Physical Evidence of America's Start to Decline and Fall

[JimBowie1958]

Completely Surreal Photos Of America's Abandoned Malls

These abandoned malls are just part of the physical plants and resources being abandoned by Americans to rot. Our economy was once strong enough to support such things, but now is in decline and so the conversion from swanky malls to more widespread Walmarts has begun.

These properties should have been bought and reconstruction started, but no, there is no money, no interest, no labor or will enough to do it yet. And so it sits and rots.

Within a few years the decline will be so steep the government wont be able to fudge the numbers any more and maintain a shred of respectability, and even then no one will talk about it outside of partisan discussions and even then wont really believe it.

And some who cant abide the thought of an approaching end will say, 'oh, we have always had malls close down!' or 'That is the Golden Years Fallacy!' or some other nonsense meant only to distract and confuse as many as possible from realizing this nation is dying.

Just as a body dies when its spirit leaves it, this nations spirit was contained in two basic sets of books. The books of the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Now only a minority read either of them much and so we have no underlying common concepts that hold our culture and society together so that we have common do's and donts, axioms and evils, or even just basic concepts like community, family and duty. Everything is under contention, and so the soul of our once great nation dies slowly, year by year.

 

[Mr. H.]

Wow. It would be fun to go snooping around in those old malls.

 

[Mr Natural]

Why go schlepping out to a mall when you can buy whatever it is they sell online in the comfort of your own home and have it delivered right to your door?

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Why go schlepping out to a mall when you can buy whatever it is they sell online in the comfort of your own home and have it delivered right to your door?

You beat me to it.
Amazon etc. likely did more damage to brick and mortar than less sales.

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Fascinating pictorial.
Some of them are really surprising by the valuable materials/lighting fixtures...one of them in the food court even had, what appeared to be in great shape, a large food cart. I just looked online and ones not as large as that one was selling for about $3000. How on earth is it still sitting there?
Marbled counters, heavy-wood/glass doors - these are worth a small fortune. I am stunned it is still there.

 

[SteadyMercury]

Amazon etc. likely did more damage to brick and mortar than less sales.

Yep, similar to another recent "OMG end of days" thread that pointed to statistics from mall foot traffic. Looking at consumer spending clearly shows the retail spending didn't go away, just a larger and larger portion of it is online and this is even more amplified in foot traffic since even people who buy in brick and mortar often do most research online first.

 

[jwoodie]

Amazon etc. likely did more damage to brick and mortar than less sales.

Yep, similar to another recent "OMG end of days" thread that pointed to statistics from mall foot traffic. Looking at consumer spending clearly shows the retail spending didn't go away, just a larger and larger portion of it is online and this is even more amplified in foot traffic since even people who buy in brick and mortar often do most research online first.

Just look at socio-demographic projections. The U.S. is a dead man walking.

 

[Spoonman]

the effects of this are even more far reaching. people don't go to malls they do even less ancillary spending. eating out, spur buys. they use less gas which means states collect less taxes, less tolls. so more tax dollars have ot be allocated to maintenance to make up for the shortfall. now there are also less jobs so people will be spending less.

 

[kiwiman127]

Much has to do with the decline of the Middle Class which make up a huge majority of the consumer class. And I'm sure we all know that over 70% of the US economy is driven by consumer spending.

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Much has to do with the decline of the Middle Class which make up a huge majority of the consumer class. And I'm sure we all know that over 70% of the US economy is driven by consumer spending.

I forget what year it was, pretty sure it was 2007 since I was reading this little factoid in a newspaper article about the market crash.
Anyhow - in that year - 67% of consumer spending was debt. Credit cards/store cards etc.

 

[Moonglow]

massive malls started to decline with the advent of strip malls....

 

[Moonglow]

the effects of this are even more far reaching. people don't go to malls they do even less ancillary spending. eating out, spur buys. they use less gas which means states collect less taxes, less tolls. so more tax dollars have ot be allocated to maintenance to make up for the shortfall. now there are also less jobs so people will be spending less.

Where I live, the rest. are loaded as are the shopping centers....the roads are congested with autos and new highways are being built, old ones expanding...

 

[iamwhatiseem]

massive malls started to decline with the advent of strip malls....

It was an 80's/90's thing.
People were spending money like there was no end.
I remember it very well. It was nothing for people to have 10 credit/store cards with everyone of them carrying a balance.
It would have been...oh..I guess about 1995 or so, I got the mail one day. In it was a VISA bill, a Sears card bill and a Lazarus card. I opened them up and saw we had almost $3000 in credit card debt. I about died.
We paid them all off in about a year, and have honestly never carried credit card debt since.
People were out of their minds with debt spending back then.

