Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. This is your co host of
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know here, Chuck Bryant, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: recommend that you listen to this week's select episode live
Speaker 1: from San Francisco, colin How Malls Work. This was in
Speaker 1: February of twenty seventeen, February nineteenth specifically, and this was
Speaker 1: our Sketch Fest performance for that year. And I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how many times we did this topic live that year,
Speaker 1: but I just wanted to kind of put this in
Speaker 1: as a Saturday Select as a way of saying, hey,
Speaker 1: here's what our live shows sound like, and they are
Speaker 1: a lot of fun, and there's even a lot more
Speaker 1: fun that gets edited out of these. So we're going
Speaker 1: on the road this year, as you know, and we're
Speaker 1: gonna hit probably six or seven more cities before it's
Speaker 1: all said and done in twenty twenty three. So I
Speaker 1: wanted to throw a live show in there to show
Speaker 1: you what was all about. So please to enjoy this
Speaker 1: week's Select live episode How Malls Work. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brian,
Speaker 1: We're in beautiful San Francisco, California, at the Castro Theater.
Speaker 1: You should thank you. It's wonderful, our biggest, our biggest
Speaker 1: show to date. Seriously today, yep, on a Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 1: Ye who knew San Francisco sketch Fest. All right, So
Speaker 1: we're talking today everybody about a little something called the
Speaker 1: Mall And I'm not joking. Yeah, that's what I have.
Speaker 1: So that's good. So we've been wanting to do something
Speaker 1: on the mall for years now and years and years,
Speaker 1: and we thought, well, what does San Francisco if not
Speaker 1: the Mall? Right, they're gonna love this one, and I
Speaker 1: guess we were wrong. Now, you guys will love it.
Speaker 1: I promise it's just like um, like the Grass episode.
Speaker 1: You may have been like, I'm not listening to that,
Speaker 1: and then you finally ran out of episodes. Listen to
Speaker 1: the Grass episode and you're like, that wasn't as bad
Speaker 1: as I thought it was gonna be. This will be
Speaker 1: similar to that experience, okay, except the Grass episode was free.
Speaker 1: I promise we will give it our all. I don't
Speaker 1: know why we're selling it like this is going downhill
Speaker 1: so fast. That's great, okay, so uphill, shall we get
Speaker 1: in the way back machine? Ooh, which is imaginary? Oo.
Speaker 1: So when you think of shopping mall, you think of
Speaker 1: the mall. Right, everybody knows what the mall is. If
Speaker 1: there's somebody who doesn't know what the mall is, raise
Speaker 1: your hand, and whoever sitting next to that person, punch
Speaker 1: him in the arm really hard, be like, come on,
Speaker 1: you know what the mall is. I assume San Francisco
Speaker 1: has malls somewhere. Oh yeah, they've got mall. I've never
Speaker 1: seen one. They're probably out a bit. It's not like
Speaker 1: a mall in the middle of the mission, or is there.
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Right, Okay, there's a few. Oh
Speaker 1: you did, I did a little They pop up here
Speaker 1: or there. You guys will know, because I'll be like,
Speaker 1: so if we're we're all in the way back machine,
Speaker 1: and we're going all the way back back back back
Speaker 1: to ancient Rome where the actual the first what you
Speaker 1: could consider a shopping center appears, and it was called
Speaker 1: Trajan's Market. And Trajan's Market was built in something like
Speaker 1: one oh seven. I think, yeah, that's early. I think
Speaker 1: its anchor store was Trajan's Horse that was okay. Sorry.
Speaker 1: If I had a store back there, that would have
Speaker 1: totally called it Trajan's Horse. Yeah yeah, And it's known
Speaker 1: as the world's oldest shopping center for good reason. Again.
Speaker 1: It was built in one oh seven and right now
Speaker 1: it's in ruins. There's some guy who sells those little
Speaker 1: balls with the raccoon tails on the end of them
Speaker 1: on a tray, but he's technically outside of the mall
Speaker 1: so it doesn't really count to the mall's closed. It
Speaker 1: has been for several millennia now, but the oldest continually
Speaker 1: operated what you would might call an outdoor market or mall,
Speaker 1: is the Grand Bazaar with an A three. A's actually two,
Speaker 1: now there's three. You've been drinking, Yeah, just not together
Speaker 1: be a z a r oh oh gotcha, yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess if I'm not gonna checking his math checks out,
Speaker 1: that's a joke from Fletch. If I'm not mistaken, I
Speaker 1: don't like all right, deep cut the Grand Bizarre Istanbul.
Speaker 1: Between fourteen fifty five and fourteen sixty one is when
Speaker 1: that was built, and it is still an operation today.
Speaker 1: About five thousand coboard shops still gets about a quarter
Speaker 1: million visitors a day. So it's still rocking day. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of folks. So you've got what medieval market
Speaker 1: towns kind of started to come later, seaports, all these things,
Speaker 1: these commercial districts where people went to shop. They all
Speaker 1: had to kind of be centered in an area together
Speaker 1: because people rode horses, or they walked, or they were
Speaker 1: chased by their people, whatever. But you had to go
Speaker 1: and get all your shopping done at one place. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's just kind of a very ancient idea, and right,
Speaker 1: it's wonderful. By the turn of the twentieth century here
Speaker 1: in the US, we had something we still do. It
Speaker 1: hasn't gone away. Pre mall. We had the department store.
Speaker 1: And I think I even mentioned this on another show.
Speaker 1: It didn't dawn on me, you know how, like the
Speaker 1: simplest words dawn on you late in life, like what
Speaker 1: it really means. I just always said, Hey, a department store.
Speaker 1: It really just occurred to me a couple of years ago, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a store full of many departments. Right, never really
Speaker 1: thought about it. Do you ever have those? It's kind
Speaker 1: of nice department stores thirteen stories high in Chicago, the
Speaker 1: Marshall end Field Company and Marshall Field, Marshall Field and Company.
Speaker 1: And then in Detroit there was one called J. L.
Speaker 1: Hudson's that was twenty five floors of department store, twenty
Speaker 1: five floors of retail space. And this thing took up
Speaker 1: like a whole block. Yeah, and there's nineteen eleven, so
Speaker 1: there's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: In eighteen twenty eight, though, if you back up a
Speaker 1: little bit, the first sort of enclosed shopping center that
Speaker 1: you might kind of consider a mall mall even though
Speaker 1: we really don't, as you'll see, because it didn't have
Speaker 1: an arcade, even though it is it's called the Westminster Arcade,
Speaker 1: fun ironically didn't have an arcade. And Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: Has anyone ever been to this place? Yeah? I've been?
Speaker 1: Have you really? Yes? I didn't know that. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: didn't type in here I've been there. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: I didn't know I needed to say that. Well, it
Speaker 1: was assumed. It's a pretty cool place. So if you
Speaker 1: look it up online, it doesn't look like the mall
Speaker 1: that you would consider a mall. Looks like sort of
Speaker 1: like a Greek revival building and it's like a big
Speaker 1: ceiling Yeah, it's really nice. It's got three it sort
Speaker 1: of looks like a train station. It's kind of three floors.
Speaker 1: And recently they were going to demolish it, but someone
Speaker 1: swooped in and built micro apartments. Now you can live
Speaker 1: in there and they're really kind of cool. And I
Speaker 1: was gonna explain again what a micro apartment was, but
Speaker 1: I forgot where I am. Yeah, so you all know,
Speaker 1: isn't that like a dresser drawer? Yes, and you walk
Speaker 1: through the little thing that's like, oh my god, I
Speaker 1: love living in thirty square feet and it's just some
Speaker 1: guy standing in a broom cloth pretty much. Uh, screw
Speaker 1: this up, herbs. Wait even well, even back further than this,
Speaker 1: Russia should get its due right, even even before them,
Speaker 1: even before the the the Westminster Arcade, there is this
Speaker 1: thing called the ghost veted Voor. And I looked at
Speaker 1: the pronunciation, but I should qualify that I looked up
Speaker 1: the pronunciation on the same site that I looked up
Speaker 1: the pronunciation on Disha chain, which I called dixiea chain
Speaker 1: throughout the entire Underground City episode. So so take that
Speaker 1: for what it. I was about to say, all our
Speaker 1: Asian friends, let us know that was wrong, but really
Speaker 1: everyone of every race let us know that was wrong,
Speaker 1: Thank you dummies. After World War two, things really kind
Speaker 1: of evolved with the shopping center though. That's when things
Speaker 1: kind of started going in In nineteen fifty Seattle's Northgate
Speaker 1: Center was But I feel like we say several times,
Speaker 1: the first thing we think of a zamal. I guess
Speaker 1: it was just part of the evolution, right. Southdale was
Speaker 1: the first real mall. All right, so Southdale we're gonna
Speaker 1: pick up with Southdale. Southdale was in Edina, Minnesota. A dinah,
Speaker 1: thank you live corrections very nice? Where were you? And
Speaker 1: I was saying Dixie a chance over and over and over. Deal. Well,
Speaker 1: previous to that, boy, we're jumping all around this designer
Speaker 1: and really the man who were gonna either thank for
Speaker 1: the mall or blame for the mall, depending on how
Speaker 1: you feel about malls is a gentleman named Victor Gruen.
