The announcement that Macy’s will be closing the store at South County Center raised the specter that there will be another round of mall closures after an initial wave that struck the St. Louis region earlier this millennium. As Toby Weiss at B.E.L.T. St. Louis documented so well at Northland Shopping Center and River Roads Mall, and as this site has done at Northwest Plaza, Jamestown Mall and now Chesterfield Mall, there has already been plenty of casualties.
South County had always stayed off the radar, almost a museum of stores that had closed long before at other more “vibrant” malls. I was shocked to discover a Gloria Jean’s Coffee Bean still operating well over a decade or more after I thought the chain was kaput.
Northwest Plaza has been reborn, sort of, but I remarked it seemed like someone who had barely survived a terrible illness.
And ironically, Crestwood Plaza is back to being a strip mall with a grocery store, which is what it was originally before being turned into an enclosed shopping mall.
Then there’s the Galleria, which next to no one even remembers was once West Roads. In the next couple of days and the next few months, I’ll start revisiting these survivors, and see what the past looked like, and wonder aloud what the future holds.
This is not the only site on the Internet essaying the American Shopping Mall’s demise. I find it troubling St Louis has lost this many. But small mom & pop business have taken hits as well.
Oddly I believe that the federal gov’t constant borrowing money (and therefore causing inflation) is in some part to blame for this. I know the popular idea is that the Internet, e.g., Amazon etc. is to blame for this, but . . . I’ll close by analogy, quoting Missouri’s favorite son, Mark Twain:
“Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it — it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner’s hands and the communist would be poor again. The division would have to be remade every three years or it would do the communist no good.”
Most shopping malls are hurting, that’s for sure.
Blaming the demise of shopping malls on ‘communism’ and government spending? Ridiculous. If you think inflation is a problem now, just wait Mr. Preston for when those tariffs kick in. It’s really a serious problem with Capitalism itself and the ever changing retail habits of consumers. When the wealth in an economy is held by too few people the unbalance eventually results in what we are seeing before our eyes.
I did not mean to anger you by my post. Please note I was QUOTING Mark Twain. Twain knew Marx.
Mr. Preston, it’s been proven that Communism is not a good economic or political system, on that point I agree with you, (See China). I fail to see, however, what effect Communism would have on shopping malls in a country that has not had anything approaching an even economic playing field since the 1950’s. This has always been a hard core Capitalist, dog eat dog country, but when it fails it often takes a dose of Socialism to get it back up and running. Thanks for your response.