Live from San Francisco: How Malls Work

So that's good. So we've been wanting to do something on the mall for years now and years and years, and we thought, well, what is San Francisco if not the Mall? Right, they're gonna love this one, and I guess we were wrong. Now, you guys will love it. I promise. It's just like, um, like the Grass episode. You may have been like, I'm not listening to that, and then you finally ran out of episodes. Listen to the Grass episode and you're like, that wasn't as bad

as I thought it was gonna be. This will be similar to that experience, Okay, except the Grass episode is free I promise we will give it our all. I don't know why we're selling it. Like this is going downhill so fast, it's great, okay, so hill shall we get in the way back machine? Oh? Which is imaginary boo. So when you think of shopping mall, you think of

the mall. Right, everybody knows what the mall is. If there's somebody who doesn't know what the mall is, raise your hand and whoever sitting next to that person, punch them in the arm. Really hard to be, like, come on, you know what the mall is. I assume San Francisco has malls somewhere. Oh yeah, they've got I've never seen one. They're probably out a bit. It's not like a mall in the middle of the mission, is there, I don't think so. Right, there's a few they pop up here there.

You guys will know, because I'll be like, so if we're we're all on the way back machine and we're going all the way back backpack back to ancient Rome where the actual the first what you could consider a shopping center appears. It was called Trajan's Market, and Trajan's Market was built in something like one oh seven. I think that's early. I think it's anchor store was Trajan's Horse. That was okay, sorry, if I had a store back there,

that would have totally called it Trajan's Horse. Yeah, and it's it's known as the world's oldest shopping center for good reason. Again, it was built in one oh seven and right now it's in ruins. There's some guy who sells um those little balls with the raccoon tails on the end of them on a tray, but he's technically outside of the mall, so it doesn't really count. So the mall is closed. It has been for several millennia now.

But the oldest continually operated. Um what you would might call an outdoor market or mall is the Grand Bazaar with an A and three. A's actually two, No, there's three. You've been drinking, Yeah, just not together be a Z A R. Yeah, I guess if I'm not gonna checking his math checks out. That's a joke from Fletch. If I'm not mistaken, I don't like alright, deep cut the Grand Bizarre Istanbul between fourteen fifty five and fourteen sixty one and is when that was built, and it is

still an operation today. About five thousand cupboard shops still gets about a quarter million visitors a day, so it's still rocking day. Yeah, yeah, a lot of folks. So you've got what medieval market towns kind of started to come later, um, seeports, all these things, these commercial districts where people went to shop. They all had to kind of be centered in an area together because people rode horses, or they walked, or they were chased by other people whatever.

But you had to go and get all of your shopping done at one place, right, And that's just kind of a very ancient idea, and it's right, it's wonderful. By the turn of the twentieth century here in the u US we had something we still do. It hasn't gone away. But pre mall, we had the department store. And um, I think I even mentioned this on another show. It didn't dawn on me, you know, like the simplest words dawn on you late in life, like what it

really means. I just always said, Hey, a department store. It really just occourad to me a couple of years ago, like, oh, just store full of many departments. Never really thought about it. Do you ever have those? It's kind of nice department stores, uh, thirteen stories high in Chicago, the Marshall and Field Company, Marshall, Field and Company. And then in Detroit there was one called J. L. Hudson's that it was twenty five floors of department store floors of retail space. And this thing

took up like a whole block. Yeah, and there's nineteen eleven. So there's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff. Uh. In eight though, if you back up a little bit, the first sort of enclosed shopping center that you might kind of consider a mall mall even though we really don't, as you'll see, because it didn't have an arcade, even though it is it's called the Westminster Arcade, ironically, I didn't have an arcade. And Providence, Rhode Island. Has anyone ever been to this place? Yeah?

Have you really? Yes? I didn't know that you didn't type in here I've been there. Yeah, all right, I didn't know I needed to say that. Well, it was assumed. Uh. It's a pretty cool place. So if you look it up online, it doesn't look like the mall that you would consider the mall looks like sort of like a Greek revival building, and uh, it's like, yeah, it's really nice. It's got three it sort of looks like a train station three floors, and recently they were going to demolish it,

but someone swooped in and built micro apartments. Now you can live in there and they're really kind of cool. And I was gonna explain again what a micro apartment was, but I forgot where I am. So you all know, isn't that like a dresser drawer? Yes, and you walk through the little thing that's like, I love living in thirty square feet and it's just some guy standing in a broom cloth. Pretty much. Uh, screw the sup herbs.

Wait even well, even back further than this, Russia should get its due right, even even before the even before the the the Westminster Arcade, there is this thing called the ghost Veeded Voor. And I looked at the pronunciation, but I should qualify that I looked at the pronunciation on the same site that I looked up the pronunciation on Disha chain, which I called Dixia chain throughout the

entire Underground City episode. So to take that for what it is, I was about to say, all our Asian friends, let us know that was wrong. But really, everyone of every race. Let us know that was wrong, Thank you dummies. After World War two, things really kind of evolved with the shopping center though, That's when things kind of started going. And um, in nineteen fifty Seattle's Northgate Center was Uh, but I feel like we say several times the first thing we think of them all. I guess it was

just part of the evolution, right. South Dale was the first real mall. Alright, so Southdale we're gonna pick up with Southdale. Southdale was in Adena, Minnesota, and Dinah, thank you live corrections very nice. Where were you when I was saying Dixie a chance over and over and over again.

