I spent my Christmas in Danville, Pennsylvania - the small town that I grew up in (pop. 5,000). I took a trip to my childhood mall, the Columbia Mall, which turned out to be quite depressing. Long gone are days of a thriving mall full of shops and crowded with people. We went there the day after Christmas, which is usually a more busy shopping day. Now this is a pretty small mall, single floor, some couple thousand feet in length perhaps (if you’re familiar with LA/OC, it’s basically a single story version of Sherman Oaks Fashion Square or Laguna Hills Mall). Anyway, on this day after Christmas, there were probably less than 200 people in the mall. One of the most buzzing areas of my childhood, the arcade and department store next to the arcade, instilled a sense of depression in me. The beloved arcade of my youth, which I’ve painfully watched shrink over the years, is closed completely. The department store next to it, one of the end department store spaces, one of the biggest spaces in the mall, has been closed for years. This end of the mall used to be buzzing and full of traffic, and me and my girlfriend stood there, alone. KB Toys is gone, the music store is 75%ing off a lot of items (bad sign?), and the amount of empty spaces in the mall is daunting as well as depressing. The mall is just depressing. Look at this Christmas bear in the mall, he is depressed:

We went through the mall and counted the number of stores open vs. closed. Excluding the stands in the middle of the mall, of which there were perhaps 10, the total number turned out to be 31 stores open vs. 19 closed - only 61% of the mall’s real stores are open. I’m not sure that it’ll be there next time I go back
While it’s simple to declare this a result of the poor economy, I believe there are other forces at work here. Guess what opened very close to the mall just a couple years ago!? That’s right, Wal-Mart. During my trip I also happened to watch the movie “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”. One of the tenets of the movie is how smaller/family/privately-owned stores die when Wal-Mart shows up. There are a lot of stores in and around the plaza which houses this particular Wal-Mart. This area, less than a mile away from the mall, is very much alive, while the mall is dying. I’m not sure why the Wal-Mart didn’t open in the mall, as the aforementioned large end-mall retail space has been available for many years. Either way, that whole area is depressing. The only good thing out of it is that there is a Panera Bread there now, near the Wal-Mart. To add insult to injury, the Wal-mart and surrounding stores are located on top of this steep hill type thing, where you wouldn’t even know they were there when driving by if not for a sign or two, while the mall is in plain sight right next to the interstate.