Speaker 1: Anyone want to correct me on that. He's an Austrian
Speaker 1: architect and he designed Northland Center in Michigan. Is that correct? Yes?
Speaker 1: And it was. Northland Center is in Southland, Michigan. Now
Speaker 1: it's so confusing, it's terrible. It had a what was known,
Speaker 1: and I said anchor store earlier, and this is what
Speaker 1: malls have. They have these anchor stores which are still
Speaker 1: to this day, mainly department stores. And that anchor store
Speaker 1: was Hudson's Department Store, had about one hundred and ten
Speaker 1: other stores. But it still wasn't a real mall mall
Speaker 1: because it wasn't as you'll see, introverted, correct, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't enclosed. It was open air. Yeah, like you know
Speaker 1: when you go to those outlet malls today where it's
Speaker 1: just all you're walking around outside like an idiot. You know,
Speaker 1: this is kind of like what Southfield was like get
Speaker 1: and that's what all shopping malls were like up to
Speaker 1: that point. They weren't enclosed. It was nineteen fifty six
Speaker 1: in a Dina, Minnesota when the first enclosed mall like
Speaker 1: we think of it today came about. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: actually looked up the previous Northland. They did close that
Speaker 1: in in the seventies and it finally shuddered for good
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, and I found this website
Speaker 1: that said twelve weirdest things left behind in the Northland
Speaker 1: Center And it wasn't that exciting, but there was one
Speaker 1: the group to tension room and I started thinking, holy crap,
Speaker 1: malls had jails. Yeah, And I looked it up and
Speaker 1: someone said I went to Yahoo. Answers like, where else
Speaker 1: do you go to get the real truth? And the
Speaker 1: number one voted up answer said, it's not a real cell.
Speaker 1: It's just a small dark room with no windows, in
Speaker 1: a chair and a camera in it that you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to leave. It's like and this one I took
Speaker 1: micro department basically, this one had changed on the benches
Speaker 1: and I was like, nah, that's a jail cell. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I saw that too. There was like a target
Speaker 1: cart under a spotlight. I think. I thought that was beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was very arty, haunting. I'm with you, lady, all right.
Speaker 1: So jumping back forward again to Minneapolis. Outside of Minneapolis
Speaker 1: is it Adena, Diana, Thank you, nineteen fifty six Southdale,
Speaker 1: twenty million bucks. The anchor store was Donaldson's and Dayton's, right,
Speaker 1: who can forget Donaldson's? I did, okay, And Dayton's actually
Speaker 1: commissioned this mall to be built because they were building
Speaker 1: a new outpost in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't just by coincidence that a Diana was ten miles
Speaker 1: away from downtown Minneapolis, because again this is nineteen fifty six,
Speaker 1: so it's during the Cold War, and that's actually right
Speaker 1: outside the eight mile blast radius of atomic bomb were
Speaker 1: it to be dropped on Minneapolis. Because of course that's
Speaker 1: what the Ruskies were thinking, We're going from Minneapolis first.
Speaker 1: But they've built a mall outside of the blast radius,
Speaker 1: so I guess we'll just give up. So the original
Speaker 1: idea for them all from Victor Gruin, was too he
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of, you know how they have these
Speaker 1: mixed use centers. Now, he had this idea way back
Speaker 1: then and he wanted people to live there and kind
Speaker 1: of congregate there. And we'll get a little more to
Speaker 1: this later, but it sort of ended up just being
Speaker 1: a shopping mall, to his disappointment. But he modeled it
Speaker 1: on Northgate in Seattle, and sort of the big idea
Speaker 1: was that you go to these department stores because that's
Speaker 1: where people were used to. But how do you get
Speaker 1: them to these other stores? Was the big question, right,
Speaker 1: how do you get them chopping? Oh at the mall? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they're there because people went to department store. So
Speaker 1: if you put a department store out in the suburbs.
Speaker 1: They'll go to the department store. They're like, oh, I
Speaker 1: thought I was supposed to take a left, Now I'm
Speaker 1: taking a right. I'm at the department store. Who cares. Right.
Speaker 1: The problem is is if you put one hundred and
Speaker 1: ten other stores coming off of that department store, they
Speaker 1: just go to the department store and leave. Not good,
Speaker 1: right if you're one of these other stores. So what
Speaker 1: Northgate figured out, and what is mind numbingly obvious but
Speaker 1: really works, is you just take this department store, put
Speaker 1: another department store, and then put the shops in between them,
Speaker 1: and then the people take a rite. But they should
Speaker 1: take a left. But they're fine, they're going to the
Speaker 1: department store. Oh, if there's another department store, well, I'll
Speaker 1: just walk past this. Maybe i'll buy that, I'll buy
Speaker 1: a little bit of this. Sure, i'll take a feather
Speaker 1: boa And then they walk into the other department store
Speaker 1: and consumerism is saved. That's right. It was revolutionary at
Speaker 1: the time. So he built he was commissioned at least
Speaker 1: by Dayton's department store to build this kind of advanced
Speaker 1: shopping center. They didn't call them malls at the time.
Speaker 1: They called them advanced shopping centers, and that's so high tech.
Speaker 1: He actually added space for a competitor at the other end,
Speaker 1: because you had this idea like how to keep people there,
Speaker 1: And I don't know how he talked Dayton's into it.
Speaker 1: Were like wait, wait, yeah, like hold on a second, no, no,
Speaker 1: we're paying you to do this, and you want to
Speaker 1: put a competitor's store in there. He's like, yeah, it'll work,
Speaker 1: trust me. So a few minutes ago I mentioned that
Speaker 1: it was introverted. My uncle's still texting me, still looking
Speaker 1: for parking, just circling the castro at this point. So
Speaker 1: we mentioned introverted and extroverted. Malls previous to this were outdoor,
Speaker 1: and like we said, they were extroverted. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you walk the perimeter and the stores faced the outside
Speaker 1: and they had doors on them that you would walk
Speaker 1: into if you wanted to shop. So he had this
Speaker 1: idea like, wait, let's reverse all that. Let's turn it
Speaker 1: all inside. Where you walk into this huge building. You
Speaker 1: got these two stores on both ends, and there are
Speaker 1: no doors. They might have a gate they lower it night,
Speaker 1: but it's just open. Like people will just walk through
Speaker 1: this little concourse and all the stores are wide open
Speaker 1: for everyone. It's air conditioned, it's heated, not at the
Speaker 1: same time, at appropriate times, especially in a place like Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: it's probably a nice place to go in the wintertime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a big deal. He introverted them is what
Speaker 1: they're called, right where they look in on themselves, and
Speaker 1: they're enclosed as well. So for the first time ever,
Speaker 1: you could just walk around this beautiful place with trees,
Speaker 1: and he put like a twenty foot bird cage, and
Speaker 1: there were goldfish ponds and all of this stuff. And
Speaker 1: it'd be the middle of winter and you could walk
Speaker 1: around in short sleeves and be like, I live in
Speaker 1: a Dinah, not a dina. The other thing he kind
Speaker 1: of nailed right out of the gate was previous to this,
Speaker 1: shopping malls were usually or shopping centers are on one floor,
Speaker 1: and they were spread out over this big, broad area
Speaker 1: and you had to enter from the outside and walk
Speaker 1: around the cold and it was all this one big,
Speaker 1: single level. And he said, how about this, how about
Speaker 1: we stack it, because this is a genius. Everyone put
Speaker 1: a store on one end, put a store on the
Speaker 1: other end. You stack him on top of each other.