Well previous to that, boy, we're jumping all around. Uh. This designer and really, um, the man who were gonna either thank for the mall or blame for the mall, depending on how you feel about malls is a gentleman named Victor Gruin. Anyone want to correct me on that. He's an Austrian architect and uh he designed Northlands Center in Michigan. Is that correct? And it was? Northland Center is in Southland, Michigan. Now looks so confusing, it's terrible. It had a what was known in I said, anchor

store earlier. And this is what malls have. They have these anchor stores which are still to this day mainly department stores. And that anchor store was Hudson's Department Store, but had about a hundred and ten other stores. But it still wasn't a real mall mall because it wasn't um as you'll see uh introverted correct, and it wasn't enclosed. It was open air. Yeah, like you know when you go to those outlet malls today where it's just all

you're walking around outside like an idiot. You know. This is kind of like what what um Southfield was like in Michigan. And that's what all shopping malls were like up to that point. They weren't closed. It was ninety six in a Dina, Minnesota when the first enclosed mall

like we think of it today came about. Yeah, and I actually looked up the previous Northland They did close that in in the seventies and it finally shuddered for good a couple of years ago, and I found this website that said twelve weirdest things left behind in the Northland Center And it wasn't that exciting, but there was one the group to tension room, and I started thinking, holy crap, malls have jails. And I looked it up

and someone said, uh. I went to Yahoo answers like where else do you go to get the real truth? And the number one voted up answer said, it's not a real cell. It's just a small dark room with no windows, in a chair and a camera in it that you that you're not allowed to leave. It's like and this one that's a department basically. This one had chains on this benches and I was like, no, that's a al cell. So I saw that too. There was like a target cart under a spotlight. I think. I

thought that was beautiful. Yeah, it was very arty, haunting. I'm with you, lady, alright. So jumping back forward again to Minneapolis. Outside of Minneapolis, is it aDNA Southdale twenty million bucks? The anchor store was Donaldson's and Dayton's, right, who can forget Donaldson's? I did, okay, And Dayton's actually commissioned this mall to be built because they were building

a new outpost in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And it wasn't just by coincidence that Diana was ten miles away from downtown Minneapolis because again this is nineteen fifty six, so during the Cold War, and that's actually right outside the eight mile blast radius of atomic bomb were it to be dropped on Minneapolis, because of course that's what the Rooskys were thinking, We're going from Minneapolis first. But they've built a mall outside of the blast radius, so

I guess we'll just give up. So the original idea for them all from Victor Gruen was to um, he wanted to kind you know how they have these mixed use centers. Now, he had this idea way back then and he wanted people to live there and uh kind of congregate there. And we'll get a little more to this later, but it sort of ended up just being

a shopping mall, to his disappointment. But he modeled it on Northgate in Seattle and sort of the big idea was that you go to these department stores because that's what people were used to. But how do you get them to these other stores? Was the big question, Right, how do you get them shopping? Oh at the mall? Yeah, like ice, they're there because people went to department store. So if you put a department store out in the suburbs, they'll go to the department store. They're like, I thought

I was supposed to take a left. Now I'm taking the right. I'm at the department store. Who cares. Right. The problem is is if you put Hunter and ten other stores coming off of that department store, they just go to the department store and leave. Not good, right

if you're one of these other stores. So what Northgate figured out, and what is mind numbingly obvious but really works, is you just take this department store, put another department store, and then put the shops in between them, and then the people take a right, but they should take a left. But they're fine, we're going to the department store. Oh there's another department store. Well, i'll just walk past this.

Maybe i'll buy that. We'll buy a little bit of this. Sure, i'll take a feather boa And then they walk into the other department store and and consumerism is saved. That's right. It was revolutionary at the time. So he built he was commissioned at least by Dayton's department store to build this uh kind of advanced shopping center. Didn't call them malls at the time. They called him advanced shopping centers

and that's so high tech. He actually at its space for a competitor at the other end because he had this idea like how to keep people there? And I don't know how he talked Dayton's into it. Were like wait, wait, yeah, like hold on a second, no, no, we're paying you to do this, and you want to put a competitor's store in there. He's like, yeah, it'll work, trust me. So a few minutes ago I mentioned that it was introverted. My uncle's still texting me, um, still looking for parking,

just circling the castro at this point. Uh so we mentioned introverted and extroverted malls previous to this. We're outdoor, and like we said, they were extroverted. So in other words, you walk the perimeter and the stores faced the outside and they had doors on them that you would walk into if you wanted to shop. So he had this idea like, wait, let's reverse all that. Let's turn it all inside. Where you walk into this huge building. You got these two stores on both ends, and there are

no doors. They might have a gate they lower at night, but it's just open, like pool will just walk through this little concourse and all the stores are wide open for everyone's air conditioned. It's heated, not at the same time, at appropriate times, especially in a place like Minneapolis, it's probably a nice place to go in the wintertime. Yeah, it was a big deal, and he introverted him. Is what they're called right where they look in on themselves

and they're enclosed as well. So for the first time ever, you could just walk around this beautiful place with trees and he put like a twenty foot bird cage, and there were goldfish ponds and all this stuff. And it would be the middle of winter and you could walk around in short sleeves and be like, I live in a Dina, not a dina. Uh. The other thing he kind of nailed right out of the gate was um.

Previous to this, shopping malls were usually um or shopping centers are on one floor and they were spread out over this big, broad area and you had to enter from the outside and walk around the cold and it was all this one big, single level. And he said, how about this, how about we stack it, because this is a genius. Everyone put a store on one end, put a store on the other end. You stack him on top of each other. You put escalators on both sides.

