Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Live From San Francisco: How Malls Work

Episode Date: March 4, 2023

In this classic show recorded live on January 5, 2017 at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, Josh and Chuck delve into the history and the heyday of the church of consumerism and what it means for local communities and our capitalist society at large when malls die.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace.

I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday. This is your cohost of stuff you should know here, Chuck Bryant. And I'm going to recommend that you listen to this week's select episode live from San Francisco, colon, how malls work. This was in February of 2017, February 19th specifically. And this was our sketch fest performance for that year. And I'm not sure how many times we did this topic live that year. But I just wanted to kind of put this in as a Saturday select as a way of saying, Hey, here's what our live shows sound like. And there

are a lot of fun. And there's even a lot more fun that gets edited out of these. So we're going on the road this year, as you know, and we're going to hit probably six or seven more cities before it's all said and done in 2023. So I wanted to throw a live show in there to show you what it was all about. So please to enjoy this week's select live episode, how malls work. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeart radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We're in beautiful San Francisco, California, the Castro Theater. Thank you. It's wonderful. Our biggest show to date seriously today on a Sunday afternoon. Who knew? San Francisco sketch fest. All right.

So we're talking today, everybody, about a little something called the mall. And I'm not joking. Yeah, that's what I have. So that's good. So we've been wanting to do something on the mall for years now and years and years. And we thought, well, what does San Francisco, if not the mall, right? They're going to love this one. And I guess we were wrong. No, you guys will love it. I promise. It's just like, like the grass episode. You may have been like, I'm not listening to that. And then you finally ran out of episodes, listen to the grass episode. You're like, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. This will be similar to that experience. Okay. Except the grass episode was free. I promise we will give it our all. I don't

know why we're selling it like this is going downhill so fast. No, it's not. It's great. Okay. Okay. So uphill, shall we get in the wayback machine, which is imaginary? So when you think of shopping mall, you think of the mall, right? Everybody knows what the mall is. If there's somebody who doesn't know what the mall is, raise your hand and whoever sitting next to that person, punch them in the arm really hard. Be like, come on, you know what the mall is. I assume San Francisco has malls somewhere. Oh yeah, they've got malls. I've never seen one. They're probably out a bit. It's not like a mall in the middle of the mission or is there? I don't think so, right? Okay. There's a few. Oh, you did. I did a little research. Okay. They pop up here,

there. You guys will know because I'll be like, so if we're, we're all on the wayback machine, and we're going all the way back, back, back, back to ancient Rome, where the actual the first, what you could consider a shopping center appears, and it was called Trajan's Market. And Trajan's Market was built in something like 107, I think. Yeah. That's early. I think its anchor store was Trajan's Horse. That was okay. Sorry. If I had a store back there, that would have totally called it Trajan's Horse. Yeah. Yeah. And it's known as the world's oldest shopping center. For good reason, again, it was built in 107. And right now it's in ruins. There's some guy who sells those little balls with the raccoon

tails on the end of them, on a tray, but he's technically outside of the mall. So it doesn't really count. So the mall is closed. It has been for several millennia now. But the oldest continually operated, what you would might call an outdoor marketer mall, is the Grand Bazaar with an A, and three A's actually. Two. No, there's three. You've been drinking. Yeah, just not together. B-A-Z-A-A-R. Oh, oh, got you. Yeah, I guess. If I'm not mistaken. His math checks out. That's a joke from Fletch, if I'm not mistaken. I don't like Fletch. All right, deep cut. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul between 1455 and 1461 is when that was built. And it is still an

operation today. About 5,000 covered shops still gets about a quarter million visitors a day. So it's still rocking. Day. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of folks. So you've got what medieval market towns kind of started to come later. Sea ports, all these things, these commercial districts where people went to shop, they all had to kind of be centered in an area together because people rode horses or they walked or they were chased by other people, whatever. But you had to go and get all your shopping done at one place, right? And that's just kind of a very ancient idea. And it's been around for a long while. Right. It's wonderful. By the turn of the 20th century here in the US, we had something we still do. It hasn't gone away. But pre-mall, we had the department

store. And I think I even mentioned this on another show. It didn't dawn on me. You know how like the simplest words dawn on you, late in life, like what it really means? I just always said, hey, a department store. It really just occurred to me a couple of years ago, like, oh, it's a store full of many departments. Right. Never really thought about it. Do you ever have those? It's kind of nice. Department stores. 13 stories high in Chicago, the Marshall and Field Company. Marshall Field. Marshall Field and Company. And then in Detroit, there was one called J.L. Hudson's that was 25 floors of department store. 25 floors of retail space. And this thing took up like a whole block. Yeah. And this is 1911. So that's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff.

In 1828, though, if you back up a little bit, the first sort of enclosed shopping center that you might kind of consider a mall mall, even though we really don't, as you'll see, because it didn't have an arcade, even though it is called the Westminster Arcade. Ironically, didn't have an arcade in Providence, Rhode Island. Has anyone ever been to this place? Yeah. I've been. Have you really? Yes. I didn't know that. Yeah. You didn't type in here. I've been there. Yeah. All right. I didn't know I needed to say that. Well, it was assumed. It's a pretty cool place. So if you look it up online, it doesn't look like the mall that you would consider a mall. It looks like sort of like a Greek revival building. And it's like big glass ceiling. Yeah. It's really nice.

