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> People love shopping

Genuine question, does this still hold true? I'm asking because I've also read it (relatively recently) in other places and it struck me, because I personally dread shopping, and I didn't think I was the only one with those type of feelings.

And ignoring old recluse people like me (even though this pandemic has transformed many of us into recluse people), I had the impression that spending your free time with friends at the mall had died out as a cool thing do to in the late 2000s-early 2010s (when the Mall Cop movies were premiered, they were more a testament to a period that had just ended).

>I didn't think I was the only one with those type of feelings.

You're not. There are plenty of people that hate shopping, just as there are plenty of people that hate watching sports. Probably a disproportionate number of both groups are on HN.

It still has huge broad appeal, though, especially among women.

This.

I certainly know a fair number of women (admittedly, the grandparent commenter would probably not call them "young") who regularly shop as a recreation and social activity. Mostly with other women from their family and circle of friends. They often shop for half a day or more, without buying anything. Usually not at "The Mall" - instead they're walking a denser shopping district, or driving around to strip malls, estate sales, antique shows, etc. Probably not grocery shopping together, but they may do the Farmer's Market.

I figure that it's the women's version of a few older guys going out and playing golf for hours. Humans spent quite a time as hunger-gatherers, and still enjoy exercising their old software.

Try living with a traditionally feminine woman.

I don't particularly like shopping. I go in, I look for something I want, I see something I like, I buy it, I leave. The satisfaction of having the thing(s) that I want trumps all other concerns, so I optimize a path to there from where I am which means spending as little time in-store. Sometimes I browse, just to see what is available, but not too much.

My girlfriend is... way different. She can spend hours, browsing around, examining the merchandise, evaluating the color or style or fabric or thread count for linens, looking for things to "call out" to her (the joke goes that you go to Target and Target tells you what to buy), chatting with sales staff, and of course ensuring that as many things we need, might need, or want are bought in that one go as possible. The shopping experience is just as important as obtaining the things. Plus, during the pandemic, retail locations were her primary spot for "people bathing" (akin to Japanese "forest bathing"), fulfilling a need she has for contact with random other folks.

This is anecdata, but I'd say yes, there are types who love and need to shop, and I'd be willing to guess that there's a bimodal distribution with strong gender correlation.

Personally, there are enjoyable parts of shopping and there are the not enjoyable parts. Depending on which parts you enjoy, and the magnitude at which you like or dislike something, means that it varies.

Trying things on without the anxieties of mailing returns and what happens if a return gets lost or rejected etc. is amazing.

Waiting in line for 30 minutes+ because a typical American mall store is understaffed and has maybe one constant cashier is not fun.

It depends on how much you like the discovery vs. how much you hate the waiting. Some people who are big, tall, and petite don't get the joy of discovery, for example, due to limited in-store selections.

Malls probably "failed" in the same way car movies did. They run their course, they never were a goal, just a means to an end. To get people to shop. The shopping industry as a whole is raking in more money than ever before, the actual mall buildings never had that much value (as evidenced by how now they are sitting empty and waiting for someone to eventually want to build something new, maybe a warehouse or a community center or whatever in their place.)

Amazon happened because having a mall with ~20-50 shops for a few thousand people regionally is so big of a waste of resources compared to having one warehouse that is shared by all the shops close to the folks. Of course this was enabled by ubiquitous online presence. Algorithmically curated catalog. It wouldn't have worked with a big paper catalog shipped to people every week/month.

>> interspersed with drinking and dining

This. That is part of what makes strolling through European city centers fun as well: the mix of shops, restaurants and cafes with sidewalk/outdoor seating to eat and drink, watch other people. The latter is harder to replace by online stores and experiences.

Ironically, the US enclosed mall model was created by an Austrian (Victor Gruen) who wanted to replicate in the US the feeling of Vienna's Ringstrasse shopping/dining district. His early designs for malls were much more multi-use and even had indoor parks where people could rest from shopping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Gruen

> The model worked until it apparently didn't. If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.

I think there's a lot more at play than just online shopping for why malls are declining. Off the top of my head here's a few theories, and I'm sure there's many other good reasons.

* Customer service experiences at many stores have been declining as companies cut costs and people don't stay in this kind of career for a long time. I'd be willing to pay more to have a knowledgeable expert give me an in-depth explanation for why TV X is better than TV Y or why Game Z is the best first person shooter on a particular console or why clothes from Brand D are made much better than others, but in most cases it certainly feels like the store staff doesn't know too much about what they're even selling. Maybe this is a bit of nostalgia speaking, but I remember going to Electronics Boutique as a youth and having fun opinionated conversations with the staff: it was clear they enjoyed games and actually knew about them firsthand.

* I have to be delicate about how I phrase this, but let's just say that some malls have to walk a no-win tightrope between feeling welcoming to the community and keeping some like homeless troublemakers at bay.

* Most products in an average person's price range feel the same just about everywhere: it's a lot of mass-produced plastic junk that's designed to fall apart anyway. If many products are manufactured overseas and there's not much difference between what you get in a store versus online, what's the point?

* As far as Covid goes: malls are again in a no-win situation. Some people are very scared of Covid to the point that they don't want to shop in person unless everybody is masked, and even then they're nervous. And some people despise masks with the passion of a million suns and don't want to subject themselves to that. There's just no way to make everybody happy.