You park in this side, you go into your department store, you walk down on the first level to get to the other department store, you get down the escalator, and then you walk back on the other level to get to your car, and you've seen every store and it was genius. It was retailed genius, exactly pretty amazing. And again we take this for granted now, but at the time everyone's like, I never thought of that. Well, the point that we take this for granted, like all of

this sounds brain dead. All of this came essentially from this one guy, this dude named Victor Grewitt, who was kind of like a high artsy Fartsia society type from Austria who fled the Nazis in and was a self taught architect right who just started designing them all. And he invented the mall, and he got basically everything right

right out of the gate, actually amazing. The MSS has a really great quote about him, They say that, um, he it was as if Orville and Wilbur Wright invented not just manned flight but also tray tables and duty free service. Not bad. The other thing he got right right out of the gate was these uh low balconies. You know, if you ever go into them all, you know, if you're on that top floor, you can look down and say, I gotta go into Chess King and get

some parachute pants. Or if you're down on the bottom floor, you can look up and you can see, I gotta go to Merry Go Around and check out the ladies. Merry Go Around. Man, that takes me back. There will be a bit of nostalgia peppered in here and there. Actually, I don't even think I put Merry Go Around. I put Camelot music is what I have in my Camelot music everyone. And the joke I have was the Duran

Duran Kiss single. Oh my God, the Kiss single. It's like I just ate a whole bud of member berries or something of what member berries. I don't know. It's a yeah, well three other people love that joke. So more than seventy five thousand people. Seventy five thousand people turned out on the grand opening day of South Dale Mall, and not just local press, Life Magazine, Time Magazine, UH,

New York Times, Business Week, Newsweek. They all came out and said things like it's the splashiest center in the US as a goldfish pond, birds art, ten acres of stores and all under one Minnesota roof. It's a pleasure dome with parking, said Time magazine. But one guy got it right. One guy said south Dale has become an integral part of the American Way, and this is the first mall. And some journalist points Witt and says, this

is how things are from now on. And this is the page that is very hard for me to read because, as you can see, I crumpled it up. Well, hold on, so if we're going to release this, we should probably take an a break. Huh oh yeah, sure, Okay, you're ready, so we'll be right back. And we're back, all right. I'm glad you thought of that. You guys get to see how the sausage. So, as I was saying before the break, I don't know if you can see it there, but this is crumpled up and very hard to read.

Because Josh sent a new version and I in the hotel room, I said, great, I printed it out. I crumpled up the wrong one, m through it away and right before I came, I was searching through the trash and uh, here it is. It's not the bad actually, so we're gonna entitle this next section the Golden Age of the mall. That it wouldn't be a live show if we didn't have a golden age of skyjacking, Golden age of pr golden age of grave robbing, and now

the golden age of the mall. It was about to say golden Age of Brodney Dangerfield, but it was all golden age for that guy. So the mall had its golden age. Between nineteen fifty six and two thousand, five fifteen hundred malls America were built, possibly two thousand, possibly three thousand, what no one knows. They just stopped counting pretty much. They're like, forget it will stay seven thousand. Who cares? Million? A million malls were built between that

time in the US. So there's a woman named Lisa Sharon who wrote a book called America The Mall Colon, because you book has to have a colon if you're smart. The cultural role of retail utopia. And she said, for the children's seventies, eighties, and nineties, the shopping mall was the place to be, space where we defined as our own. The mall taught us how to fit in, how to be a consumer ultimately, how to be an American? Uh So, who I mean, we don't You don't have to say

how old you are. But if if you grew up in sort of the seventies and the eighties, you know that the mall and into the nineties, of course, the shopping mall was like it's different than it is today. Like families used to go to the mall for the day. You pick a Saturday, and you all pile in the car, you go to the mall. You maybe go see a movie, the kids would go to the arcade. Mom and dad would do some shopping, and you would literally spend like

six and eight hours as a family outing at a mall. Right, pretty unbelievable to think about that. Now you gather around the laptop and go onto Amazon dot com. Yeah, and I'll sit around and stare at your phones and ignore it. You say, yes, I would like to get into for men to pickles. I could do some fermentation weights. Thanks for suggesting that Amazon. Interesting. You just changed my life. But it was a big deal. You would spend family day at the mall. And uh in the eighties, it

was just it was a part of America as anything else. Um, there were uh restaurants in the food court at the mall that didn't exist outside of the mall. They were born in the mall, like Cinnabon. Someone gasped, that's it, we can go home now. We're ever working toward as a gasp from somebody. Orange Julius that was another one. And Express was only in malls for a long time.

And apparently Sparrow. Everyone knows of Samorrow right. It was so tied to malls that when Sabarrow filed for bankruptcy in two fourteen, they cited unprecedented decline in mall traffic in their filing. There's like, no one likes the mall anymore. We're tomorrow, We're dead. Word good Chick fil A too. You guys don't have Chick fil A here, do you? Oh? You do? Long before we knew the chicken. This is back when everyone just thought it was delicious and juicy

and crispy, not filled with homophobia. But no, no, they've they've since walked it back. So it's all fine. We're just not open on Sundays. Uh Chick fil A would used to only be in the mall. I think there was one original chick fil A store in Georgia. I think that's where it was born. But aside from that, it was only in the mall. And I remember, uh going to the mall. Remember when malls used and they may still do this. I don't go to malls. There's

on Amazon dot com. Um. Malls used to have events like a world record Sunday, I Scream Sunday or something to get people there. I went to Chick fil A when I was about ten at North Lake Mall, which was my mall, because they had the world's largest cup of lemonade on a Saturday afternoon. My mom took me and I drank from that spigot among the thousands of other people, and it was not even that impressive, Like I thought it was giant, but now that I'm adult,

it was probably like eight ft high. Right now it was sixty four ounces. But they were just the first ones to try, so whatever they did was the world's biggest cup of lemon eight. That was a mall event that I went to. What was your mall? I had to because we moved a very formative time in my life. I had Southwick Mall, Untiledo Noah, and then I had a town Center Mall in Atlanta. No, okay, you guys haven't been to Town Center Mall. Believe me, I would