Speaker 1: You put escalators on both sides. You park in this side,
Speaker 1: you go into your department store, you walk down on
Speaker 1: the first level to get to the other department store,
Speaker 1: you get down the escalator, and then you walk back
Speaker 1: on the other level to get to your car. And
Speaker 1: you've seen every store, right, and it was genius. It
Speaker 1: was retail genius, exactly pretty amazing. And again we take
Speaker 1: this for granted now, but at the time everyone's like, hum,
Speaker 1: I never thought of that. Well, the point that we
Speaker 1: take this for granted, like all of this sounds brain dead.
Speaker 1: All of this came essentially from this one guy, this
Speaker 1: dude named Victor Grewitt, who was kind of like a
Speaker 1: high artsy Fartsia society type from Austria who fled the
Speaker 1: Nazis in nineteen thirty eight and was a self taught
Speaker 1: architect right who just started designing them all and he
Speaker 1: invented the mall, and he got basically everything right out
Speaker 1: of the gate, actually amazing. The Economist has a really
Speaker 1: great quote about him. They say that he it was
Speaker 1: as if Orville and Wilbur Wright invented not just manned
Speaker 1: flight but also tray tables and duty free service. Not bad.
Speaker 1: The other thing he got right right out of the
Speaker 1: gate was these low balconies. You know, if you'd ever
Speaker 1: go into them all. You know, if you're on that
Speaker 1: top floor, you can look down and say, I gotta
Speaker 1: go into Chess King and get some parachute pants. Or
Speaker 1: if you're down on that bottom floor, you can look
Speaker 1: up and you can see I gotta go to Marry
Speaker 1: Go Around and check out the ladies. Merry Go Around. Man.
Speaker 1: That takes me back right. There will be a bit
Speaker 1: of nostalgia peppered in here and there. Actually, I don't
Speaker 1: even think I put Marry Go Around. I put Camelot
Speaker 1: music is what I have in my Camelot music everyone.
Speaker 1: And the joke I have was the Duran Duran kissingle.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the kissingle. It's like I just ate
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of member berries or something of what
Speaker 1: member berries. I don't know. It's a whole South Park thing. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well three other people love that joke. So more than
Speaker 1: seventy five thousand people. Seventy five thousand people turned out
Speaker 1: on the grand opening day of Southdale Mall, and not
Speaker 1: just local press, Life Magazine, Time Magazine, New York Times,
Speaker 1: Business Week, Newsweek, They all came out and said things
Speaker 1: like it's the splashiest center in the US, as a
Speaker 1: goldfish pond, birds art, ten acres of stores, and all
Speaker 1: under one Minnesota roof. It's a pleasure dome with parking,
Speaker 1: said Time magazine. But one guy got it right. One
Speaker 1: guy said Southdale has become an integral part of the
Speaker 1: American Way, and this is the first mall. And some
Speaker 1: journalist points to it and says, this is how things
Speaker 1: are from now on. And this is the page that
Speaker 1: is very hard for me to read because, as you
Speaker 1: can see, I crumpled it up. Well, hold on, so
Speaker 1: if we're going to release this, we should probably take
Speaker 1: an ab break. Huh oh yeah, sure, Okay, you're ready,
Speaker 1: so we'll be right back, and we're back, all right.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you thought of that. You guys get to
Speaker 1: see how the sausage. So, as I was saying before
Speaker 1: the break, I don't know if you can see it there,
Speaker 1: but this is crumpled up and very hard to read.
Speaker 1: Because Josh sent a new version and I in the
Speaker 1: hotel room, I said great, I printed it out, rumpled
Speaker 1: up the wrong one and threw it away, and right
Speaker 1: before I came I was searching through the trash and
Speaker 1: here it is. It's not that bad actually, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna entitle this next section the golden age of the
Speaker 1: mall was you have to go like this one. It
Speaker 1: wouldn't be a live show if we didn't have a
Speaker 1: golden age of skyjacking, Golden age of pr golden age
Speaker 1: of grave robbing, and now the golden age of them
Speaker 1: all right. I was about to say golden age of
Speaker 1: Rodney Dangerfield, but it was all golden age for that guy.
Speaker 1: So the mall had its golden age. Between nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: six and two thousand and five, fifteen hundred malls or
Speaker 1: America were built, possibly two thousand, possibly three thousand, what
Speaker 1: no one knows. They just stopped counting pretty much. They're like,
Speaker 1: forget it. We'll say seven thousand. Who cares. Million. A
Speaker 1: million malls were built between that time in the US.
Speaker 1: So there's a woman named Lisa Sharon who wrote a
Speaker 1: book called America at the Mall Colon, because every book
Speaker 1: has to have a colon if you're smart. The cultural
Speaker 1: role of retail utopia. And she said, for the children seventies, eighties,
Speaker 1: and nineties, the shopping mall was the place to be,
Speaker 1: a space where we defined as our own. The mall
Speaker 1: taught us how to fit in, how to be a consumer,
Speaker 1: ultimately how to be an American. So who I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't. You don't have to say how old you are.
Speaker 1: But if you grew up in sort of the seventies
Speaker 1: and the eighties, you know that the mall and into
Speaker 1: the nineties. Of course, sure, the shopping mall was like
Speaker 1: it's different than it is today. Like families used to
Speaker 1: go to the mall for the day. You'd pick a Saturday,
Speaker 1: and you'd all pile in the car. You go to
Speaker 1: the mall. You maybe go see a movie, the kids
Speaker 1: would go to the arcade. Mom and dad would do
Speaker 1: some shopping, and you would literally spend like six and
Speaker 1: eight hours as a family outing at a mall. Right,
Speaker 1: pretty unbelievable to think about that. Now you gather around
Speaker 1: the laptop and go on the Amazon dot com. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'll sit around and stare at your phones and
Speaker 1: ignore you. Just say, yes, I would like to get
Speaker 1: into fermenting pickles. I could use some fermentation weights. Thanks
Speaker 1: for suggesting that Amazon. Interesting. You just changed my life.
Speaker 1: But it was a big deal. You would spend family
Speaker 1: Day at the mall. And in the eighties it was
Speaker 1: just it was a part of America as anything else.
Speaker 1: There were restaurants in the food court at the mall
Speaker 1: that didn't exist outside of them all. They were born
Speaker 1: in the mall, like Cinnabon. Someone gasped, that's it, we
Speaker 1: can go home now, we're ever working toward as a
Speaker 1: gasp from somebody. Orange Julius that was another one. And
Speaker 1: Express was only in malls for a long time. And
Speaker 1: apparently Sbarrow. Everyone knows of Sbarrow, right. It was so
Speaker 1: tied to malls that when Sabarrow filed for bankruptcy in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, they cited unprecedented decline in mall traffic in
Speaker 1: their filing. There's like, no one likes the mall anymore.
Speaker 1: We're borrow, We're dead. Yeah, word good Chick fil A too.
Speaker 1: You guys don't have Chick fil A here, do you? Oh?
Speaker 1: You do you do well? Long before we knew the chicken,
Speaker 1: it was back when everyone just thought it was delicious
Speaker 1: and juicy and crispy, not filled with homophobia. Yeah, but no, no,
Speaker 1: they've they've since walked it back. So it's all fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're just not open on Sundays. Uh. Chick fil A
Speaker 1: would used to only be in the mall. I think
Speaker 1: there was one original Chick fil A store in Georgia.