It's got three. It sort of looks like a train station. Kind of three floors. And recently, they were going to demolish it, but someone swooped in and built micro apartments now. You can live in there. And they're really kind of cool. And I was going to explain again what a micro apartment was, but I forgot where I am. Yeah. So you all know. Isn't that like a dresser drawer? You ever go to IKEA? Yes. And you walk through the little thing that's like, oh my God. Oh, I love those. Yeah. That's a micro apartment. Living in 30 square feet. And it's just some guy standing in a broom. Pretty much screw this over herbs. Wait, even well, even back further than this, Russia should get its due. Right? Even even before the bad timing, even before the

the Westminster arcade, there was this thing called the ghost vena dvor. And I looked at the pronunciation, but I should qualify that. I looked up the pronunciation on the same site that I looked up the pronunciation on Disha Chang, which I called Dixie Chang throughout the entire underground city episode. So to take that for what it is. I was about to say all our Asian friends, let us know that was wrong, but really everyone of every race, let us know that was wrong. Sure. Thank you dummies. After World War II, things really kind of evolved with the shopping center, though. That's when things kind of started going. And in 1950s, Seattle's Northgate Center was, but I feel like we say several times the first thing we think of as a mall. I guess it was

just part of the evolution. Right. Southdale was the first real mall. All right. So Southdale, we're going to pick up with Southdale. Southdale was in Edina, Minnesota. Edina, thank you. Live Corrections. Very nice. Where were you when I was saying Dixie Chang? Over and over and over again. Well, previous to that, boy, we're jumping all around. This designer and really the man who are going to either thank for the mall or blame for the mall, depending on how you feel about malls, is a gentleman named Victor Gruen. Anyone want to correct me on that? He's an Austrian architect and he designed Northland Center in Michigan. Is that correct? Yes. And it was... Northland Center is in Southland, Michigan. I know. It's so confusing. It's

terrible. It had what was known, and I said anchor store earlier, and this is what malls have. They have these anchor stores, which are still to this day, mainly department stores. And that anchor store was a Hudson's department store. Right. Had about 110 other stores, but it still wasn't a real mall mall because it wasn't, as you'll see, introverted, correct? And it wasn't enclosed. It was open air. Yeah. Like, you know, when you go to those outlet malls today, where it's just all you're walking around outside like an idiot, you know? This is kind of like what Southfield was like in Michigan. And that's what all shopping malls were like up to that point. They weren't enclosed. It was 1956 in Adyna, Minnesota, when the first enclosed mall, like we think of it today,

came about. Yeah. And I actually looked up the previous Northland. They did close that in in the 70s, and it finally shuttered for good a couple of years ago. And I found this website that said 12 weirdest things left behind in the Northland center. And it wasn't that exciting. But there was one the group detention room. And I started thinking, holy crap, malls had jails. Yeah. And I looked it up and someone said, I went to Yahoo Answers. Like, where else do you go? To get the real truth. And the number one voted up answer said, it's not a real cell. It's just a small dark room with no windows and a chair and a camera in it. They you they you're not allowed to leave. It's like this one. It's a micro apartment, basically. This one had chains on

the benches. And I was like, no, that's a jail cell. Yeah. So I saw that too. There was like a target cart under a spotlight, I think. I thought that was beautiful. Yeah, it was very arty haunting. I'm with you, lady. All right, so jumping back forward again to Minneapolis, outside of Minneapolis. Is it Edina or Dinah? Dinah. Dinah. Thank you. 1956 Southdale, 20 million bucks. The anchor store was Donaldson's and Dayton's. Right. Who can forget Donaldson's? I did. And Dayton's actually commissioned this mall to be built because they were building a new outpost in the suburbs of Minneapolis. And it wasn't just by coincidence that Edina was 10 miles away from downtown Minneapolis. Because again, this is 1956. So it's during the Cold War. And that's actually

right outside the eight mile blast radius of an atomic bomb were to be dropped on Minneapolis. Because of course, that's what the Ruskies were thinking. We're going from Minneapolis first. But they built a mall outside of the blast radius. So I guess we'll just give up. So the original idea for the mall from Victor Gruen was to, he wanted to kind of, you know how they have with these mixed youth centers now. He had this idea way back then. And he wanted people to live there and kind of congregate there. And we'll get a little more to this later. But it sort of ended up just being a shopping mall to his disappointment. But he modeled it on Northgate and Seattle. And sort of the big idea was that you go to these

department stores. Because that's what people were used to. But how do you get them to these other stores was the big question. Right. How do you get them shopping? Oh, at the mall? Yeah, like once they're there, because people went to department stores. So if you put a department store out in the suburbs, they'll go to the department store. They're like, I thought I was supposed to take a left. Now I'm taking a right. I'm at the department store. Who cares, right? The problem is, is if you put 110 other stores coming off of that department store, they just go to the department store and leave. Not good, right? If you're one of these other stores. So what Northgate figured out in what is mind numbingly obvious, but really works,