recognize you. No, no, not necessarily. No, I would not call myself a mall rat because I wasn't. I didn't like sell or consume drugs at the mall, so it wasn't a mall rat. I was like, they're legitimately like I was there to visit the Led Zeppelin box set on cassette that I was saving up to buy, just it was still there, you know, Or like I would go to Spencer's and like put my hand on the plasma ball. Let's be like, yeah, Spencer Gifts. Well I

say that like you're from here. I know that like eight people are from San Francisco in this room, you know, Spencer Gifts. Okay, very titilating place for a young Bathos because because there's the one section, you know what I'm talking about, plus the posters too. Yeah, it's funny now as an adult, the one section, I just thought it was like, oh man, and then there are some children here just you don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe maybe she's used pick I don't know how to do that.

It was but for a young Baptist kid, I was just like I would I would. I would walk by it and I would pretend like I'm looking at other things and just look in that section to see what was in it. I remember, and now it's just so dumb the stuff that was in that section. Yeah, it's like a stud collar. It's like who cares. By the time, you're like, I got it checking me out yesterday was wearing one and nothing else. Maybe a condom with bells,

and that's it so silly. I remember walking past Victoria's Secret like I was not doing that on purpose, but just kind of like like I could. Actually I trained my right eye to go like I took a lot of exercise, a lot of work, a lot of muscle relaxers, but I got a town path. Oh that's good. And that was pretty cell phone when you couldn't fake like you were doing something else. Good work. That's very impressive.

You trained it back and everything I did now I can't do it anymore or else I show you guys. I don't know where I was. I got so side tracked my North Lake mall. Oh and the gold mine was my arcade at the mall wonderful. You get like twenty tokens for a dollar on a Wednesday, and now games cost like a dollar fifty to play one game. Ah progress, That's what else did they have back in those days? You made a list Chess King, of course,

Marry go Around. I mentioned contempo casuals. Ladies knew this section was all into that county seat remember county seat. That is a deep cut. Or you could go get gene blue. It was like when the gap used to be like sweatshirts and blue jeans before they rebranded. You should go back to that. Merry go Around. Can't want music? What else? Oh? Well, bookstores? You could just say bookstore and that would be novel. Be Dalton Books. I think I consumed every single volume of truly tasteless jokes and

those without buying a single one. Man, I remember those, God, those are great. Pet Doctor the cruelest, cutest store of all time, Remember like the Mall Pet Store. It was like this, hamps are so cute and then it died like an hour later from Neglay. It just shuffle it out and put a new one in. There's a trap door. Nice. John Hodgeman to hate this show. Dripping with nostalgia. He's here in this town. He refused to come because he knew,

you kidding, he'd already be up here. Like the nostalgia's toxic. The mall became a prominent fixture in movies of the day, of course, the Sherman Oaks Galleria and California, which is where we are, yea California here. That was the mall in Fast Times a Ridgemont High one of the great mall movies, and full mall movie, but it's short. It also appeared prominently in Commando, where on a sports nigger beats up like a ton of guys at the mall. Yeah,

same mall. Uh. And I of the comment you mentioned, anyone. I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking, because you know that here if you haven't seen the movie, this comment comes and destroys like everyone at night. Yeah, and everyone has these comment parties to watch the comment, but it kills everybody except for the two really hot teenage girls that didn't watch the comment, and then a few other people. And what do they do. They go

to the mall shop because it's abandoned. And I remember being a kid thinking that would be the dopest thing ever to just go in an empty mall and it's all yours order order to live at Restoration Hardware, to run into Spencer Gifts into that section. Yeah, just like pass out from pleasure. That's what a way did you and you missed your chance? You could be walking around the castro right right kind of look out and there's a creepy guy with a wandering eye staring at me

and who knew? Who knew? Uh? What else? The Blues Brothers had a very famous mall scene. Yeah, they went through the Dixie Square Mall, sorry the Square mall that where they were like, this place has got everything. Uh, and maybe one of the most famous mall parking lots of all time the Twin Pines Mall from Back to the Future, which was actually the Quinte Heels mall. Heels that was possibly appropriate maybe, which I don't even know

where that is. I mean, it's in l A obviously, but I'm not sure it's a It's in City of Industry, which is name for a town everybody you know, it's outside of l A. I looked it up. And of course mall rats, which we don't need to talk about too much. Because it was a little really that was Kevin Smith. Here's a really high voice. N Smith. You can't leave out moon Unit Zappa dude, Oh well, yeah,

of course. Valley Girl. Yeah, she had a hit single, Valley Girl, and her father, Frank Zappa hated the Valley Girls right, and while it kind of blew up in his face when he released a song with his daughter about how stupid Valley Girls were, that it actually popularized Valley Girls and made him cool in America. So eat that, Frank Zappa. Uh, he's past. That's eat that. In Musical Heaven, so um, alls started to really grow um, not only in popularity but in size, to the point, as Josh says,

of sheer absurdity. Uh in Canada, because they have malls too, I should say, uh yeah, yeah, we have some Canadians here, and yet no one from Toledo. The West Edmonton mall really all right opened and no one from Toledo, anyone from Elm Street in Edmonton. Yeah, that's what I thought. It was open. Two had an ice skating rink, It had sea lions in a pool boo, and an indoor bungee jump. It's a tempt fate for shoppers right over the Sea Lions. It's just scared than terrible. Oh my god.

Sea Lions hate being jumped over, and the developers knew it too. And of course the Mall of America, perhaps the most famous mall in Minnesota. Uh, they were gonna build a roller coaster there when they decided to build three roller coasters there. I've never been there. Have you been there in Mall of America? Anyone been there? Oh? Wow? All right? Huge? Right it's outside of a Dina, so actually no, really, it's like seven miles from a Dina.

