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IPFS News Link • Business/ Commerce

Big, bold … and broken: is the US shopping mall in a fatal decline?

• https://www.theguardian.com, Dominic Rushe

Twenty-five years ago this August, the Mall of America, America's largest shopping mall, opened its many, many doors for business. The Minnesotamall is currently wrapping up a year of celebration at the dizzyingly vast temple to consumerism. It's a celebration that comes, ironically, as America's malls are dying. But not the Mall of America.

Once the epicenter of American retail, malls are in crisis. Pictures of dead malls, their hollow shells left like abandoned sets for a George Romero zombie movie, are rapidly replacing pictures of decaying Detroit as the go-to image for dystopia USA.

It has been three years since a major new shopping mall opened in the US, leading even some mall operators to speculate that the last one has already been built. Of the roughly 1,200 spread across the country, less than half are expected to be in operation five years from now.


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