is you just take this department store, put another department store, and then put the shops in between them. And then the people take a right, but they should take a left, but they're fine. They're going to the department store. Oh, there's another department store. Well, I'll just walk past this. Maybe I'll buy that. I'll buy a little bit of this. Sure, I'll take a feather boa. And then they walk into the other department store and consumerism is saved. That's right. It was revolutionary at the time. So he built, he was commissioned at least by Dayton's department store to build this kind of advanced shopping center. They didn't call them malls at the time. They called them advanced shopping centers. It's so high tech. He actually

added space for a competitor at the other end, because he had this idea, like how to keep people there. And I don't know how he talked Dayton's into it. Yeah, the Dayton's are like, wait, wait. Yeah, like, hold on a second. No, no, we're paying you to do this. And you want to put a competitor's store in there. He's like, yeah, it'll work. Trust me. So a few minutes ago, I mentioned that it was introvert. My uncle's still texting me. Still looking for parking. Just circling the Castro at this point. So we mentioned introverted and extroverted. Malls previous to this were outdoor. And like we said, they were extroverted. So in other words, you walk the perimeter and the stores face the

outside and they had doors on them that you would walk into if you wanted to shop. So he had this idea like, wait, let's reverse all that. Let's turn it all inside where you walk into this huge building. You got these two stores on both ends. And there are no doors. They might have a gate they lower at night, but it's just open. Like people will just walk through this little concourse. And all the stores are wide open for everyone. It's air conditioned. It's heated. Not at the same time at appropriate times, especially in a place like Minneapolis, right? It's probably a nice place to go in the wintertime. Yeah, it was a big deal. He introverted them is what they're called, right? Where they look in on themselves and they're enclosed as well. So for the first time ever,

you could just walk around this beautiful place with trees and he put like a 20 foot bird cage and there were goldfish ponds and all this stuff. And it'd be the middle of winter and you could walk around in short sleeves and be like, I live in a diner, not a diner. The other thing he kind of nailed right out of the gate was previous to this shopping malls were usually or shopping centers are on one floor and they were spread out over this big broad area and you had to enter from the outside and walk around the cold and it was all just one big single level. And he said, how about this? How about we stack it? Because this is a genius, everyone put a store on one end, put a store on the other end, you stack them on top of each other, you put escalators on both sides,

you park in this side, you go into your department store, you walk down on the first level to get to the other department store, you go down the escalator and then you walk back on the other level to get to your car and you've seen every store. Right. And it was genius. It was retail genius. Exactly. Pretty amazing. And again, we take this for granted now, but at the time everyone's like, huh, never thought of that. Well, the point that we take this for granted, like all of this sounds brain dead, all of this came essentially from this one guy, this dude named Victor Gruen, who is kind of like a high artsy fartsy society type from Austria, who fled the Nazis in 1938, and was a self-taught architect, right, who just started designing a mall and he

invented the mall and he got basically everything right, right out of the gate. It's pretty amazing. The economist has a really great quote about him. They say that he, it was as if Orville and Wilbur Wright invented not just manned flight, but also tray tables and duty free service. Not bad. The other thing he got right right out of the gate was these low balconies, you know, if you ever go into a mall, you know, if you're on that top floor, you can look down and say, oh, I got to go into Chest King and get some parachute pants. Sure. Or if you're down on that bottom floor, you can look up and you can see I got to go to Mary go around and check out the ladies. Mary go around. Man, that takes me back. There will be a bit of

nostalgia peppered in here and there. Actually, I don't even think I put Mary go around. I put Camelot music is what I have in my notes. Camelot music, everyone. And the joke I have was the Duran Duran Kasingel. Oh my God, the Kasingel. It's like I just ate a whole bunch of member berries or something. Of what? Member berries. I don't know what that is. It's a whole South Park thing. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, three other people love that joke. So more than 75,000 people, 75,000 people turned out on the grand opening day of Southdale Mall and not just local press, Life Magazine, Time Magazine, New York Times, Business Week, Newsweek. They all came out and said things like it's the splashiest center in the U.S. has a goldfish pond, birds, art, 10 acres

of stores and all under one Minnesota roof. It's a pleasure dome with parking, said Time Magazine. But one guy got it right. One guy said Southdale has become an integral part of the American way. And this is the first mall and some journalist points to it and says this is how things are from now on. And this is the page that is very hard for me to read because as you can see, I crumpled it up. Well, hold on. So if we're going to release this, we should probably take an ad break, huh? Oh, yeah, sure. Okay. You ready? So we'll be right back. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia Fontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme,

like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. If you're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters.

I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the I Heart Radio app, at the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually

not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeill. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. And we're back. All right. I'm glad you thought of that. Yeah. You guys get to see how the sausage is made. So as I was saying before the break, I don't know if you can see it there, but this is crumpled up and very hard to read because

Josh sent a new version in the hotel room. I said, great, I printed it out. I crumpled up the wrong one and threw it away. And right before I came, I was searching through the trash and here it is. It's not that bad actually. So we're going to entitle this next section, the golden age of the mall. You have to go like this one. It wouldn't be a live show if we didn't have a golden age of skyjacking, golden age of PR, golden age of grave robbing, and now the golden age of the mall. I was about to say golden age of Rodney Dangerfield, but it was all golden age for that guy. So the mall had its golden age between 1956 and 2005, 1500 malls in America were built. Possibly 2000, possibly 3000. What? No one knows.