Speaker 1: I think that's where it was born. But aside from that,
Speaker 1: it was only in the mall. And I remember going
Speaker 1: to the mall. Remember when malls used and they may
Speaker 1: still do this. I don't go to malls. There's a
Speaker 1: shop on Amazon dot com. Um. Malls used to have
Speaker 1: events like a world record Sunday ice cream Sunday or
Speaker 1: something to get people there. I went to Chick fil
Speaker 1: A when I was about ten at Northlake Mall, which
Speaker 1: was my them all because they had the world's largest
Speaker 1: cup of lemonade on a Saturday afternoon. My mom took
Speaker 1: me and I drank from that spigot among the thousands
Speaker 1: of other people, and it was not even that impressive,
Speaker 1: Like I thought it was giant, but now that I'm adult,
Speaker 1: it was probably like eight feet high. Right now it
Speaker 1: was sixty four ounces. But they were just the first
Speaker 1: ones to try, so whatever they did was the world's
Speaker 1: biggest cup of lemonte. That was a mall event that
Speaker 1: I went to. What was your mall? I had two
Speaker 1: because we moved a very formative time in my life.
Speaker 1: I had Southwick Mall untiledo. Yeah, and then over a clause, Okay,
Speaker 1: I had a town center mall in Atlanta. No, okay,
Speaker 1: you guys haven't been a town center mall. Believe me,
Speaker 1: I would recognize you. Were you a mall rat. No, no,
Speaker 1: not necessarily. No, I would not call myself a mall
Speaker 1: rat because I wasn't. I didn't like sell or consume
Speaker 1: drugs at the mall, so I wasn't a mall rat.
Speaker 1: I was like there legitimately, like I was there to
Speaker 1: visit the led Zeppelin box set on cassette that I
Speaker 1: was saving up to buy, just to make sure it
Speaker 1: was still there, you know, Or like I would go
Speaker 1: to Spencers and like put my hand on the plasma ball.
Speaker 1: Let's be like, oh, you guys have Spencer Gifts. Well
Speaker 1: I say that like you're from here. I know that,
Speaker 1: like eight people are from San Francisco in this room.
Speaker 1: You know, Spencer Gifts. Okay, okay, very titillating place for
Speaker 1: a young Baptist is because after because the one section
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about, plus the posters too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But it's funny now as an adult, the one section
Speaker 1: I just thought it was like, oh man, and then
Speaker 1: there are some children here just you don't know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. Maybe may maybe she's used to pick lad.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to do that. It was, but
Speaker 1: for a young Baptist kid, I was just like I would.
Speaker 1: I would. I would walk by it and I would
Speaker 1: pretend like I'm looking at other things and just look
Speaker 1: in that section to see what I was in it.
Speaker 1: I remember, and now it was so dumb the stuff
Speaker 1: that was in that secure Yeah. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: stud collar. I was like, who cares. By the time
Speaker 1: you're like, oh cool, I got it checking me out
Speaker 1: yesterday was wearing one and nothing else. Yeah, maybe a
Speaker 1: condom with bells and that's it. So silly. I remember
Speaker 1: walking past Victoria's Secret like I was not doing that
Speaker 1: on purpose, but just kind of like like I could
Speaker 1: actually I trained my right eye to go like I
Speaker 1: took a lot of exercise, a lot of work, a
Speaker 1: lot of muscle relaxers, but I got it down path.
Speaker 1: Oh that's good. And that was pret cell phone when
Speaker 1: you couldn't fake like you were doing something else. Right,
Speaker 1: good work, that's very impressive. You trained it back and
Speaker 1: everything I did now I can't do it anymore, or
Speaker 1: else I show you guys, I don't know where I was.
Speaker 1: I got so sidetracked by North Lake Mall. Oh and
Speaker 1: the gold mine was my arcade at the mall. Sure wonderful.
Speaker 1: You can get like twenty tokens for a dollar on
Speaker 1: a Wednesday, and now games cost like a dollar fifty
Speaker 1: to play one game. Yeah, a progress. That's what else
Speaker 1: said they have back in those days? You made a
Speaker 1: list Chess king. Of course, Mary go Around, I mentioned
Speaker 1: contempo casuals, ladies, deb knew. This section was all into
Speaker 1: that county seat. Remember county seat. Oh, that's that is
Speaker 1: a deep cut where you could go get gene blue.
Speaker 1: But it was like when the gap used to be
Speaker 1: like sweatsirts and blue jeans before they rebranded. Right, you
Speaker 1: should go back to that, Mary go Around. Can want music?
Speaker 1: What else? Oh? Well, bookstores? You could just say bookstore
Speaker 1: and that would be novel be Dalton, Yeah, Waldon books,
Speaker 1: Walden Books. I think I consumed every single volume of
Speaker 1: truly tasteless jokes and those without buying a single one. Man,
Speaker 1: I remember those, God, those are great, Yeah, Pet Doctor,
Speaker 1: the cruel List, cutest store of all the time, Remember
Speaker 1: like the mall pet Store. It was like this, hamps
Speaker 1: are so cute and then it died like an hour
Speaker 1: later from Nigglay. They just shuffle it out and put
Speaker 1: a new one in. There's a trap door. Nice John
Speaker 1: Hodgeman want to hate this show dripping with nostalgia. He's
Speaker 1: here in this town. He refused to come because he
Speaker 1: knew or are you kidding? He'd already be up here, like, Oh,
Speaker 1: Nostalgia's toxic. The mall became a prominent fixture in movies
Speaker 1: of the day, of course, the Sherman Oaks Galleria and California,
Speaker 1: which is where we are, Yeah, California here. That was
Speaker 1: the mall in Fast Times at Ridge Mount High, one
Speaker 1: of the great mall movies, and full Mall movie, but
Speaker 1: you can tell it's short. It also appeared prominently in Commando,
Speaker 1: where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up like a ton of guys
Speaker 1: at the mall, same mall. Nine of the comment you
Speaker 1: mentioned anyone, I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking,
Speaker 1: because you know the here if you haven't seen the movie,
Speaker 1: this comment comes and destroys like everyone at night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and everyone has these comment parties to watch the comment
Speaker 1: but it kills everybody except for the two really hot
Speaker 1: teenage girls that didn't watch the comment and then a
Speaker 1: few other people. And what do they do. They go
Speaker 1: to the mall shop because it's abandoned. And I remember
Speaker 1: being a kid and thinking that would be the dopest
Speaker 1: thing ever to just go in an empty mall and
Speaker 1: it's all yours, or to order to live at Restoration Hardware.
Speaker 1: I wore to run into Spencer Gifts into that section. Yeah,
Speaker 1: collar just like pass out from pleasure. That's what a
Speaker 1: wayed you and you missed your chance. You could be
Speaker 1: walking around the castro right right kind of look out
Speaker 1: and there's this creepy guy with a wandering staring at
Speaker 1: me and who knew? Who knew? What else? The Blues
Speaker 1: Brothers had a very famous mall scene. Yeah, they went
Speaker 1: through the Dixie Square mall, sorry, the Decius Square mall
Speaker 1: that where they were like, this place has got everything.
Speaker 1: And maybe one of the most famous mall parking lots
Speaker 1: of all time the Twin Pines Mall from Back to
Speaker 1: the Future, which was actually the Quinte Heels Mall. Heels
Speaker 1: that was possibly appropriate maybe, which I don't even know
Speaker 1: where that is. I mean it's in LA obviously, but
Speaker 1: I'm not sure it's a it's in City of Industry,
Speaker 1: which is that the name for a town? Everybody, No,
Speaker 1: it's outside of LA. I looked it up. And of
Speaker 1: course mall Rats, which we don't need to talk about
Speaker 1: too much because it was a little Really that was
Speaker 1: Kevin Smith. Here's a really high voice. No, I'm Vin Smith.
Speaker 1: You can't leave out Moon Unit. Zappa dude, Oh well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course. Valley Girl. Yeah, she had a hit single,
Speaker 1: Valley Girl, and her father, Frank Zappa hated the Valley Girls, right,
Speaker 1: and while it kind of blew up in his face
Speaker 1: when he released a song with his daughter about how
Speaker 1: stupid valley Girls were, that it actually popularized Valley Girls
Speaker 1: and made him cool in America. Yeah, so eat that,
Speaker 1: Frank Zappa. He's past eat that. In musical heaven, so um.
Speaker 1: Alls started to really grow, not only in popularity but
Speaker 1: in size, to the point, as Josh says, of sheer
Speaker 1: absurdity in Canada because they have malls too, I should say, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have some Canadians here, and yet no one from Toledo.