 

[Mojo2]

Completely Surreal Photos Of America's Abandoned Malls

These abandoned malls are just part of the physical plants and resources being abandoned by Americans to rot. Our economy was once strong enough to support such things, but now is in decline and so the conversion from swanky malls to more widespread Walmarts has begun.

These properties should have been bought and reconstruction started, but no, there is no money, no interest, no labor or will enough to do it yet. And so it sits and rots.

Within a few years the decline will be so steep the government wont be able to fudge the numbers any more and maintain a shred of respectability, and even then no one will talk about it outside of partisan discussions and even then wont really believe it.

And some who cant abide the thought of an approaching end will say, 'oh, we have always had malls close down!' or 'That is the Golden Years Fallacy!' or some other nonsense meant only to distract and confuse as many as possible from realizing this nation is dying.

Just as a body dies when its spirit leaves it, this nations spirit was contained in two basic sets of books. The books of the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Now only a minority read either of them much and so we have no underlying common concepts that hold our culture and society together so that we have common do's and donts, axioms and evils, or even just basic concepts like community, family and duty. Everything is under contention, and so the soul of our once great nation dies slowly, year by year.

I, too, lament the failure and demolition of these malls.

But, i don't see it as a sign of our decline as much as I do a sign of progress not being denied.

The internet has made shopping at home and often with free delivery and the ability to easily shop for the lowest price to be a sign of progress.

A good thing.

There will always be a place for a good mall in some locales. You need local stores where you can see and feel and try on andtest the items you want to buy. And places you can go to spend your pleasurable leisure time. But there isn't the same level of need for this as there once was.

It's like the horse and buggy gave way to the automobile and blacksmith shops closed.

However, there are some malls which have focused on catering to demographic groups, for example, and have flourished.

Check this out.

CBS NEWS

March 23, 2014, 10:11 AM

A dying breed: The American shopping mall

It used to be when a sign at the mall said EVERYTHING MUST GO, it meant a particular store was going out of business. These days it could very likely mean the entire mall is shutting down. Our Cover Story is reported by Mark Strassmann:

"This was a working fountain, wasn't it? Many, many years ago?" said Audrey Caligiuri.

"Yup," said Dayne Bihn, "it definitely was."

These are the ruins of a dying culture: the American shopping mall.

Caligiuri grew up outside of Toledo, and like many of her generation, she spent much of her teenage years hanging out at the Woodville Mall.

"The mall was always the place to go," she said. "It was always busy. I mean, you couldn't even get parking spots a lot here. I probably spent most of my paycheck in my high school years at JC Penney's and Petrie's."

With the explosion of the Internet and changing shopping habits, hundreds of U.S. malls are expected to close their doors - like the Woodville Mall outside Toledo, Ohio. CBS NEWS
Audrey wasn't alone -- everyone wanted to go to the mall. For half a century the mall was the Mecca of our booming consumer culture, a fact celebrated in many a teen movie.

America's love affair with shopping malls began in 1956, when the nation's first fully-enclosed mall, Southdale, opened its doors outside Minneapolis.

"This was the most exciting period in this economy," said Robin Lewis, author of "The New Rules of Retail." "Actually, the most explosive growth anywhere on Earth at any time during history, the early '50s through the '70s.

"In the mid-'50s Dwight Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, and they constructed 54,000 miles of interstate highway. Now, what that did immediately is it provided mobility for the population which, prior to that, had been mainly rural. So they began to move into the suburbs and cities.

"But also, what it afforded was the ability to construct these regional malls, and they just exploded across the country."

Between 1956 and 2005, about 1,500 malls were built, including the Mall of America, one of the world's biggest -- 4.2 million square feet of stores, an amusement park, even a wedding chapel. And it attracts millions of visitors each year, from all over the world.

It was a Golden Age of shopping, which lasted until a new Golden Age came along, courtesy of the Internet.

"All of a sudden, the consumer now has every single retail store throughout the world a key tap away," said Lewis.

Today, malls across the U.S. are dying. No new enclosed mall has been built since 2006, and Lewis predicts fully half of all our malls will close in the next 10 years.

"Why would you get in your car and drive to a mall when you can just reach in your pocket?" asked Strassmann.

"That's the point," Lewis replied.

But on the outskirts of Atlanta, we found one formerly dying mall that's thriving. Where some saw financial ruin, Jose Legaspi saw opportunity.