They just stopped counting? Pretty much. They're like, forget it. We'll just say 7,000. Who cares? A million. A million malls were built between that time in the U.S. So there's a woman named Lisa Charon who wrote a book called America at the Mall, because every book has to have a colon. Sure. If you're smart. The cultural role of retail utopia. And she said, for the children of 70s, 80s, and 90s, the shopping mall was the place to be, a space where we defined as our own. The mall taught us how to fit in, how to be a consumer, ultimately how to be an American. So who, I mean, you don't have to say how old you are, but if you grew up in sort of the 70s and the 80s, you know that the mall, and then to the 90s, of course, the shopping mall was like,

it's different than it is today. Like families used to go to the mall for the day. You'd pick a Saturday and you'd all pile in the car, you'd go to the mall, you maybe go see a movie, the kids would go to the arcade, mom and dad would do some shopping, and you would literally spend like six and eight hours as a family outing at a mall. Right. Pretty unbelievable to think about that. Now you gather around the laptop and go on to amazon.com. Yeah. And I'll sit around and stare at your phones and ignore each other. You say, yes, I would like to get into fermenting pickles. I could use some fermentation weights. Thanks for suggesting that Amazon. Interesting. You just changed my life. But it was a big deal. You would spend family day at the mall. And in the 80s,

it was just, it was a part of America as anything else. There were restaurants in the food court at the mall that didn't exist outside of the mall. They were like born in the mall, like Cinnabon. Someone gasped. That's it. We can go home now. That was an audible gasp. That's all we're ever working toward is a gasp from somebody. Orange Julius. That was another one. Panda Express was only in malls for a long time. And apparently Sbarro, everyone knows of Sbarro, right? It was so tied to malls that when Sbarro filed for bankruptcy in 2014, they cited unprecedented decline in mall traffic in their filing. They're just like, no one likes a mall anymore. We're Sbarro. We're dead. We're dead. Chick-fil-A, too. You guys don't have Chick-fil-A here, do you?

Oh, you do? You do? Well, this is long before we knew they served hate chicken. This is back when everyone just thought it was delicious and juicy and crispy. Not filled with homophobia. Yeah. But no, no, they've since walked it back. So it's all fine. Yeah. We're just not open on Sundays. Chick-fil-A would used to only be in the mall. I think there was one original Chick-fil-A store in Georgia. I think that's where it was born. But aside from that, it was only in the mall. And I remember going to the mall, remember when malls used, and they may still do this, I don't go to malls, shop on Amazon.com. Malls used to have events like a World Record Sunday, Ice Cream Sunday, or something to get people there. I went to

Chick-fil-A when I was about 10 at Northlake Mall, which was my mall, because they had the world's largest cup of lemonade. On a Saturday afternoon, my mom took me and I drank from that spigot along with thousands of other people. And it was not even that impressive. I thought it was giant, but now that I'm adult, it was probably like eight feet high. Yeah, right. No, it was 64 ounces, but they were just the first ones to try. So whatever they did was the world's biggest cup of lemonade. That was a mall event that I went to. What was your mall? I had two, because we moved a very formative time in my life. I had Southwick Mall in Toledo. And then... All for applause. Okay. I had a town center mall in Atlanta. No. Okay. You guys haven't been to town center mall.

Believe me, I would recognize you. Were you a mall rat? No. No. Not necessarily. No. I would not call myself a mall rat, because I didn't sell or consume drugs at the mall. So I wasn't a mall rat. I was there legitimately. I was there to visit the Led Zeppelin box set on cassette that I was saving up to buy, just to make sure it was still there. Look at it and touch it. Or I would go to Spencer's and like put my hand on the plasma ball. Just be like, what is this? You guys have Spencer Gifts? Well, I say that like you're from here. I know that like eight people are from San Francisco in this room. You know Spencer Gifts? Okay. Okay. Very titillating place for a young Baptist boy, by the way. Oh, it is. Because after... Because of the one section, you know what I'm

talking about? Plus the posters too. Yeah. It's funny now as an adult, the one section, I just thought it was like, oh man, and then there are some children here just, you don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe she's used piglet. I don't know how to do that. It was... But for a young Baptist kid, I was just like, I would walk by it and I would pretend like I'm looking at other things and just look in that section to see what was in it. I remember walking by. And now it's just so dumb, the stuff that was in that section. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a stud collar. It's like, who cares? By the time you're like, oh my God. A guy checking me out yesterday was wearing one. And nothing else. Yeah. Maybe a condom with bells and that's it. So silly. I remember walking

past Victoria's Secret, like I was not doing that on purpose, but just kind of like, like I could actually, I trained my right eye to go like that. It took a lot of exercise, a lot of work, a lot of muscle relaxers, but I got a down pat. Oh, that's good. And that was pretty cell phone when you couldn't fake like you were doing something else. Right. Good work. That's very impressive. You trained it back and everything. I did. Now I can't do it anymore. Or else I'd show you guys. I didn't know where I was. I got so sidetracked by a North Lake Mall. Oh, and the goldmine was my arcade at the mall. Sure. Wonderful. You could get like 20 tokens for a dollar on a Wednesday. And now games cost like $1.50 to play one game. Yeah. Progress.