Speaker 1: The West Edmonton mall really all right opened and no
Speaker 1: one from Toledo, anyone from Elm Street in Edmonton. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I thought. It was open in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: had an ice skating rink, It had sea lions in
Speaker 1: a pool boo, and an indoor bungee jumps to tempt
Speaker 1: fate for shoppers right over the sea lions. It's just
Speaker 1: scared than Oh my god, sea lions hate being jumped over.
Speaker 1: And the developers knew it too. And of course the
Speaker 1: Mall of America, perhaps the most famous mall in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: They were going to build a roller coaster there. They
Speaker 1: did when they decided to build three roller coasters there.
Speaker 1: I've never been there. Have you been there in the
Speaker 1: Mall of America? No? I haven't anyone been there? Oh wow,
Speaker 1: all right, huge? Right, it's outside of a dinah, so actually,
Speaker 1: you know, really it's like seven miles from a dinah.
Speaker 1: That's true. Should we go to the mall walkers, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. This may be one of my favorite
Speaker 1: sections of any show we've ever done, because I love
Speaker 1: mall Walkers. Didn't know it existed until I worked at them. All.
Speaker 1: I worked. I think I mentioned on the show I
Speaker 1: worked at the Gap for a month in college over
Speaker 1: Christmas break and I was a champion folder and I
Speaker 1: still have those skills today. Were you really you know
Speaker 1: I actually quit working in the Gap is because they
Speaker 1: got mad that I wouldn't recommend socks and belts as
Speaker 1: they checked out, And I said, I think if they
Speaker 1: wanted socks and belts, they would get socks and belts.
Speaker 1: And my manager said, you know, I don't know if
Speaker 1: the Gap is right for you. I think you might
Speaker 1: be right. I took off my little pen and I
Speaker 1: handed it to him, and me and my mock turtlenecks
Speaker 1: strolled right on at it and that was it. That's
Speaker 1: the only retail job I've ever I did. But anyway,
Speaker 1: a long way of getting to mall walkers. I remember
Speaker 1: showing up for work one morning to open and there
Speaker 1: were these old people walking around and I thought, does
Speaker 1: anyone know that they're in here because the mall's not
Speaker 1: open yet, And someone said they live here. Yeah, they yeah,
Speaker 1: they live in and merry go round and come out
Speaker 1: at night from the giant pants they just sprouted out
Speaker 1: of the legs. But they explained to me what a
Speaker 1: mall walker was, and even at a young age, I
Speaker 1: was like, that's wonderful. It wore my heart and it
Speaker 1: became a legit, real American thing. It did. Apparently the
Speaker 1: CDC did a report on this, because if you can't
Speaker 1: study gun violence, might as well study mall walking out
Speaker 1: sing And in twenty fifteen they said malls are right
Speaker 1: behind neighborhoods for popularity of walking. They just went to
Speaker 1: bed after that, but they did a little more digging
Speaker 1: and they said the reason people love malls is because
Speaker 1: there's restrooms, water fountains, benches, and level surfaces. And this
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite quotes from any CDC rapport ever.
Speaker 1: They said that quote, the latest fashionable workout attire is
Speaker 1: not a requisite for malwalking, And no truer words have
Speaker 1: ever been spoken. You won't find any yoga pants on
Speaker 1: the mallwalkers. As a matter of fact, I would imagine
Speaker 1: you would be ostracized if you did just kind of
Speaker 1: gussy up, like you're putting on airs or something new.
Speaker 1: They don't play that in a dinah. Yeah. Actually, you
Speaker 1: know what malwalkers were, those those workout pants that look
Speaker 1: like waded up paper. You know, what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: It's like this wrinkly, weird material. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what it's made of. Fish skin? What, Yes, all right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about all right, we'll talk about it later.
Speaker 1: Let's hang on to this page to remind us to
Speaker 1: talk about it. Well, that's fish skin, but you mean clothing.
Speaker 1: That's totally weird, but it makes sense in a way.
Speaker 1: Uh So, these these generally elderly folks are walking around malls,
Speaker 1: and at the Mall of America, they have a PR
Speaker 1: coordinator there named Tara Neebling, and she says, we love
Speaker 1: our wall markers, mall walkers. They're very special to us.
Speaker 1: And they even have a program there is so adorable
Speaker 1: where they give them little swipe cards. It keeps track.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like a fitbit, but they can't wear
Speaker 1: a fitbit, I guess because I don't even know why
Speaker 1: they can't figure it out or something. That's a very
Speaker 1: agist and is going to be against the wall for
Speaker 1: that joke later on. But they give them these little
Speaker 1: swipe cards that lets them track how much they're walking
Speaker 1: and how much exercise they're getting. They have monthly breakfast
Speaker 1: meetings where they have health experts come in and talk
Speaker 1: about stuff. We should all go there right now. And
Speaker 1: all this is in exchange for a fifteen dollars annual
Speaker 1: fee if you want to officially be a member. But
Speaker 1: don't feel bad, sir, because like I was, like, what
Speaker 1: a rip. They said they welcome unofficial mall walkers aka
Speaker 1: the old dudes who refused to pay the fifteen dollars
Speaker 1: aka Society's leeches. That would be me. I'm not paying
Speaker 1: fifteen dollars. That's me and about oh ten or fifteen years. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I think it's adorable. And the whole thing about mall
Speaker 1: walkers is they it was a problem at first because
Speaker 1: they didn't used to open malls to allow this. They
Speaker 1: just came to the mall when it was open and
Speaker 1: they would walk around and they said that there was
Speaker 1: a quote in here they said they thought it would
Speaker 1: upset the regular shoppers to have them just exercising among them.
Speaker 1: And they're like, you know what do we do? We
Speaker 1: can't kill them. They got our they have our arms
Speaker 1: behind our backs, like they really have us over a barrel.
Speaker 1: We can't kill them, can we? We could wait for
Speaker 1: them to die, And I guess this is that they're
Speaker 1: really healthy because all mall owners gets together year. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like CAP's red satin inside black on the own. So
Speaker 1: they decided to open them all just for them to
Speaker 1: walk around before the store is open, which is just adorable,
Speaker 1: I think. And speaking of the Mall of America, Douglas Copeland,
Speaker 1: I don't know if any of you have read Generation X.
Speaker 1: It's a really great book, but he basically coined the name.
Speaker 1: Apparently no one's read it. Douglas Copeland, Wow, this really
Speaker 1: would work so much better if you guys knew what
Speaker 1: Generation X was. Yeah, we wrote it. So he wrote
Speaker 1: the book literally Generation X, and like just set the
Speaker 1: tone for the whole thing. And he was actually at
Speaker 1: the opening of Mall of America on August eleven, nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, and he was up there on stage with
Speaker 1: the local radio affiliate, and he said that everybody was
Speaker 1: walking by with what he called country fair face, where
Speaker 1: they were like google eyed and eating ice cream, couldn't
Speaker 1: believe this mall. It was the most amazing thing they'd
Speaker 1: ever seen. And he said that the inner viewer just
Speaker 1: assumed he was going to be like a slacker, ironic
Speaker 1: wise ass and said, you know, I bet you think
Speaker 1: this whole mall is very hokey and trashy, and Douglas
Speaker 1: Copeland said, actually not at all, Chuck. Where should I
Speaker 1: start here? Oh? Oh, sorry, I can't finish my part.
Speaker 1: Then the radio guy was like, what, Chuck, and he said, quote,
Speaker 1: I mean that. I feel like, I mean another era
Speaker 1: that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn't, not yet.
Speaker 1: I think we might one day look back on photos
Speaker 1: of today and think to ourselves, you know, those people
Speaker 1: were living in golden times and they didn't even know it.
Speaker 1: Communism was dead, the economy was good, and the future,
Speaker 1: with all of its accompanying technologies, hadn't crush society's mojo
Speaker 1: like a bug drop the mica and they said, well,
Speaker 1: that's really not good for the mic, and we're please, please,
Speaker 1: don't do that anymore. And he goes on to say
Speaker 1: it's true. He says that technology hadn't hallowed up the
Speaker 1: middle class and turned to all into like laptop click chunkies.
