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Comment by cjo_dev | Hacker News Reader

The river? Contaminated since they don't have sewer system. The best place to go according to locals? The mall. Want to go anywhere else in Paraguay? It'll take you ages due to a lack of infrastructure.

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It’s interesting how malls have mostly died in America but are still a huge thing in many countries, especially ones that have become more developed in the last couple of decades.

Really? This sounds very interesting, as the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls.

Amazon then COVID wrecked them.

COVID might have finally done some stragglers in, but large scale indoors malls in the US were pretty well wrecked long before that

Malls are looked back on nostalgically as a 90s/2000s thing by a big percentage of the population. The whole mallwave genre is one example:

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

There are still many huge malls, but generally speaking the vast majority of them have closed, are empty, or are being rebranded into something else.

The comment you're replying to still holds.

> the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls

It's just that a lot of the malls have been augmented or replaced by strip malls. They have the same kinds of stores and they are still close enough to each other that it's convenient. Many have security, though it's more for the property than it is for the employees or guests, and there are large ones all over the place. You can go to Target and get a $14 can opener that you were hoping to pay $5 for but they made sure not to carry any cheap can openers, and notice there's a cell phone store nearby and go and get locked into a contract where you pay more than double. Don't forget to get some boring, expensive, and unhealthy food on the way out.

Strip malls aren’t the same thing and don’t have the nostalgic factor. They also don’t have the sense of place that malls did in their heyday – who goes to hang out at a strip mall, for example?

>This sounds very interesting, as the USA is the place that i would expect to have the most malls.

Since online shopping took over, why would Americans travel long distances by car to go to the mall?

Some things are still a lot easier to buy in-person, like books and clothes. Online stores rarely have enough information about the product, either as a whole (materials, specs, etc) or as an instance (wear and tear, etc).

With the rise of expendable income in developing countries, malls fill a need to buy items to improve their standard of living. I'd argue developed countries have already improved their quality of life enough that malls aren't needed as much.

malls have: - security - parking - AC It's the perfect place for going out in a developing country.

I recently went back to my local mall (in the US) for the first time in a long time that was a ghost town until recently and it was packed full of kids and families! Arcades, carnival style games in storefronts, ice cream stores, go karts, they even had one of those Japanese style capsule stores. It seems has become less explicitly shopping place and more a place to kill a few hours with the family. Would be interested if this is a trend in other places.

I was recently in a mall for the first time in years and was shocked by how full and vibrant it was.

That being said, the two malls I used to haunt in my home city where I grew up are either shut down or conspicuously empty of both foot traffic and shops.

I guess it's because of the shrinking middle class. Fewer Americans live in middle-income households, and their share of total consumer spending has gone down even more. Businesses specialize by being cheap or targeting the wealthy. Nice and affordable is no longer as viable strategy as it used to be.

They have (or had) bus services somewhat similar to Greyhound in the US. A friend and I took a trip to the Iguacu falls from Asuncion (more than 20 years ago, granted), which was an overnight bus trip with a brief stop in Ciudad del Este. It was reasonably comfortable as these things go. In a car it would be quicker but still probably 5 - 6 hours even though it's not much more than 200 miles because, as you've pointed out, the roads aren't amazing.

The railway had closed down only a few years before I visited but, at that time, there was little hope of it reopening. I've no idea what's happened since.

As a "local", I wouldn't ever recommend a mall for going. Maybe a good bar, there are some here.

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