So what else did they have back in those days? You made a list. Chest King, of course. Mary go around. I mentioned Contempo Casuals, ladies. Deb. I knew this section was all into that. That. County seat. Remember county seat? Oh, that's a, that is a deep cut. Where you could go get Jean. It was like when the gap used to be like sweatshirts and blue jeans before they rebranded. Right. Sure. You should go back to that. Mary go around. Camelot music. What else? Oh, well, bookstores. You could just say bookstore and that would be novel. B. Dalton. Yeah. Walden books. Walden books. I think I consumed every single volume of truly tasteless jokes in those without buying a single one. Man, I remember those. God, those are great. Yeah.

Pet doctor, the cruelest, cutest store of all time. Remember like the mall pet store? I was like, this hamster is so cute. And then it died like an hour later from neglect. You just shuffle it out and put a new one in. There's a trap door. Nice. John Hodge going to hate this show. Dripping with nostalgia. Dripping. He's here in this town. He refused to come because he knew. Or did he? Are you kidding? He'd already be up here. Like, oh, wow. Let me take some like. Nostalgia is toxic. The mall became a prominent fixture in movies of the day. Of course, the Sherman Oaks Galleria in California, which is where we are. Yeah. California here. That was

the mall and fast times at Ridgemont High, one of the great mall movies and full mall movie. But you know, don't sell it short. It also appeared prominently in commando where Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up like a ton of guys at the mall. Yeah. Same mall night of the comment you mentioned. Anyone? I remember seeing that as a kid and thinking, because you know, the hero, if you haven't seen the movie, this comet comes and destroys like everyone. At night. Yeah. And everyone has these comet parties to watch the comet, but it kills everybody except for the two really hot teenage girls that didn't watch the comet and then a few other people. And what do they do? They go to the mall shop because it's abandoned. And I remember being a kid thinking

that would be the dopest thing ever. Sure. To just go in an empty mall and it's all yours. Or to live at restoration hardware or something like that. I would have run into Spencer Gifs into that section. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. You try it on the dog collar and just like pass out from pleasure. That's what awaited you and you missed your chance. You could be walking around the Castro right now. That's right. And I look out and there's this creepy guy with a wandering eye staring at me. And who knew? Who knew? Uh, what else? The Blues Brothers had a very famous mall scene. Yeah, they went through the Dixie Square Mall. Sorry, the Disha Square Mall. That where they were like, uh, this place has got everything.

And maybe one of the most famous mall parking lots of all time, the Twin Pines Mall from Back to the Future, which was actually the Puente Heels Mall. Heels? That was possibly appropriate. Maybe. Uh, which I don't even know where that is. I mean, it's in LA, obviously, but I'm not sure. It's, uh, it's in City of Industry, which is that's not the name for a town, everybody. No, it's outside of LA. I looked it up. And of course, mall rats, which we don't need to talk about too much because it was a little, really? That was Kevin Smith. He has a really high voice. No, I'm Kevin Smith. You can't leave out Moon Unit Zappa, dude. Oh, yeah, of course. Valley Girl. Yeah, she had a hit single Valley Girl and her father Frank Zappa hated the Valley Girls, right? And

well, it kind of blew up in his face when he released a song with his daughter about how stupid Valley Girls were, that it actually popularized Valley Girls and made them cool in America. Yeah. So eat that, Frank Zappa. Uh, he's past. That's fine. Eat that in musical heaven. So malls started to really grow, not only in popularity, but in size to the point, as Josh says, of sheer absurdity in Canada, because they have malls too. I should say, yeah, yeah. Do we have some Canadians here? And yet no one from Toledo. The West Edmonton Mall. Really? All right. Opened and no one from Toledo. Anyone from Elm Street in Edmonton? That's what I thought.

It was open in 1982. Had an ice skating rink. It had sea lions in a pool. Boo. And an indoor bungee jump to tempt fate for shoppers. Right over the sea lions. It's just scare the f*** out of them. Oh my God, sea lions hate being jumped over. And the developers knew it too. And of course the Mall of America, perhaps the most famous mall in Minnesota, they were going to build a roller coaster there. They did when they decided to build three roller coasters there. I have never been there. Have you been there in the Mall of America? No, I haven't. Anyone been there? Oh wow. All right. Huge, right? It's outside of Edina. Actually, no, really. It's like seven miles from Edina. It's true. Should we go to the Mall

Walkers? Yeah, I think so. This may be one of my favorite sections of any show we've ever done, because I love Mall Walkers. Didn't know it existed until I worked at a mall. I think I've mentioned on the show I worked at the Gap for a month in college over Christmas break. And I was a champion folder, and I still have those skills today. Were you really? You know, I actually quit working in the Gap because they got mad that I wouldn't recommend socks and belts as they checked out. And I said, I think if they wanted socks and belts, they would get socks and belts. And my manager said, you know, I don't know if the Gap is right for you. I went, I think you might be right. Took off my little pin, and I handed it to him, and me and my mock turtleneck strolled right on out

of there. That was it. That's the only retail job I've ever had. Sticking it to the man. I did. But anyway, long way of getting to Mall Walkers, I remember showing up for work one morning to open, and there were these old people walking around, and I thought, does anyone know that they're in here? Because the mall's not open yet. And someone said, yeah. Maybe they live here. Yeah, they, yeah, they live in Mary go round and come out at night from the giant pants. They just sprout out of the legs. But they explained to me what a mall walker was. And even at a young age, I was like, that's wonderful. It warmed my heart and it became a legit real American thing. It did. Apparently, the CDC did a report on this because if you can't study gun violence, might as well study mall walking.