Should we go to the mall Walkers? Yea. This may be one of my favorite sections of any show we've ever done, because I love Mall Walkers. I didn't know it existed until I worked at them all I worked, I think I mentioned on the show. I worked at the Gap for a month in college over Christmas break and I was a champion folder and I still have

those skills today. Were you really? You know? I actually quit working in the Gap is because they got mad that I wouldn't recommend socks and belts as they checked out, and I said, I think if they wanted socks and belts, they would get socks and belts. And my manager said, you know, I don't know if the gap is right for you, and I think you might be right. I took off my little pen and I handed it to him, and me and my mock turtleneck strolled right on that

and that was it. That's the only retail job I've ever I did. But anyway, a long way of getting to mall walkers. I remember showing up for work one morning to open and there were these old people walking around and I thought, does anyone know that they're in here because the mall is not open yet? And someone said, yeah, they they live in uh and Merry go round and come out at night from the giant pants they just

screwed out of the legs. But they explained to me what a mall walker was, and even at a young age, I was like, that's wonderful. It warmed my heart and it became a legit, real American thing. It did. Apparently the CDC did a report on this, because if you can't study gun violence, might as well study mall walking.

And in two thousand and fifteen they said, uh, malls are right behind neighborhoods for popularity of walking they just went to bed after that, but they did a little more digging and they said the reason people of malls is because there's restrooms, water fountains, benches, and level surfaces. And this is one of my favorite quotes from any CDC report ever. They said that quote, the latest fashionable workout attire is not a requisite for mall walking, And

no truer words have ever been spoken. You won't find any yoga pants on the mall walkers. As a matter of fact, I would imagine you would be ostracized if you did just kind of gussy, if like you're putting on airs or something. You know, they don't play that in a dina. Yeah. Actually, you know what mall walker's where those uh those workout pants that that look like lotted up paper. You know what I'm talking about. It's like this wrinkly, weird material. I don't even know what

it's made of. Fish skin? What? Yes, all right, we're gonna talk about all right, we'll talk about it later. Let's hang on to this page to remind us to talk about it. Well, that's fish skin, but you mean clothing that's totally weird, but it makes sense in a way. Uh So, these these generally elderly folks are walking around malls. And at the Mall of America, they have a PR coordinator there named Tara Neebling, and she says, we love our wall uh wall markers, mall walkers. They're very special

to us, and they even have a program. They're so adorable. But they give them little swipe cards. It keeps track. It's sort of like a fitbit, but they can't wear a fitbit, I guess because I don't even know why. They can't figure it out or something that's very agist and is going to be against the wall for that joke later on. But they've given these little swipe cards that lets them track how much they're walking and how

much exercise they're getting. They have monthly breakfast meetings where they have health experts come in and talk about we should all go there right now. And all this is in exchange for a fifteen dollar annual fee if you want to officially be a member. But don't feel bad, sir, because like I was, like, what a rip? He said. They welcome unofficial mall walkers a k a. The old dudes who refused to pay the fifteen dollars a k a society's leeches. That would be me. I'm not paying

fifty dollars. That's mean about ten or fifteen years. Anyway, I think it's adorable. Uh. And the whole thing about mall walkers is they it was a problem at first because they didn't used to open malls to allow this. They just came to the mall when it was open and they would walk around. And they said that there was a quote in here they said they thought it would upset the regular shoppers to have them just exercising among them. And they're like, you know, what do we do?

We can't kill them. They got our they have our arms behind our backs, like they really have us over a barrel. You can't kill them, can we? We could wait for them to die. And I guess this is that they're really healthy. Owners gets together once a year, capes red satin inside black on, you know. So they decided to open them all just for them to walk around before the store is open, which is just adorable,

I think. And speaking of the Mall of America, Douglas Copeland, I don't know if any of you have read Generation X. It's a really great book, but he basically coined the name. Apparently no one's read it. Douglas Copeland, Um, wow, this really would work so much better if you guys knew what what Generation X was. Yeah, we wrote it. So he wrote the book literally Generation X, and like just

set the tone for the whole thing. And he was actually at the opening of Mall of America on August and he was up there on stage with the local radio affiliate, and he said that everybody was walking by with what he called country fair face, where they were like google eyed and eating ice cream, couldn't believe this mall.

It was the most amazing thing they've ever seen. And he said that the interviewer just assumed he was going to be like a lacquer ironic wise ass and said, you know, I bet you think this whole mall is very hokey and trashy. And Douglas Copeland said, actually not at all, Chuck, where should I start here? Oh? Oh, sorry, I can finish my part. And then the radio guy was like, what, Chuck, and he said, quote, I mean that I feel like I'm in another era that we

thought had vanished, but it really hasn't, not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves. You know, those people were living in golden times and they didn't even know it. Communism was dead, the economy was good, and the future with all of its accompanying technologies, hadn't crush society's mojo like a bug and drop the mic. And they said, well, that's really not good for the mic, and we're please anymore.