From a customer service standpoint, customers are less likely to be repeat customers when everybody in the entire building is trying to sell them a credit card on top of their purchase. My grandmother, who between she and her husband never took out a line of credit for anything in their entire lives, got so fed up with the practice that she started wasting their time by agreeing to sign up for a card every time she checked out at any department store. Of course she was always declined because was an 80 year old with a credit score of 0.

Some people love shopping but it’s far from everyone and you’re leaving out another major factor: the staggering inefficiency of car travel. American malls use huge amounts of space for car storage (which has no entertainment value) and they’re frequently surrounded by traffic jams.

That’s part of what makes them expensive but it also cuts into the pleasure part. It’s one thing to enjoy trying clothes on in person but having to sit in a car for an hour (which in the LA area is often each way, not just round-trip) takes the fun out of it. This is especially true now that there are more recreation opportunities at home.

Teenagers are also a big market, but that devolves to who has a non-working parent to drive them, which is less common than it used to be. Transit can help but it’s often an afterthought and many parents offer teenagers less range than they used to.

> If Amazon and online shopping hadn't happened, we'd still be going to the malls.

According to https://www.strongtowns.org/, the "big mall with parking lots" infrastructure is much more expensive than the "small shops in mixed residential" infrastructure. So I would expect it was going to fail anyway, eventually, just more catastrophically, as the costs would be offloaded to local municipality and it would just all blow up all at once (as can be seen around Detroit, for example).

I think that analysis is flawed. Expensive is part of the experience. If the expensive experience is bringing in enough people it doesn't matter that a cheaper way to do it exists.

Well I think its more that consumers shift behaviour.

For some people clothes shopping is best experienced in person. For others its nicer to do online.

I like almost everybody else used to go shopping for clothes but now I mostly shop online. I get vastly expanded selections and with easy returns it is for me more convenient.

I do know percentages but just to pull a number out of thin air if just 20% of shoppers moved a majority of their clothing purchases online a lot of retail shops could not afford that drop in sales.

Some malls can change into your example 1, but others in other locations won't have the overhead to do it.

This. I already know my size, why should I have to dig through clothes I can't possibly wear?

Men's sizes have the fortune of being more standardized than women's. Fit is also more important for women, as women have more things they need to fit around (you can have a dress that is the correct shoulder width but doesn't fit the bust, pants that fit the waist but not the butt, etc.) and the fits are a tighter on many clothes. And even worse is that different brands are inflating sizes at different rates for different fits as well. This doesn't even get into other things, like material feeling (the label only tells you so much) or things that you can't easily tell online with women's clothing like nonfunctional pockets.

Although men's clothing is also moving in this direction. US men's sizing used to be just straight up inches, but now they've started doing the size inflation thing, so a US size 33 jean is no longer 33 inches waist.

Sizes don't seem to follow any standard. I have shoes from size 10 to 12, depends on the brand and model. Shirts I mostly wear Large, or Medium, but I have Smalls and a few XLs. They's all the same physical size to fit me, the label is just semi random.

So as much as I hate shopping, for clothes I'll only ever shop in person.

Well they are often somewhat uniform for brands.

I know if I repeat buy clothes I can get the same size.

> A large number of retailers fell not to online shopping, but instead to lowering quality of service and goods. Sears, Circuit City, JC Penny, and Kmart each have analogous stores and former competitors that remain and are doing well.

Online shopping decreased the demand for retail but not all the way to zero. So it makes sense that some should fold and others should stay.

I'm too tired to find sources right now, but the popular thinking is that each of these retailers sank due to bad service. They had leadership changes that suddenly wanted to cut salespeople (while their competitors didn't), or source cheaper parts (Sears Craftsman and appliances). This was at a time when the businesses had seemingly healthy margins and glowing prospects.

Whole Foods Market was a leader in employees benefit's, compensation, and innovation for a time. The drive for growth as a private company was followed by it moving to a public company.

It created larger and larger stores, cut/lost the company culture and then was acquired by Amazon.

It is now for the most part a shell of what made it an attractive space to shop. Coupled with the online grocery expansion, a sector predominantly made on very small margins and vast competition only exacerbated its fall.

A cycle of markets I suppose. But, not the only path they may have taken. To me this parallels the rise and fall of US malls.

Whole Foods is a convenient place to take my Amazon returns now, at least.

This is a very good point. If I go to a physical shop to touch and get a feel for the product, generally it's after a lot of online research into the product range.

I don't go to a physical store expecting to be able to get any useful information from a sales person.

Given that the only thing that the shop has given me is the ability to view and touch the physical product, I don't feel any guilt in then ordering online if the physical store can't supply or deliver the product immediately or in a way that is beneficial to me.

Tech isn't very alien to us, but for the average Circuit City or Best Buy customer, that's another story.

Or take Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace Hardware, and the now defunct Sears. It's nice to have people on the sales floor that know about the various tools, paints, and home improvement projects. Even in the YouTube era where you can get project ideas and tutorials, having someone physically present to ask questions or bounce ideas off of helps tremendously.

The unfortunate thing is that most workers in big box stores don't seem to know anything about the products they are selling beyond the dot points right there on the label. They can how ever do a fine job at selling you the latest greatest in finance package, so I suppose that is something.

When the market dries up it's the weakest, marginal companies that fail. Maybe Circuit City could have survived with better service, but that would have doomed someone else.