And in 2015, they said malls are right behind neighborhoods for popularity of walking. They just went to bed after that. But they did a little more digging. And they said, the reason people love malls is because there's restrooms, water fountains, benches, and level surfaces. And this is one of my favorite quotes from any CDC report ever. They said that quote, the latest fashionable workout attire is not a requisite for mall walking and no truer words have ever been spoken. You won't find any yoga pants on the mall walkers. As a matter of fact, I would imagine you would be ostracized if you did just kind of gusty up like you're putting on airs or something. Yeah, they don't play that in a diner. Yeah, actually, you know, at mall walkers where

those workout pants that look like watered up paper, you know what I'm talking about? It's like this wrinkly weird material. I don't even know what it is. I think that's made of fish skin. What? Yes. All right, we're going to talk about this later. We'll talk about it later. Let's hang on to this page to remind us to talk about it. Well, that's fish skin, but you mean clothing? Right. That's totally weird. But it makes sense in a way. So these generally elderly folks are walking around malls. And at the Mall of America, they have a PR coordinator there named Tara Niebling. And she says, we love our wall markers. Mall walkers. They're very special to us. And they even have a program there. It's so adorable. But they give them little swipe cards.

It keeps track. It's sort of like a Fitbit, but they can't wear a Fitbit, I guess, because I don't even know why they can't figure it out or something. Well, they're expensive. That's very agist. And your back is going to be against the wall for that joke later on. But they give me these little swipe cards that let's them track how much they're walking and how much exercise they're getting. They have monthly breakfast meetings where they have health experts come in and talk about this stuff. We still go there right now. And all this is in exchange for a $15 annual fee if you want to officially be a member. But don't feel bad, sir, because like I was like, what a rip. It said they welcome unofficial mall walkers, aka the old dudes who

refuse to pay the $15 aka society's leeches. That would be me. I'm not paying $15. That's me in about 10 or 15 years. Anyway, I think it's adorable. And the whole thing about mall walkers is it was a problem at first because they didn't use to open malls to allow this. They just came to the mall when it was open and they would walk around and they said that there was a quote in here. They said they thought it would upset the regular shoppers to have them just exercising among them. And they're like, what do we do? We can't kill them. They have our arms behind our backs. Like they really have us over a barrel. We can't kill them. Can we? We could wait for them to die. And I guess this is the really healthy because all of mall owners gets together once a

year. Yeah, yeah. They're wearing like capes, red satin inside black on the out. So they decided to open the mall just for them to walk around before the store is open, which is just adorable. I think. And speaking of the mall of America, Douglas Copeland, I don't know if any of you have read Generation X. It's a really great book, but he basically coined the name. Apparently no one's read it. Douglas Copeland. Wow, this really would work so much better if you guys knew what Generation X was. Yeah, we wrote it. So he wrote the book literally Generation X and like just set the tone for the whole thing. And he was actually at the opening of Mall of America on August 11, 1992. And he was up there on stage with the local radio affiliate. And he said that everybody was walking

by with what he called country fair face where they were like, Google-eyed and eating ice cream. Couldn't believe this mall. It was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen. And he said that the interviewer just assumed he was going to be like a slacker, ironic, wise ass and said, you know, I bet you think this whole mall is very hokey and trashy. And Douglas Copeland said, actually, not at all. Chuck. Where should I start here? Oh, sorry, I didn't finish my part. Then the radio guy was like, what? Chuck. And he said, quote, I mean that I feel like I'm in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn't not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, you know, those people were living in golden times and they didn't

even know it. Communism was dead. The economy was good. And the future with all of its accompanying technologies hadn't crushed society's mojo like a bug. Drop the mic. And they said, well, that's really not good for the mic. And we're like, please, please don't do that anymore. And he goes on to say it's true. He says that technology hadn't hollowed out the middle class and turned us all into like laptop click junkies. He didn't say that there were no, he said there were no new boogie men hiding in the closet. He said, we may look at the nineties as the last good decade. And all of this came to him at the mall. So they didn't get their snarky quote after all. No, which is kind of ironic in a way. So he really did zing them, but it was a meta zing.

So if you want to talk to psychology of malls, we need to go back to Victor Gruen. And he has a quote where he said shoppers will be so bedazzled by the store surroundings, they'll be drawn unconsciously continually to shop. And this kind of goes against his ethos. He wasn't some big, he wasn't like the PR guy. I can't think of his name. We did that like 12 times. Oh, Ed Bernays. He wasn't like Ed Bernays. He didn't have this thing where he was like, yes, we need to get people to shop. But he was commissioned to do so. And he did a good job. He thought the mall would be a little bit more like a sort of like they had in Europe, like a public meeting space. And that's why he built these atriums in the middle,