And he goes on to say it's true. He says that technology hadn't hallowed up the middle class and turned us all into like laptop click junk. He's he didn't say that there were no He said there were no new boogeymen hiding in the closet. He said, we may look at the nineties as the last good decade. And all of this came to him at the mall, so they didn't get their snarky quote after all, which is kind of ironic in a way. You know, he really

did zing him. But it was a medazine. So if you want to talk to the psychology of malls, we need to go back to Victor Gruen and um he has a quote where he said shoppers will be so bedazzled by the store surroundings they will be drawn unconsciously continually to shop, and um, this kind of goes against his ethos. He he wasn't some big He wasn't like the pr guy. I can't I think of his name. We did that like twelve times. He wasn't like Ed Burney's. He didn't have this thing where he was like, yes,

we need to get people to shop. But he was commissioned to do so, and he did a good job. He thought the mall would be a little bit more like a sort of like they had in Europe, like a public meeting space, and that's why he built these atriums in the middle, the skylights in the fountain, and he thought people would go there and hang out and talk politics and maybe even uh stand up and like speak about things publicly to people, because that's what happens

at the mall. Right, instead of the developers are like, you go over there, you're done, you did your damage, right, We're actually gonna go so far as to name a psychological effect after you, something called the grew In transfer, which is where you walk into the mall and you're like, I'm going to buy a Hello, Kitty pen and that is it, and you get through the mall and you're like, oh my god, there's a water fountain, Oh my god, there's old people walking around. There's this amazing stuff going

on here at the mall. I forgot what I was going to get, and now I have a compulsion to get an orange Julius with drugs in it. And you forget what you're doing, and all of a sudden you're shopping in general rather than purposefully shopping. That is called the grew In transfer or the grew In effect, And and Victor grew probably would not be very happy to know that that was the case. No, And as we'll see later, he in fact was not happy about that.

Uh So Malcolm Gladwell, Josh's mortal enemy. He did an interview with a Alfred Tubman and he said it's called threshold resistance. He said, people assume that we enclosed his face because of air conditioning and climate control. He said, what it really did was allow us to open the store to the customer. Just what we talked about, that introverted thing. All of a sudden, you're in this huge

retail utopia. All the doors are open at all time, and you're just strolling through the mall and you walk by Nike Town, and they have like looks like a nightclub in there, so you're just sort of unconsciously drawn inside there, like I'd like to make some new friends, truly,

I can't Nike Town. Uh. Back in the day in shopping centers, they used to have live bands, and that was replaced, of course, with music later on, which is you know, you take like a normal song like Bread's I Want to Make with You, and then you remove the lyrics, the percussion, replace it all with strings, and

all of a sudden, people are just walking around. Like by most by it works really well, so much so that the people at malls who are typically in charge of the music were the same people who were in charge of the heat and the lighting, the facilities manager. That's how much music meant to It was like part of the building. But at the same time, you can't really call it music, you know. In fact, you probably call something weird like music. Yeah, you think about the

coolest DJ. I'm not hip on that scene. Uh, Steve Ioki, Okay, the facilities manager is the opposite of Steve Ioki. But they're sitting in their room and and they're controlling the music and the the lights and the sounds of the mall all in that little room dead mouse. Oh, I know what that is. But the s is a number five? Right yeah? So hip, so hip. I'm not old. I know that guy too. So we talked a little bit earlier about the the cycle of the mall, the two

story layout. And while you can go to malls where there are three stories, um, most of the malls I've been to that have a third story. It's not the entire mall. There'll be like a section with a third story. I don't know if they built it on or what, but generally you see a two story mall because you had that cycle the across down, across, up, back to your car and you've seen all the stores. Right, But if you have a third level, you go across, down, across. My car should be here. But now I have a

third level and I'm stuck. I'm just gonna wander around this corner until some people come get me. And as a matter of fact, Valco mall had three levels. Look what happened to it? What mall? It's the local mall. Oh and the fourteen people from San Francisco applied right, yeah, Oh, it's in San Jose it's like the same place. Come on, I think you could default to Bay Area and you

do yourself a lot of favors. You're hearing this from like the guy who took off an infinity scarf right before he came on stage because he was told like, it's not cool anymore. I don't even know what that is. So you're burn does not work? No, No, I was talking about myself burning you, buddy. I wasn't burning you, all right, burn? Yeah, any scarf, it's a stupid what else did they figure anyone where? You're fine? Lady? Your infinity scarf is fine? Is that an infinity? That's lovely?

Can you come up here and show everyone when an infinity scar I'm kidding? No, everyone stopped now. Yeah, because we thought about adding runway modeling to our shows. That would be a great time. Sorry about the infancy scarf joke. Now I feel terrible. Is anyone drinking nothing but soilent right now? I should have made that joke instead. I'm looking over my glasses for more clothes I can make fun of Tyler Murphy. That beard is something else. He

died of blue. Everybody, all right, this is another part that's gonna be edited out later, so Tyler say whatever you want. So the other thing they figured out with keeping people in the mall, which is a big goal, is that that people like to shop with other people. But sometimes the people that you bring to shop with you, namely husbands, don't like to be at the mall. So they said, well, let's put comfy areas in the mall,

like chairs. And in fact, there was a quote that said a chair says we care a famous mall designer. What it really means is a chair says we can keep your wife here longer than you like to be here. Right. The husband's like, oh, I just want to lay down and die on my floor at home. Can I just go home? Like you can lay down and die here, sir? Right, lay there? Shut up. So the ironies are growing, we said earlier. I don't think we specifically said he was

a socialist. Now it's really weird for a socialist to be the father of the shopping mall, wouldn't you think. And his original idea was that people could go there and espouse their views, and that maybe happen once in nineteen seventy six, until the Supreme Court came in and said in the case of hud Hudgens versus Natural Relations Labor Relations Board. Basically, these union dudes wanted to pick it inside the mall and they did so they got

kicked out. They sued, and the Supreme Court said, actually, his private property, and you can't bring your picket signs in here. And and the picketers were like, wait, wait, wait, the all is the new heart, the new civic center of American life. In the Supreme Court, don't be an idiot place of shot dummy and everyone. When I didn't hear what you just said, We're gonna just keep pretending like the mall is the hardest civic life. So it was a big problem for Grew And actually he um

