Written by Göksu Gündüzalp, the first entry in the column Growing Pains.
As a kid, I loved shopping malls’ food courts, they would smell like döner and popcorn and melted butter that will be served on iskender, they would smell like grease. Going to the mall could be a whole day activity, and I would run into people from school. There is always more to do and want as you can go to the cinema, play laser tag, bowling... I think there is nothing wrong with loving, dreaming, desiring objects, and wanting to eat, buy, experience things. And I say this because this is not always my opinion. But it is something I want to believe in, because I do feel shame about wanting, liking objects and things. A can of coke or a chocolate by a big corporation, if you don’t know anything about the companies producing them, while being exposed to ads selling you dreams and friendships, can simply look interesting, like nice designs, their colours symbolising possibilities.
My mother says she feels tired after going to the mall, all the lights and electricity give her these negative, heavy and tiring energies. I enjoy visiting malls sometimes because it reminds me of my childhood. I asked my friends who grew up in Scotland, Spain, Turkey about their thoughts on shopping malls and we all agreed we had spent time in malls especially as kids. These friends said in their childhoods in 2000-2010s, malls were where young people hung out: they were excited to go to malls as kids but they didn’t find much appeal in malls now and thought they weren’t social hubs for younger people anymore. This past summer I graduated from uni. In September, I started to feel more intensely I was older, that I had grown up. Because everyone around me looks way younger now. It felt like I was being pushed to a new stage in my life although I stayed the same, in the same spot. Kind of like a shopping mall? I recently realised there’s always so many more people to grow up, the world doesn’t stop with me and there will always be younger people, going through phases I went through already as well as ones I’ve never experienced. It just was interesting to think although I grew up and grew out of going to malls, loving H&M and watching teenage dramas, there are many people who are hungry for things that are not interesting to me anymore. This sounds super egotistic and middle class? And what is a similar excitement in my current Turkish upper middle class 23 years-old person experience is being excited about a new music event, matcha place, which shows I got more niche and how different is this then being interested in malls? (it is slightly different but makes me still feel annoyed with myself, to be hungry for and curious of all the shiny events, experiences and global products)
Victor Gruen designed the first mall in Minnesota in 1952 as a space for community and later said he wasn’t happy with how malls had become consumerist spaces. In the US, between 1970 and 2015, ‘the number of malls grew twice as fast as the population’ (Thompson, 2017). The podcast Made in the Middle’s episode The one with the mall, its complicated talks about how in US, malls were racialised social community spaces that started to appear in mid 1950s where people of colour didn’t feel welcome or comfortable in. The appearance of dead malls increased in 2010s. In between 2010 and 2013, ‘mall visits declined by 50 percent’ in the US and ‘kept falling ever since’ (Cushman and Wakefield in Thompson, 2017). Cowen Research says malls started to decay and become less popular following the great recession of 2008-2012 (ibid). There seems to be various reasons for the abandonment of malls such as the growing presence of online shopping, the oversupply of malls, the shift from spending disposable income on material goods to experiences, increasing economic disparity, covid-19 and cost of living crisis. Another reason for the death of malls and smaller businesses within them is the increasingly dominant presence of ‘juggernaut’ companies such as Amazon and Walmart (Parlette and Cowen, 2011: 796). Like a blouse you bought last fall that doesn’t seem to fit your personality, can a mall be discarded? A mall being run unsustainably and then being left to rot shows the extent of the consumerist capitalist systems’ wasteful use of space, energy, materials. In various instances, dead malls provoked local activism: people protested the demolition of their local malls, as malls can sometimes be community spaces and ‘poor and racialised communities depend more on malls for recreation and consumption’ (794). Although most dead malls end up being demolished, some are repurposed into most commonly ‘hospitals, churches’, as well as ‘amazon fulfilment centres, offices, car dealerships’ (Newton, 2019). Then, there are rarer repurposes such as ‘art museums, homeless shelters, micro apartments, business centres’ (ibid). The NPR podcast gives the example of their local mall in Nebraska which became a business centre where now some small businesses and various social organisations, non- profits and health services pay rent that is cheaper than the city centre prices. These repurposes into community spaces for non-profits and health organisations make me feel hopeful as these nostalgic places are fought for, reclaimed as social spaces rather than being treated as privately owned shopping spaces. Dead malls should make us think more of the long-term consequences and scale of products that will be discarded and pushed aside at a later stage of their ‘life cycle’.