the skylights and the fountain. And he thought people will go there and hang out and talk politics and maybe even stand up and like speak about things publicly to people. Because that's what happens at the mall. Instead, the developers are like, you go over there, you're done, you did your damage, right? We're actually going to go so far as to name a psychological effect after you. Something called the Gruen transfer, which is where you walk into the mall and you're like, I'm going to buy a Hello Kitty pen and that is it. And you get through the mall and you're like, Oh my God, there's a water fountain. Oh my God, there's old people walking around. There's just amazing stuff going on here at the mall. I forgot what I was going to get. And now I have a compulsion

to get an orange Julius with drugs in it. And you forget what you're doing. And all of a sudden, you're shopping in general rather than purposefully shopping. That is called the Gruen transfer or the Gruen effect. And Victor Gruen probably would not be very happy to know that that was the case. No. And as we'll see later, he in fact was not happy about that. So Malcolm Gladwell, Josh's mortal enemy, that is not true. He did an interview with a Alfred Taubman and he said, it's called threshold resistance. He said, people assume that we enclose the space because of air conditioning and climate control. He said, what it really did was allow us to open the store to the customer, just what we talked about, that introverted thing. All of a sudden,

you're in this huge retail utopia. All the doors are open at all times and you're just strolling through the mall and you walk by Nike town and they have like, looks like a nightclub in there. Sure. So you're just sort of unconsciously drawn inside there. You're like, I'd like to make some new friends. Surely I can at Nike town. Back in the day, in shopping centers, they used to have live bands and that was replaced, of course, with music later on, which is, you know, you take like a normal song, like breads, I want to make it with you. And then you remove the lyrics, the percussion, replace it all with strings. And all of a sudden people are just walking around like, bye. It works really well. So much so that the people at malls who were typically in charge of

the music were the same people who were in charge of the heat and the lighting, the facilities manager. That's how much music meant to it. It was like part of the building. But at the same time, you can't really call it music, you know? In fact, you'd probably call it something weird, like, muzak. Yeah, you think about the coolest DJ. I'm not hip on that scene. Steve Aoki. Okay. The facilities manager is the opposite of Steve Aoki. But they're sitting in their room and and they're controlling the music and the lights and the sounds of the mall all in that little room. Dead mouse. Oh, I know what that is. But the S is the number five. Get right. Yeah. So hip. So hip. I'm not old. Skrillex. Skrillex. I know that guy too.

So we talked a little bit earlier about the the cycle of the mall, the two story layout. And while you can go to malls where there are three stories, most of the malls I've been to that have a third story, it's not the entire mall. There'll be like a section with a third story. I don't know if they built it on or what, but generally you see a two story mall because you had that cycle the across down across up back to your car. Right. And you've seen all the stores. Right. But if you had a third level, you go across down across my car should be here. But now I have a third level and I'm stuck. I'm just going to wander around in this corner until some people come get me. And as a matter of fact, Valco mall had three levels. Look what happened

to it. What mall? It's a local mall. Oh, and the 14 people from San Francisco applauded. Right. Yeah. Oh, it's in San Jose. Cappuccino. It's like the same place. Come on. I think you could default to Bay Area and you do yourself a lot of favors. You're hearing this from like the guy who took off an infinity scarf right before he came on stage because he was told like, it's not cool anymore. I don't even know what that is. So your burn does not work. No, no, I was talking about myself. I was burning you buddy. I wasn't burning you. All right, burn. Yeah. What's an infinity scarf? It's a stupid. What else did they figure out? You're fine, lady. Your infinity scarf is fine. Is that an infinity scarf? That's lovely.

Can you come up here and show everyone an infinity scarf? I'm kidding. No, everyone stop. Because we thought about adding runway modeling to our shows. That'd be a great time. Sorry about the infinity scarf joke. I feel terrible. Is anyone drinking nothing but soilent right now? I should have made that joke instead. I'm looking over my glasses for more clothes I can make fun of. Tyler Murphy, that beard is something else. Oh, is Tyler here? Oh, there he is. He dyed it blue, everybody. All right. This is another part that's going to be edited out later. So Tyler, say whatever you want.

Well, that was great. So the other thing they figured out with keeping people in the mall, which is a big goal, is that people like to shop with other people. But sometimes the people that you bring to shop with you, namely husbands, don't like to be at the mall. So they said, well, let's put comfy areas in the mall like chairs. And in fact, there was a quote that said, a chair says we care. Yeah. A famous mall designer. What it really means is a chair says we can keep your wife here longer than you would like to be here. Right. The husband's like, oh, I just want to lay down and die on my floor at home. Can I just go home? You can lay down and die here, sir. Right. Just lay there. Shut up.

So the ironies have grown. We said earlier, why don't think we specifically said he was a socialist? No. It's just really weird for a socialist to be the father of the shopping mall. Wouldn't you think? And his original idea was that people could go there and espouse their views. And that maybe happened once in 1976 until the Supreme Court came in and said, in the case of Hudgens versus natural relations, labor relations board, basically these union dudes wanted to pick it inside the mall and they did so. They got kicked out. They sued and the Supreme Court said, actually, it's private property and you can't bring your picket signs in here. And the picketers were like, wait, wait, wait, the mall is the new heart, the new civic center of

American life in the Supreme Court. Don't be an idiot. It's a place to shop, dummy. And everyone went, I didn't hear what you just said. We're going to just keep pretending like the mall is the heart of civic life. So it was a big problem for Gruen, actually. He also hated cars. He was big into walking. He was in favor of pedestrianism. And yet you have to drive a car to get to the mall. And not only that, you have to park. Like some of his creations, I think Southdale had like 2.8 million square feet of parking. And he called these things like land wasting seas of parking lots. So as he's designing these things, he's like, I'm not very happy about this. And they would go do it anyway, even the stuff he scratched out. They're like, no, this is a good idea. We're going to go

with this. And he had like no say whatsoever after a while. No. And he got pretty disgusted and he left the United States forever in the 1960s, went back to Europe and said in 1978, a couple years before his death, he gave a speech in London and said, I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities. And they said, sir, we have the paternity tests and you are the father, right? He said, no, I'm not. No, you really are. Yeah, we use luminol and everything. Maybe we should take another ad break. Yeah, let's take another ad break. We'll be back right after this.

