tip that I came across
Speaker 3: for how to easily find an open space. According to
Speaker 3: mathematician Joe Pagano, all you need to do is find
Speaker 3: anile close to the mall entrance, get about twenty full
Speaker 3: spaces in your site, and then just stop and wait
Speaker 3: six minutes.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of just stopping like that's not
Speaker 1: upset anyone behind you, But why sex men?
Speaker 3: According to Joe, the average shopper spends one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty minutes in the mall. So if you divide one
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty minutes. By the twenty spaces you've zeroed
Speaker 3: in on, then you get six minutes. And that's how
Speaker 3: long it should take for a shopper to return to
Speaker 3: one of those spaces. So if you follow Joe's method,
Speaker 3: that should be the max amount of time you'll spend
Speaker 3: hunting for a spot.
Speaker 1: Well, I do like that one, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to try it out the next time I'm craving
Speaker 1: an orange. Julius, I think you end up with the
Speaker 1: trophy for this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: All Right, well, I think that does it for today's
Speaker 3: Part Time Genius from Gabe, Tristan, Mangesh and me.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 3: We'll be back soon with another episode.
Speaker 2: Part Time Genius is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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