Shopping Malls Will Survive

Strip malls killed home industry. Shopping malls killed strip malls. Online shopping is creeping up on shopping malls. Every dog has its day.

The migration of life from concrete buildings to something nebulous like the internet will not result in mall closure. A mall is a building of all seasons, unlike a one-use building like a church, temple, synagogue, mosque, bowling alley or doctor’s rooms. It’s not a train station, that is empty now because of cheaper cars and highways that criss cross over drivers’ heads.

A shopping mall serves many purposes. It’s a park (although it’s concrete) where we sit and watch the world go round. Buy ice cream cones, if we cannot afford to take kids to the Food Court, with food from all over the world. Parents try to avoid malls altogether, because credit cards are still limp, from previous visits.

Teenage kids cannot be constrained and they use the mall as a fishing pond, a fashion runway and a show-and-tell stage that he’s with me now. Older citizens use the mall as a reassurance pad. They live in retirement homes where meals and everything else goes by the clock. A visit to the mall reassures them that the world is still spinning on its wheel.

That’s nice of you to say shopping malls will survive, but what about shops that have been empty for the last three months? You have a point there, because I always see another TO LET shop every time I go there, which is about twice a month. Commercial developers that own shopping malls must adjust, think outside the box, to attract new tenants. Example. I did not like the idea of coffee shops inside book stores, but book publishers believed it will work. Did it sell more books? I must give them a call for some stats.

Be that as it may, if online shopping eventually puts the last nail on store tenants, the building will survive as a multi-purpose something. There must be an alternative. Think outside the box.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

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