Speaker 1: He didn't say that there were no He said there
Speaker 1: were no new boogeymen hiding in the closet. He said,
Speaker 1: we may look at the nineties as the last good
Speaker 1: decade and all of this came to him at the mall,
Speaker 1: so they didn't get their snarky quote after all, which
Speaker 1: is kind of ironic in a way. So he really
Speaker 1: did zing them, but it was a meta zinc So
Speaker 1: if you want to talk to the psychology of malls,
Speaker 1: we need to go back to Victor Gruen, and he
Speaker 1: has a quote where he said shoppers will be so
Speaker 1: bedazzled by the store surroundings they'll be drawn unconsciously continually
Speaker 1: to shop. And this kind of goes against his ethos.
Speaker 1: He wasn't some big He wasn't like the pr guy.
Speaker 1: I can't think of his name. We did that like
Speaker 1: twelve times. He wasn't like Ed Burney's. He didn't have
Speaker 1: this thing where he was like, yes, we need to
Speaker 1: get people to shop, but he was commissioned to do
Speaker 1: so and he did a good job. He thought the
Speaker 1: mall would be a little bit more like a sort
Speaker 1: of like they had in Europe, like a public meeting space,
Speaker 1: and that's why you build these atriums in the middle
Speaker 1: of the skylights in the fountain, and he thought people
Speaker 1: would go there and hang out and talk politics and
Speaker 1: maybe even stand up and like speak about things publicly.
Speaker 1: To people, because that's what happens at the mall. Right, Instead,
Speaker 1: the developers are like, you go over there, you're done,
Speaker 1: you did your damage. Right. We're actually going to go
Speaker 1: so far as to name a psychological effect after you,
Speaker 1: something called the grew In transfer, which is where you
Speaker 1: walk into the mall and you're like, I'm going to
Speaker 1: buy a Hello Kitty pen and that is it. And
Speaker 1: you get through the mall and you're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: there's a water fountain. Oh my god, there's old people
Speaker 1: walking around. There's just amazing stuff going on here at
Speaker 1: the mall. I forgot what I was going to get,
Speaker 1: and now I have a compulsion to get an Orange
Speaker 1: Julius with drugs in it. And you forget what you're doing,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you're shopping in general rather
Speaker 1: than purposefully shopping. That is called the grew In trans
Speaker 1: for the grew In effect, and Victor Grewhim probably would
Speaker 1: not be very happy to know that that was the case. No,
Speaker 1: And as we'll see later, he in fact was not
Speaker 1: happy about that. So Malcolm Gladwell, Josh's mortal enemy. He
Speaker 1: did an interview with a Alfred Taubman and he said
Speaker 1: it's called threshold resistance, he said. People assume that we
Speaker 1: enclose the space because of air conditioning and climate control.
Speaker 1: He said, what it really did was allow us to
Speaker 1: open the store to the customer. Just what we talked about,
Speaker 1: that introverted thing. All of a sudden, you're in this
Speaker 1: huge retail utopia. All the doors are open at all time,
Speaker 1: and you're just strolling through the mall, and you walk
Speaker 1: by Niketown and they have like looks like a nightclub
Speaker 1: in there, so you're just sort of unconsciously drawn inside there,
Speaker 1: like I'd like to make some new friends, all right, truly,
Speaker 1: I can't Niketown. Back in the day in shopping centers,
Speaker 1: they used to have live bands, and that was replaced,
Speaker 1: of course, with muzak later on, which is you know,
Speaker 1: you'd take like a normal song like breads, I want
Speaker 1: to make it with you, and then you remove the lyrics,
Speaker 1: the percussion or place it all with strings, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden people are just walking around like bye bye.
Speaker 1: It works really well, so much so that the people
Speaker 1: at malls who are typically in charge of the music
Speaker 1: were the same people who were in charge of the
Speaker 1: heat and the lighting. The facilities manager that's how much
Speaker 1: music meant to It was like part of the building.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, you can't really call it music,
Speaker 1: you know. In fact, you'd probably call it something weird
Speaker 1: like muzac. Yeah, you think about the coolest DJ. I'm
Speaker 1: not hip on that scene. Steve Ioki. Okay, the facilities
Speaker 1: manager is the opposite of Steve Ioki. But they're sitting
Speaker 1: in their room and and they're controlling the music and
Speaker 1: the lights and the sounds of the mall all in
Speaker 1: that little room. Dead mouse, Oh, I know what that is.
Speaker 1: But the s is a number five? Right, Yeah, so hip,
Speaker 1: so hip, I'm not old scrilling scrillis. I know that
Speaker 1: guy too. So we talked a little bit earlier about
Speaker 1: the the cycle of the mall, the two story layout.
Speaker 1: And while you can go to malls where there are
Speaker 1: three stories, most of the malls i've been to that
Speaker 1: have a third story. It's not the entire mall. There'll
Speaker 1: be like a section with a third story. I don't
Speaker 1: know if they built it on or what, but generally
Speaker 1: you see a two story mall because you had that
Speaker 1: cycle the across, down, across, up back to your car, right,
Speaker 1: and you've seen all the stores, right, But if you
Speaker 1: had a third level, you go across, down, across. My
Speaker 1: car should be here. But now I have a third
Speaker 1: level and I'm stuck. I'm just gonna wander around in
Speaker 1: this corner until some people come get me. And as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, Valco Mall had three levels. Look
Speaker 1: what happened to it? What mall? It's a local mall.
Speaker 1: Oh and the fourteen people from San Francisco applied, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Oh it's in San Jose. It's like the same place.
Speaker 1: Come on, I think you could default to Bay Area
Speaker 1: and you do yourself a lot of favors. You're hearing
Speaker 1: this from like the guy who took off an Infinity
Speaker 1: scarf right before he came on stage because he was
Speaker 1: told like, it's not cool anymore. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that is. So your burn does not work? No, no,
Speaker 1: I was talking about myself burning you, buddy. I wasn't
Speaker 1: burning you, all right, burn? Yeah, it's an Infinity scarf.
Speaker 1: It's a stupid What else did they figure any when
Speaker 1: you're fine? Lady? Your Infinity scarf is fine? Is that
Speaker 1: a that's lovely? Can you come up here and show
Speaker 1: everyone when an Infinity scarf I'm kidding. No, everyone stopped
Speaker 1: now because we thought about adding runway modeling to our shows.
Speaker 1: Sure that would be a great time. Sorry about the
Speaker 1: infanty scarf joke. Now I feel terrible. Is anyone drinking
Speaker 1: nothing but soilent right now? I should have made that
Speaker 1: joke Instead, I'm looking over my glasses for more clothes.
Speaker 1: I can make fun of Tyler Murphy. That beard is
Speaker 1: something else. He died of blue. Everybody, all right, this
Speaker 1: is another part that's gonna be edited out later, So
Speaker 1: Tyler say whatever you want. So the other thing they
Speaker 1: figured out with keeping people in the mall, which is
Speaker 1: a big goal, is that people like to shop with
Speaker 1: other people, but sometimes the people that you bring to
Speaker 1: shop with you, namely husbands, don't like to be at
Speaker 1: the mall. So they said, well, let's put comfy areas
Speaker 1: in the mall, like chairs. And in fact, there was
Speaker 1: a quote that said a chair says we care, Yeah,
Speaker 1: a famous mall designer. But it really means is a
Speaker 1: chair says we can keep your wife here longer than
Speaker 1: you would like to be here. Right. The husband's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: I just want to lay down and die on my
Speaker 1: floor at home. Can I just go home. You can
Speaker 1: lay down and die here, sir, right lay there, shut up.
Speaker 1: So the ironies are grewing. We said earlier. I don't
Speaker 1: think we specifically said he was a socialist now, so
Speaker 1: it's really weird for a socialist to be the father
Speaker 1: of the shopping mall, wouldn't you think. And his original
Speaker 1: idea was that people could go there and espouse their views,
Speaker 1: and that maybe happened once in nineteen seventy six, until
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court came in and said, in the case
Speaker 1: of Hudgins versus Natural Relations Labor Relations Board, basically, these
Speaker 1: union dudes wanted to pick it inside the mall and
Speaker 1: they did so they got kicked out. They sued, and
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court said, actually, his private property, and you
Speaker 1: can't bring your picket signs in here. And the picks
Speaker 1: who are like, wait, wait, wait, the mall is the
Speaker 1: new heart, the new civic center of American life, and
Speaker 1: the Supreme courtment, don't be an idiot, it's a place
Speaker 1: to shop, dummy, and everyone when I didn't hear what
Speaker 1: you just said, we're gonna just keep pretending like the
Speaker 1: mall is the hardest civic life. So it was a
Speaker 1: big problem for grew and actually he also hated cars.
