Eighties, schmeighties. We go all the time. It’s so much fun. They are really quaint little stores in there. We walk around, explore, laugh. We have our mall jokes and our mall routines. There are tons of people there, all clearly in the middle of their own mall rituals. There are teenage girls choosing squishies with the grim determination of fighter pilots. Very young couples on their first dates. Tween girls flocking to Claire’s (that curse of every mother of girls) for their BFF bracelets. Young dudes poring over dusty DVD collections. A father of four little kids sells his 3D-printed apple toys at ridiculously low prices. A single mother bustles in her pop-up wrapping kiosk. A black lady does brisk business of selling dessert pickles.
People sit around pouting instead of just going and doing things like tasting the mall lady’s dessert pickles. Yes, they taste something horrid but you make memories to last a lifetime.
Clarissa's Blog 
Well I can tell you why people stopped in my area.
The young used to hang out at the mall, well kind of. In truth there wasn’t really that much to do entertainment wise. Our mall to start out was always a sorry excuse of a mall, and so as things continued to go downhill in the area, the mall followed suit.
Now there has never been much in the way of entertainment in my area despite the population level. Mostly for whites this is a retirement community. The young tend to flee when possible and those who return tend to do so because of family.
For the blacks, its more of a mix of the young can’t escape the area or simply don’t care to try. I honestly have no idea which. Mixed with a fair amount of the elderly.
Either way about oh ten to fifteen years ago, maybe twenty you started to see the black kids gathering up in groups of about a hundred to two hundred around the movie theater and the mall.
The movie theater couldn’t close early as they were already hurting badly due to the stupid decision to raise ticket prices and concession prices to the point where a lot of people stopped going. So they elected to hire police officers to be stationed outside the theater at night.
The mall didn’t take that option, they elected to simply close earlier. Between that, the fact that it was already going down hill from its terrible start, and the fact that you had a crowd of blacks flocking there more or less killed it. The only thing keeping those store afloat at this point is the Christmas shopping as all the rural areas flock here then.
Ironically unlike a lot of places in the US, none of us have ever really feared a mob of black kids gathering about to burn stuff down like happens elsewhere. Frankly there are way to many blacks and whites who are heavily armed and take a very dim view to that sort of stuff for it to ever even be considered.
But yea the mall is basically dead at this point. Realistically even without the mob gathering there making people feel unsafe. I doubt it would have lasted very long anyway. There was never that much of a selection of stores and practically no entertainment, so as the white population aged they had no reason to visit, the blacks mostly didn’t really have the money to, and as prices rose and rose and rose more and more stores shut down as they lost customers.
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Our mall died for a couple reasons: they jacked up the rents to exclude all of the non-chain-stores, and they removed all the “hang out” spaces that made it a fun place to spend time with three or more other people in favor of a hundred little mostly-unmanned kiosks. The benches used to face each other, now they’re back to back. It was allways a smalltime smalltown mall, but it was the only one.
When I was a kid, there was an arcade, a cute little gifts shop that sold stationery by the pound, and a hobby craft store. It was a rite of passage to get one’s ears pierced at the no-walls jewelry counter next to Pennys: like can you do it without flinching or yelping in front of your friends and all the mallgoers out there in public. People came *just* to go to those shops. They were all eliminated by rent hikes.
The center “lanes” of the mall at that time were full of interesting features: there were giant cages of budgies in the food court, the intersection of the branching hallways had a raised deck with a low wall around it that housed a coffee shop where dad could sit, read the paper, and watch down the halls for our return. Next to that there was the “play hole”– a recessed area with a tiny climbing structure and slide, and a 60-degree-incline carpeted wall that we spent untold hours perfecting our “run up the wall” technique on. Somewhere in that cluster was a set of fountains and a recessed walkway that went under a little tiled waterfall. Down by the Sears there was another recessed area with stepped benches and a tiny stage, where the mall paid teenagers to do puppet shows summers and weekends. Low-quality but free. They ripped out *all* that stuff and replaced it with… 3 minutes on the bungee trampoline rig for ten dollars after signing a waiver, an equally pricey VR ride, and a zillion iterations of the cell-phone-cover kiosk. There’s still a little-kid-play-corral, but it’s now a padded area with a few brightly-colored soft amorphous shapes in it. Can’t trust anybody around hard edges.
The ‘old mall’ was tiled in shades of brown, orange, and ochre– classic 70s/early80s colors. It was brightly lit, but didn’t *feel* that way because of the color scheme. When they did the big reno, it became pale gray, all over. Looked bigger and brighter, but in an alienating, bug-on-a-plate, surgical-theater kind of way.
Perhaps it was about maximizing profits and minimizing liabilities. Perhaps it was straightening the sightlines so security could control the riff-raff. But after that it was a very uncomfortable space: loud, bright, no large flowerbeds or random curved half-walls with funky windows in them, no places to chill while your family shopped, no fountains, no group amusements that didn’t cost a fortune.
Anyway, it went downhill for a very long time, until people were renting four empty shops in a row for blacklight mini-golf and there were still so many dead storefronts it was depressing. Got damaged in the hurricane, there was a lot of litigation about leases and… seems to have been sold to developers and slated for demolition.
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Malls are a big thing in SA, but they are mostly owned by whites, so the more things change the more they stay then same.
https://www.sowetan.co.za/opinion/columnists/2018-10-01-the-age-of-the-shopping-mall-is-upon-us-and-white-men-still-rule/
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