I feel this surrender to doing something meaningless, shiny, consumerist, greasy when I feel hungover and when I believe socially or maybe morally, I reached my goal and am enough or that I have nothing more to do that day. So, it’s like a cheat day experience. I go to a mall and feel unsatisfied, or I order from Jollibee. In my head this feels like something of lesser will when I want to order food, shop from a chain. I am doing something I know isn’t healthy? But as I write these, I am thinking it isn’t useful to be ashamed. Rather than questioning ‘why am I interested in shopping and buying?’, it is more useful to think of the structures, companies that make use of and shape my desires and interests into things to be expressed through products, and consumption. A mall being designed in a way to show hundreds of options, things you need and don’t need takes advantage of our interest in many things, dreams of who you could be. But all of these hurt my head, the wants, desires, lights and colours. I love going to H&M or a vintage store to dress my friends or myself up to see different versions of us. The Gruen effect is when a shopping space is designed to confuse you and as you lose focus, you transfer from looking for a specific item to shopping in general. To me shopping in general is such a normalised action that reading about the Gruen effect made me realise shopping is also when you look for a specific product. This effect is related to excitement, love for objects and things which is not a negative thing, I think. I am tired of putting the blame on myself, it is the design! As well as myself who chooses to continue being distracted? I think I am telling these to myself, maybe some of these are obvious things to you, or maybe you don’t agree, and I’d want to hear any opinion you have. I don’t know if this is a shared sentiment, but I do feel shame or guilt about liking shopping, wanting to wear trendy clothes, wanting to eat greasy food. And this is for many reasons. I don’t want to support corporations funding and supporting the genocide in Palestine or deepening the climate crisis, and I don’t want to be perceived as someone who supports these companies of fast fashion or KFC. But it is easier for me to not shop from fast fashion or food chains in comparison to someone from a working-class background, because I can afford to spend more money on a brand that has less unethical exploitative effects. I believe these choices of consumption became a part of our identities and a way of socialising now. Also, I feel guilty because I know I am participating in the continual of this consumerist capitalist system by buying and consuming. But again, the solution isn’t me abstaining alone.
Sometimes it feels more annoying and frustrating that alternative tastes become identities, or a consumer’s personality: like shopping secondhand from stores that are branded as sustainable. This reminds me of when Franny from JD Salinger’s Franny and Zooey says: ‘’Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way” (Salinger, 1961: 68). Choosing between big corporations’ products and smaller brands of food, clothes, experiences doesn’t feel like the action needed to change or challenge this consumerist system, although probably it has an impact, or it’s like voting for the least awful candidate in an election. I feel convinced I should think more about the way my young and human urge to have an identity, personality, friends, and my dreams and love for things is used and shaped within consumer, shopping narratives and campaigns.
References
Newton, E. (2019) ‘The one with the mall’ Made in the Middle. NPR Network. Available at: https://www.kios.org/society-culture/2019-11-01/the-one-with-the-mall- its- complicated (Accessed: 5 December)
Parlette, V. and Cowen, D. (2011) ‘Dead malls: Suburban Activism, Local Spaces, Global Logistics’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 35(4). 691- 887. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00992.x
Salinger, J. D. (1961) Franny and Zooey. Heinemann. London
Thompson, D (2017) What in the World is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017?. The Atlantic. Avaflable at: https://www.theatlantfc.com/busfness/archfve/2017/04/retafl- meltdown-of- 2017/522384/ (Accessed: 5 December 2024)
Urie, D. (2019) ‘Retail Apocalypse’ continues: Gap, Family dollar, thousands of other stores will close this year. Available at: https://www.nola.com/news/business/retail- apocalypse-continues-gap-family-dollar-thousands-of-other-stores-will-close-this- year/article_6888c20e-0569-5915-83cd-a62efec9f647.html. (Accessed: 5 December 2024)