Speaker 1: He was big into walking. He was in favor of pedestrianism,
Speaker 1: and yet you have to drive a car to get
Speaker 1: to the mall. And not only that, you have to park,
Speaker 1: like some of his creations. I think Southdale had like
Speaker 1: two point eight million square feet of parking, and he
Speaker 1: called these things like land wasting seas of parking lots.
Speaker 1: So as he's as he's designing these things, he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm not very happy about this, and they would go
Speaker 1: do it anyway, even the stuff he scratched out. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: this is a good idea. We're gonna go with this.
Speaker 1: And he had like, no, say whatsoever. After a while, no,
Speaker 1: and he got a pretty disc a gusted, and he
Speaker 1: left the United States forever. In the nineteen sixties, went
Speaker 1: back to Europe and said in nineteen seventy eight, a
Speaker 1: couple of years before his death, he gave a speech
Speaker 1: in London and said, I am often called the father
Speaker 1: of the shopping mall. I would like to take this
Speaker 1: opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse
Speaker 1: to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.
Speaker 1: And they said, sir, we have the paternity tests and
Speaker 1: you are the father, right He said, no, I'm not, No,
Speaker 1: you really are. Yeah, we used luminal and everything. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should take another ad break. Yeah, let's take another
Speaker 1: ad break. We'll be back right after this. And we're back.
Speaker 1: We should, I guess move on to the death of
Speaker 1: the mall. Yeah, because I don't know if you guys
Speaker 1: know this or not, but malls are not doing very
Speaker 1: well these days. I know some couple of all clap well,
Speaker 1: you'll probably like the rest of this episode. The mall
Speaker 1: actually peaked in nineteen ninety at sixteen million square feet
Speaker 1: of new space opened in that year, and it's been
Speaker 1: tapering off ever since. And here's a little staggering statistic
Speaker 1: for you. Since in nineteen fifties, when the first mall
Speaker 1: was built, there was at least one mall built every
Speaker 1: single year until two thousand and seven, usually many, many mall,
Speaker 1: well up to a million from what I hear, I
Speaker 1: mean that's an estimate, but yeah, yeah, So two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven marked the first year that a new mall
Speaker 1: wasn't built, and I think there were no new malls
Speaker 1: built until two twelve. In the United States two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight recession, the Great Recession had a really big
Speaker 1: impact on retail. Yeah, that's there's like a bunch of
Speaker 1: different reasons people put for what killed the mall. Right,
Speaker 1: the mall has long been known for killing the American downtown. Right,
Speaker 1: the mall moved out to the suburbs and the downtown
Speaker 1: just kind of went away. Right, So reason number one
Speaker 1: is that the Great Recession killed the mall. And this
Speaker 1: is true to a pretty large extent actually, Like from
Speaker 1: World War Two until I think two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: every single year Americans spent more money than they had
Speaker 1: the year before, which is nuts. Right. Then two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine comes and we stopped, and not only did
Speaker 1: we stop, we actually declined tremendously. We stopped spending by
Speaker 1: something like ten percent. And then the money that we
Speaker 1: did spend, we started spending at Target in Walmart, not
Speaker 1: at the mall, or at places like J. C. Pennies
Speaker 1: or Sears who tried to keep these malls propped up
Speaker 1: and who malls depended on. Because again, remember if you
Speaker 1: go to a mall, the whole reason the mall exists
Speaker 1: is for the department stores to spread their traffic out
Speaker 1: to the smaller stores. And if the department stores are hurting,
Speaker 1: which they were, then the smaller stores hurt as well.
Speaker 1: So as these big, large anchor stores started to go under,
Speaker 1: the malls did as well. But people said, the Great
Speaker 1: Recession was pretty bad. It's probably not the only reason
Speaker 1: that the mall is dying. Yeah, we mentioned Amazon dot
Speaker 1: Com earlier, and they're not the only online retailer, of course.
Speaker 1: And you can tell we're not from the area because
Speaker 1: we say dot com after it. We just want to
Speaker 1: make sure you guys know what we're talking about. We're
Speaker 1: trying to communicate with you. I can't believe I said that.
Speaker 1: How nerdy we would both of us have said it
Speaker 1: like five or six times. Yes, stuff, you should know
Speaker 1: dot com. Well, there's dot orgs and dot nets do yeah, Amazon,
Speaker 1: dot EDUS, dot UK's specificity is a soul of narrative.
Speaker 1: Oh good one, thank you. Take that, everybody, thank you.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, traditional retailers for the very first time
Speaker 1: generated about half their sales from the web. But you
Speaker 1: can't like I do all my shopping online now, I
Speaker 1: literally haven't been. I think I went to the mall
Speaker 1: last year for something and asked my wife. She's out there.
Speaker 1: I was miserable. I hated it, but we had to
Speaker 1: go for some reason or another I can't remember, probably
Speaker 1: to stay in line for our stupid phone. I'm just
Speaker 1: kidding out and do that either, thank you. But I
Speaker 1: almost stood in line for breakfast this morning right here
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, because that's the thing. Jeez. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: online retailing isn't that big of a thing yet. Even
Speaker 1: if it hits the fifteen percent annual growth over the
Speaker 1: next three years that they project by twenty nineteen, it'll
Speaker 1: still will only be about two point four I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: twelve point four percent of retail, which is not enough
Speaker 1: to kill them all. No, but it's a factor. No.
Speaker 1: And plus, you can kind of find this weird confidence
Speaker 1: in the idea that malls may continue limping along if
Speaker 1: you're into that kind of thing, by the fact that
Speaker 1: Amazon dot Com open a brick and mortar store a
Speaker 1: bookstore to help boost their online sales, which is mind boggling,
Speaker 1: but they did it in Seattle. But more than anything,
Speaker 1: perhaps the reason the malls died, it's because they were
Speaker 1: never meant to live forever. And this next part is
Speaker 1: about the economics of malls, and specifically it sounds so
Speaker 1: boring tax loopholes concerning malls, and Josh is going to
Speaker 1: explain it. Okay, So if you build a building somewhere,
Speaker 1: and I should say, hats off to Gladwell for planning
Speaker 1: this too. This comes largely from him. But if you
Speaker 1: build a building somewhere and say, like nineteen fifty, the
Speaker 1: government said, you know what, your building's not going to
Speaker 1: hold up forever, so you can deduct a certain percentage
Speaker 1: of your building's value every year and put it aside
Speaker 1: tax free to replace that building eventually. And at the
Speaker 1: time when shopping malls first started to come about in
Speaker 1: the early fifties, the deduction for this wear and tear
Speaker 1: was one fortieth, right, Like, you had a forty years
Speaker 1: to deduct this value of your building. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: not going well. No, that's perfect so far. I'm checking
Speaker 1: him for accuracy. Okay, all right, I feel like like
Speaker 1: my fingernails are bleeding. So every year, right, if you
Speaker 1: went and built a shopping mall, you could deduct one
Speaker 1: fortieth of the value of the shopping mall. Not a
Speaker 1: huge deduction, but it was something it's called depreciation. The
Speaker 1: problem is is this depreciation deduction was? It was something,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't enough. If you built a shopping mall
Speaker 1: in the early fifties, you were really asking for trouble
Speaker 1: because they were hugely expensive. They cost like twenty million
Speaker 1: or thirty million, which are on par to one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty or two hundred million dollars today, right, and
Speaker 1: you were going to make your money back very very slowly.
Speaker 1: But then, and I think nineteen fifty four, yes, the
Speaker 1: US government said, you know what, we really want to
Speaker 1: kind of get things going on building and construction. We
Speaker 1: want to make sure Josh and Chuck have something interesting
Speaker 1: to talk about at the end of their Malls episode
Speaker 1: years from now. So we're going to change the tax code.