he also hated cars. He was big into walking. He was in favor of pedestrianism. And yet you have to drive a car to get to the mall. And not only that, you have to park, like some of his creations want. I think Southdale had like two point eight million square feet of parking, and he called these things like land wasting seas of of parking lots. So as he's as he's designing these things, he's like, I'm not very happy about this, and they would go do it anyway,

even the stuff he scratched out. They're like, no, this is a good idea. We're gonna go with this. And he had like, no, say whatsoever. After a while now and he got pretty disgusted, and he left the United States forever. In the nineteen sixties, went back to Europe and said. Uh. In nineteen seventy eight, a couple of years before his death, he gave a speech in London and said, I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to

disclaim paternity once and for all. I refused to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities. And they said, sir, we have the paternity tests and you are the father, right He said, no, I'm not, No, you really are. Yeah. We used lumen all in everything. Uh. Maybe we should take another ad break. Yeah, let's take another ad break. We'll be back right after this, and we're back. We should, I guess move on to the

death of the mall. Yeah, because I don't know if you guys know this or not, but malls are not doing very well these days. I know, but you'll probably like the rest of this episode. The mall actually peaked in nineteen ninety at sixteen million square feet of new space opened in that year, and it's been tapering off ever since. And here's a little staggering statistic for you.

Since the nineteen fifties, when the first mall was built, there was at least one mall built every single year until two thousand seven, usually many, many mall, well up to a million from what I hear. I mean that's an estimate, but yeah, yeah, so two thousand seven marked the first year that a new mall wasn't built, and I think there were no new malls built until two thousand twelve in the United States. Uh, two thousand eight. Recession,

the Great Recession had a really big impact on retail. Yeah, that's there's like a bunch of different reasons people put for what killed the mall. Right, the mall has long been known for killing the American downtown. Right, the mall moved out to the suburbs in the downtown just kind of went away. Right, So reason number one is that

the Great Recession killed them mall. And this is true to a pretty large extent actually, like from World War Two until I think two thousand nine, Every single year Americans spent more money than they had the year before, which is nuts. Right. Then two thousand nine comes and we stopped, and not only did we stop, we actually declined tremendously. We stopped spending by something like ten percent.

And then the money that we did spend, we started spending at Target and Walmart, not at the mall or at places like j. C. Pennies or Sears who tried to keep these malls propped up, and who mall is depended on. Because again, remember, if you go to a mall, the whole reason the mall exists is for the department stores to spread their traffic out to the smaller stores. And if the department stores are hurting, which they were,

then the smaller stores heard as well. So as these big, large anchor stores started to go under, the malls did as well. But people said the Great Recession was pretty bad. It's probably not the only reason that the mall is dying. Yeah, we mentioned Amazon dot Com earlier, and they're not the only online retailer, of course, and you can tell we're not from the area because we say dot com after it. We just want to make sure you guys know what

we're talking about. We're trying to communicate with you. I can't believe I said that. How nerdy we would both of us have said it like five or six times. Stuff. You should know. Dot com Well, there's dot orgs and dot nets and dot yeah, not Amazon, dot e d US, dot UK specificity is a soul of narrative. Oh good one, thank you. Take that, everybody, thank you. Uh. In two thousand fourteen, traditional retailers, for the very first time, generated

about half their sales from the web. Um, but you can't, like I do all my shopping online now, I literally haven't been. I think I went to the mall last year for something and asked my wife, she's out there. I was miserable. I hated it, but we had to go for some reason or another. I can't remember, probably staying the line for a stupid phone. I'm just kidding out and do that either. But I almost stood in line for breakfast this morning right here in San Francisco,

because that's the thing. Jeez. But online retailing isn't that

big of a thing yet. Uh, even if it hits the fifteen percent annual growth over the next three years that they project by two thousand nineteen, it'll still only be about two point four I'm sorry, twelve point four percent of retail, which is not enough to kill them all, but it's a factor no. And plus you can kind of find this weird confidence in the idea that malls may continue limping along if you're into that kind of thing, by the fact that Amazon dot Com open a brick

and mortar store a bookstore to help boost their online sales, which is mind boggling, but they did it in Seattle. But more than anything, perhaps the reason the malls died, it's because they were never meant to live forever. Uh. And this next part is about the economics of malls, and specifically it sounds so boring tax loopholes concerning malls. Josh is gonna explain it. Okay, So if you build a building somewhere, and I should say hats off to

Gladwell for explaining this too. This comes largely from him. But if you build a building somewhere and say, like nineteen fifty, um, the government said, you know what, your building is not going to hold up forever, so you can deduct a certain percentage of your building's value every year and put it aside tax free to replace that building eventually. And at the time when shopping malls first started to come about in the early fifties, the the

deduction for this wear and tear was one. Right, Like, you had a forty years to deduct this value of your your building. This is not going well, No, that's perfect so far. I'm checking in for accuracy. Okay, Right, I feel like like my fingernails are bleeding. So every year, right, if you went and built a shopping mall, you could deduct one of the value of the shopping mall. Not a huge deduction, but it was something. It's the problem is is this depreciation deduction was It was something, but

it wasn't enough. If you built a shopping mall in the early fifties, you were really asking for trouble because they were hugely expensive. They cost like twenty million or thirty million, which are on par to a hundred and eighty or two hundred million dollars today, right, and you were going to make your money back very very slowly. But then and I think nineteen the US government said, you know what, we really want to kind of get

things going on building and construction. Uh, we want to make sure Josh and Chuck have something interesting to talk about at the end of their Malls episode years from now. So we're going to change the tax code, and they did, and they created or allowed for something called accelerated depreciation, and this changed everything, Chuck. So I'm gonna go back to nineteen sixty one. The Wall Street Journal wrote a little article trying to describe this financial situation for real

estate company name Cratur Corp. Sounds totally made up. I can eave villains business that you would run or std I abbreviated, what does that stand for? It won't go away, Doc, So I'm gonna I'm gonna million to one, I tell you. So this is the sixty young and around the numbers just to make it easier. So let's say Crowder Corp.