In 2005 he took over a struggling, generic mall and transformed it into Plaza Fiesta, designed specifically to meet the needs of an exploding Hispanic population.

"We follow demographics," Legaspi told Strassmann. "Because it's nothing more than numbers game, I will tell you. You've got to have enough number of consumers to be able to support something like this, or any kind of mall."

Legaspi had turned dead space into successful Hispanic malls in several cities with large immigrant communities. Looking to expand, he discovered the Hispanic population of Atlanta had nearly tripled between 1990 and 2000.

But one thing was missing.

"The extended family concept is very, very key" to the culture of the Hispanic community, Legaspi said. "There was not a place where the families could gather. And shopping doesn't just mean shoes and clothing or eating at a restaurant; it's also a place where they can listen to music, sit down, relax, and spend some time with the family."

Plaza Fiesta has 280 stores, but there's also a doctor's office, and a dentist. There are hairdressers, money-wiring services -- everything you might find in a Mexican village. There's even a bus station to bring customers in; the mall had more than 4 million visitors last year.

And in another nod to the sense of community he's trying to foster, Legaspi has gone back to the future: "Every Sunday -- just remember 1950s America, people would come to the town square and they would listen to the band on the bandstand, right?" he told Strassmann. "Well, what we do every Sunday is we have music, and people can just come and sit down and relax and listen to the music."

"It's more than one-stop shopping, it's a one-stop experience?" Strassmann said.

"It's a one-stop experience, absolutely."

Robin Lewis says the lessons here can be learned by other malls, in other places: pay attention to a changing America, and give your customers something they can't get sitting at their computer.

So, if some dying malls are going to have a second life, Strassmann asked Lewis, what are the keys?

"Experience," he replied. "Entertainment. If we're going to drag them away from their smartphone and shopping on the Internet, you've got to give them a reason to spend the time to go and make the effort to go there. And the only way they're gonna do that is if there's a fun thing going on."

And an experience you can't get online.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-dying-breed-the-american-shopping-mall/

 

[Mojo2]

Amazon etc. likely did more damage to brick and mortar than less sales.

Yep, similar to another recent "OMG end of days" thread that pointed to statistics from mall foot traffic. Looking at consumer spending clearly shows the retail spending didn't go away, just a larger and larger portion of it is online and this is even more amplified in foot traffic since even people who buy in brick and mortar often do most research online first.

Just look at socio-demographic projections. The U.S. is a dead man walking.

 

[kiwiman127]

Much has to do with the decline of the Middle Class which make up a huge majority of the consumer class. And I'm sure we all know that over 70% of the US economy is driven by consumer spending.

I forget what year it was, pretty sure it was 2007 since I was reading this little factoid in a newspaper article about the market crash.
Anyhow - in that year - 67% of consumer spending was debt. Credit cards/store cards etc.

I don't believe you!













Yes, I do.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Why go schlepping out to a mall when you can buy whatever it is they sell online in the comfort of your own home and have it delivered right to your door?

1) You know what you are getting at a store. You can pick it up, check out the box to see if it has been reshelved, see if it is exactly what you want, etc.

2) Immediate purchase and acquisition.

3) Get advice from the store clerks if you have any questions. Usually people that work these stores know at least a little bit about what the store sells and the topic.

4) Watching all the weird mall rats.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Amazon etc. likely did more damage to brick and mortar than less sales.

Yep, similar to another recent "OMG end of days" thread that pointed to statistics from mall foot traffic. Looking at consumer spending clearly shows the retail spending didn't go away, just a larger and larger portion of it is online and this is even more amplified in foot traffic since even people who buy in brick and mortar often do most research online first.

Just look at socio-demographic projections. The U.S. is a dead man walking.

As are all the European ethnicities.

White people have decided they would rather have a third car and an ATV than have kids.

And that has an impact.

 

[JimBowie1958]

Yep, similar to another recent "OMG end of days" thread that pointed to statistics from mall foot traffic. Looking at consumer spending clearly shows the retail spending didn't go away, just a larger and larger portion of it is online and this is even more amplified in foot traffic since even people who buy in brick and mortar often do most research online first.

Just look at socio-demographic projections. The U.S. is a dead man walking.

U.S. Birth Rate Falls to a Record Low; Decline Is Greatest Among Immigrants | Pew Research Center?s Social & Demographic Trends Project


http://www.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/Ortman.pdf

 

[Gracie]

Those pics are kinda sad. Such a waste. And we have homeless people out in the elements. Those places could be turned in to mini cities. Or places for rehab on wounded soldiers. Or homes for the poor. Or shelters for animals.

Like I said..such a sad waste.