Speaker 1: And they did, and they created or allowed for something
Speaker 1: called accelerated depreciation, and this changed everything, Chuck. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to go back to nineteen sixty one. The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal wrote a little article trying to describe this
Speaker 1: financial situation for a real estate company named Krader Coorp.
Speaker 1: Sound totally made up like an evil villain's business that
Speaker 1: you would run or an std I abbreviated what does
Speaker 1: that stand for? Cratter Corp? It won't go away, doc,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna gona million to one, I tell you.
Speaker 1: So this was a nineteen sixty young and around the
Speaker 1: numbers just to make it easier. So let's say Cratter Corp.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty made about ten million bucks overall. Is
Speaker 1: everyone writing this down as we're saying that you don't
Speaker 1: need to? So deductions from operating expenses and mortgage interest
Speaker 1: is about five million bucks. So they still make about
Speaker 1: five million bucks. Not a bad income, but not good enough.
Speaker 1: Then came the depreciation, accelerated depreciation to the tune of
Speaker 1: about seven million dollars. So all of a sudden, Cradder,
Speaker 1: instead of having a profit of five million dollars on
Speaker 1: the books, has a loss of a couple of million
Speaker 1: dollars on the books. And everyone has these huge tax
Speaker 1: write offs. And now you fully understand, if you didn't before,
Speaker 1: why our next president doesn't pay income tax. Right. It's
Speaker 1: basically this accelerated depreciation on real estate that allows you
Speaker 1: to write off these massive amounts of money to show
Speaker 1: big losses where you're in fact making gains. Right, And
Speaker 1: the big change of the tax code was to the irs.
Speaker 1: They're still getting the same amount of taxes over the
Speaker 1: life of the building. They just said, if you want
Speaker 1: to deduct this depreciation at the beginning of the life
Speaker 1: of the building, that's fine with us. It's all the
Speaker 1: same to us. Well, if you were a developer, you
Speaker 1: would build this building, deduct as much as you could
Speaker 1: over say three four five years, maybe even break even
Speaker 1: just from the tax deductions, and then sell that mall
Speaker 1: for pure profit of fifty or one hundred or one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty million dollars and talk away laughing and
Speaker 1: laughing and laughing and exactly wearing your cape. But here's
Speaker 1: the thing. They wouldn't like put that money back into
Speaker 1: the mall to make it better. They would sell it
Speaker 1: off like you said, and just go build a bigger
Speaker 1: mall further out. And now we'll call these excerbs. They're
Speaker 1: not even suburbs. Because they were all about going where
Speaker 1: the land was cheapest. Right, the mall stopped being a
Speaker 1: place to actually service people. They would just build malls
Speaker 1: where they could get the best deals on land and
Speaker 1: found that people would drive to them and sometimes even
Speaker 1: build entire towns around them. Right, yeah, let's move to
Speaker 1: the mall. And it's true, and so under this view
Speaker 1: when you really understand why there were two thousand or
Speaker 1: three thousand or a million malls built in the United States, huge,
Speaker 1: huge mall. Some cities had multiple malls. When you realize
Speaker 1: that they were built for text breaks and not to
Speaker 1: fulfill some consumer demand, then of course they were destined
Speaker 1: to shrivel and die because they were part of an
Speaker 1: official supply. And once that became exposed and the text
Speaker 1: bricks went away, mall started going down. And it's sad
Speaker 1: in a way when a mall goes under. People have
Speaker 1: associations of memories with the mall, you know, like you
Speaker 1: you think about all the mall walkers you've seen and
Speaker 1: loved walking around the mall, and when it dies, it's
Speaker 1: it's sad. But even more than that, it can actually,
Speaker 1: depending on the town, can take an entire city down
Speaker 1: with it. Yeah, there was a place north Randall, Ohio. No,
Speaker 1: I'm satisfied. What do you mean really, I mean it's
Speaker 1: outside of Cleveland. I figured half of Cleveland probably tried
Speaker 1: to move to some Even Emily didn't cheer for that one. No, No,
Speaker 1: she's from Ohio. Yeah. So they had the Randall Park
Speaker 1: mall and it costs about one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 1: million bucks to build in nineteen seventy five. And get this,
Speaker 1: the grand opening, five thousand guests had champagne, twelve hundred
Speaker 1: pounds of fresh shrimp, crab, cold roast turkey, hot corned
Speaker 1: beef and ham, melan and cheese, small crapes filled with
Speaker 1: chicken and spinach, coffee and dessert. It was like a
Speaker 1: Roman orgy basically and disguise of the opening of a mall.
Speaker 1: You got you got the world's largest cup of lemonade.
Speaker 1: That wasn't too bad. I just hate that I put
Speaker 1: my mouth on that thing along with the other people.
Speaker 1: He should have at least had smaller cups or maybe
Speaker 1: not professional swimmers inside the cup. No there were seahorses. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: those are fine. You just they passed right through your
Speaker 1: digestive chap. You don't metabolize this so gross. Tommy Dorsey
Speaker 1: showed up at the grand opening of this mall with
Speaker 1: his orchestra to play. It was a big event. But
Speaker 1: Randall Mall has since fallen on hard times and those
Speaker 1: two point two million square feet of retail space have
Speaker 1: been shuttered and um almost along with it. North Randall,
Speaker 1: Ohio as a whole. That whole town is sort of
Speaker 1: on life support basically because of closing up the shopping malls.
Speaker 1: Really sad. Yeah, but there are some malls that are
Speaker 1: still doing well. Outlet malls are thriving. High end malls
Speaker 1: in case you're wondering how they're really wealthy, are doing
Speaker 1: pretty good. High end malls are thriving like you would
Speaker 1: not believe. They're up by fourteen point six percent since
Speaker 1: the economic crisis. And there's this dude. His name's Rick Caruso.
Speaker 1: He pretended the death of the mall. Malls are dead,
Speaker 1: They're gone unless they reinvent themselves. And it just so
Speaker 1: happens that I build the type of mall that malls
Speaker 1: should reinvent themselves into. So he basically is trying to
Speaker 1: recreate downtown, but a nice, happy Disney esque downtown where
Speaker 1: nothing ever goes wrong and everything is great, and by
Speaker 1: the way, it's also a mall and it's outdoors. And
Speaker 1: to follow this trend, malls are doing the exact opposite
Speaker 1: of what they did when Gruen started designing and closed malls.
Speaker 1: They're tearing the roofs off and following this new trend
Speaker 1: to try to survive. Yeah, he calls them lifestyle centers.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's one here. There's one in
Speaker 1: Atlanta called Atlantic Station. I hate them more than anything
Speaker 1: has really strong opinions. At least a mall is a mall.
Speaker 1: It's not pretending to be a small town. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: You know it's true. It's like, look, we just built
Speaker 1: these streets and there's it looks like a stoplight, but
Speaker 1: your your child can control it fully and no cars
Speaker 1: are allowed. Then there's no cars with a button. So
Speaker 1: it's like downtown USA. There's no crime anywhere, security guards everywhere,
Speaker 1: and I'll you do a shop, shop shop. So to me,
Speaker 1: there's like there's a certain sadness over the death of
Speaker 1: the mall. Like for me personally, I think even for
Speaker 1: some of the booers in here. You spent time at
Speaker 1: the mall. The mall represented something to America. But if
Speaker 1: you step back and look about exactly what the mall represents,
Speaker 1: and even more to the point, with the death of
Speaker 1: the mall represents, is it really the death of a
Speaker 1: golden age or a golden era when things were great?
Speaker 1: Because if you look at the mall, it's an outpost
Speaker 1: of consumerism. It's like a church of consumption, right, So
Speaker 1: if we've lost that, then maybe out of the ashes,
Speaker 1: out of the things that are so broken right now,
Speaker 1: you can find some kind of weird hope that maybe
Speaker 1: we can rebuild in a new, better way to where
Speaker 1: the most important part of civic life isn't the mall. Wow,
Speaker 1: and that is mall. That's malls. Thank you everybody, you
Speaker 1: can do that stuff you should know is a production
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