In nineteen sixty made about ten million bucks overall. Is everyone writing this down as we're saying that, So deductions from operating expenses and mortgage interests is about five million bucks. So they still make about five million bucks. Not a bad income, but not good enough. Then came the depreciation, accelerated depreciation to the tune about seven million dollars. So all of a sudden crowder, instead of having a profit of five million dollars on the books, has a loss

of a couple of million dollars on the books. And everyone has these huge tax write offs. And now you fully understand, if you didn't before, why our next president doesn't pay income tax. Right. It's basically this accelerated depreciation on real estate that allows you to write off these massive amounts of money to show big losses where you're in fact making gains. Right. And the big change of the tax code was to the I R s. They're still getting the same amount of taxes over the life

of the building. They just said, if you want to deduct this depreciation at the beginning of the life of the building, that's fine with us. It's it's all the same to us. Well, if you were a developer, you would build this building, deduct as much as you could over say three four five years, maybe even break even just from the tax deductions, and then sell that mall for pure profit of fifty or a hundred or a hundred and fifty million dollars and walk away laughing and

laughing and laugh and exactly, we're in your cape. But here's the thing. They wouldn't like put that money back into the mall to make it better. They would sell it off like you said, and just go build a bigger mall further out. And now we'll call these ex serbs. They're not even suburbs. Because they were all about going where the land was cheapest. The mall stopped being a

place to actually service people. They would just build malls where they could get the best deals on land and found that people would drive to them and sometimes even build entire towns around them. Right, yeah, let's move to the mall. And it's true. And so under this view, when you really understand why there were two thousand or three thousand or a million malls built in the United States, huge,

huge mall. Some cities had multiple malls, when you realize that they were built for text breaks and not to fulfill some consumer demand, then of course they were destined to shrivel and die because they were part of an artificial supply. And once that him exposed and the text bricks went away, malls started going down. And uh, it's

sad in a way. When a mall goes under. People have associations of memories with the mall, you know, like you you think about all the mall walkers you've seen and loved walking around the mall, and when it dies, it's it's it's sad. But even more than that, it can actually, depending on the town, can take an entire city down with it. Yeah, there was a place north Randall, Ohio. No, I'm satisfied. What do you mean really, I mean it's

outside of Cleveland. I figured half of Cleveland probably tried to move to some Even Emily didn't cheer for that one. I know she's from Ohio. So they had the Randall Park mall and uh, it costs about a hundred and seventy five million bucks to build in and get this. The grand opening, five thousand guests had champagne, twelve hundred pounds of fresh shrimp, crab, cold roast, turkey, hot corn, beef and ham, um, melon and cheese, small crapes filled

with chicken and spinach, coffee and dessert. Uh. It was like a Roman orgy basically. And disguise of the opening of them all you got you got the world's largest cup of lemonade. Yeah, it wasn't too bad. I just hate that I put my mouth on that thing along with other people. He should have at least had smaller cups or maybe not professional swimmers inside the cup. No, there were seahorses, but no, no no, no, those are fine. You just they passed right through your digestive tip. You

don't metabolize this. So gross. Uh. Tommy Dorsey showed up at the grand opening of this mall with this orchestra to play. It was a big event. But Randall Mall has since fallen on hard times and those two point two million square feet of retail space have been shuttered and um almost along with it. Uh North Randall, Ohio as a whole, That whole town is sort of on life support basically because of closing of the shopping mall. Really yeah, but there are some malls that are still

doing well. Outlet malls are thriving. High end malls, in case you're wondering how they're really wealthy, are doing pretty good. High end malls are thriving like you would not believe. They're up by fourteen point six percent since the economic crisis. And there's this dude, his name's Rick Caruso. He pretended the uh, the death of the mall. Malls are dead, They're gone unless they reinvent themselves, and it just so happens that I build the type of mall that malls

should reinvent themselves into. So he basically is trying to recreate downtown, but a nice, happy disneyesque downtown where nothing ever goes wrong and everything is great. And by the way, it's also a mall and it's outdoors. And to follow this trend, malls are doing the exact opposite of what they did when Gruen started designing and closed malls. They're tearing the roofs off and following this new trend to try to survive. Yeah, he calls them lifestyle centers. I

don't know if there's one here. There's one in Atlantic called Atlantic Station. I hate them more than anything, really strong opinions. At least the mall is a mall. It's not pretending to be a small town. You know, It's true. It's like, look, we just built these streets and there's it looks like a stoplight, but your your child can control it fully. And then there's no cars with a button.

So it's it's like downtown USA. There's no crime anywhere, security guards everywhere, and all you do a shop, shop shop, So to me, there's like there's a certain sadness over the depth of the mall. Like for me personally, I think even for some of the boos in here you spend time at the mall, the mall represented something to America.

But if you step back and look, it's about exactly what the mall represents, and even more to the point, with the death of the mall represents, is it really the death of a golden age or a golden eraw when things were great? Because if you look at the mall,

it's an outpost of consumerism. It's like a church of consumption, right, So if we've lost that, then maybe out of the ashes, out of the things that are so broken right now, you can find some kind of weird hope that maybe we can rebuild in a new, better way to where the most important part of civic life isn't the mall. Wow, and that is mall. That's malls. Thank you everybody you can for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot Com two