What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me.

But you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, have a podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the Internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the

first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, the Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. And we're back. We should, I guess, move on to the death of the mall. Yeah, because I don't know if you guys know this or not, but malls are not doing very well these

days. I know. You'll clap, but you'll probably like the rest of this episode. The mall actually peaked in 1990 at 16 million square feet of new space opened in that year, and it's been tapering off ever since. And here's a little staggering statistic for you. Since the 1950s, when the first mall was built, there was at least one mall built every single year until 2007. Usually many, many malls. Well, up to a million from what I hear. I mean, that's an estimate, but yeah. Yeah. So 2007 marked the first year that a new mall wasn't built. And I think there were no new malls built until 2012 in the United States. 2008 recession, the Great Recession, had a really big impact on retail.

Yeah, there's like a bunch of different reasons people put for what killed the mall, right? The mall has long been known for killing the American downtown, right? The mall moved out to the suburbs and the downtown just kind of went away, right? So reason number one is that the Great Recession killed the mall. And this is true to a pretty large extent, actually, from World War II until I think 2009. Every single year, Americans spent more money than they had the year before, which is nuts, right? Then 2009 comes and we stopped. And not only did we stop, we actually declined tremendously. We stopped spending by something like 10%. And then the money that we did spend, we started spending at Target and Walmart, not at

the mall or at places like JCPenney's or Sears, who tried to keep these malls propped up and who malls depended on. Because again, remember, if you go to a mall, the whole reason the mall exists is for the department stores to spread their traffic out to the smaller stores. And if the department stores are hurting, which they were, then the smaller stores hurt as well. So as these big, large anchor stores started to go under, the malls did as well. But people said the Great Recession was pretty bad. It's probably not the only reason that the mall is dying. Yeah, we mentioned Amazon.com earlier and they're not the only online retailer, of course. And you can tell we're not from the area because we say dot com after it.

We just want to make sure you guys know what we're talking about. We're trying to communicate with you. I can't believe I said that. How nerdy. Both of us have said it like five or six times. Yes. Stuff you should know dot com. Well, there's dot orgs and dot nets and dot. Yeah, not Amazon. Dot edus.uk. Specificity is the soul of narrative. Oh, good one. Take that, everybody.

Thank you. In 2014, traditional retailers for the very first time generated about half their sales from the web. But you can't like, I do all my shopping online now. I literally haven't been, I think I went to the mall last year for something and asked my wife, she's out there. I was miserable. I hated it. But we had to go for some reason or another. I can't remember. Probably to stay in a line for a stupid phone. I'm just kidding. I don't do that either. Thank you. But I almost stood in line for breakfast this morning right here in San Francisco because that's a thing.

Jeez. Yeah. But online retailing isn't that big of a thing yet. Even if it hits the 15% annual growth over the next three years that they project by 2019, it'll still only be about 2.4, I'm sorry, 12.4% of retail, which is not enough to kill the mall. No. But it's a factor. No. And plus, you can kind of find this weird confidence in the idea that malls may continue limping along if you're into that kind of thing by the fact that amazon.com opened a brick and mortar store, a bookstore to help boost their online sales, which is mind-boggling. But they

did it in Seattle. But more than anything, perhaps the reason the malls died is because they were never meant to live forever. And this next part is about the economics of malls. And specifically, it sounds so boring, tax loopholes concerning malls. And Josh is going to explain it. Okay. So if you build a building somewhere, and I should say hats off to Gladwell for explaining this too. This comes largely from him. But if you build a building somewhere in, say, like 1950, the government said, you know what, your building's not going to hold up forever. So you can deduct a certain percentage of your building's value every year and put it aside, tax-free, to replace that building eventually. And at the time when shopping malls first started

to come about in the early 50s, the deduction for this wear and tear was one 40th, right? Like you had a 40 years to deduct this value of your building. This is not going well. No, that's perfect so far. I'm checking in for accuracy. Okay. All right. I feel like my fingernails are bleeding. So every year, right, if you went and built a shopping mall, you could deduct one 40th of the value of the shopping mall. Not a huge deduction, but it was something. It's called depreciation. The problem is, is this depreciation deduction was, it was something, but it wasn't enough. If you built a shopping mall in the early 50s, you were really asking for trouble because they were

hugely expensive. They cost like 20 million or 30 million, which are on par to 180 or 200 million dollars today, right? And you were going to make your money back very, very slowly. But then, and I think 1954, yes, the US government said, you know what, we really want to kind of get things going on billing and construction. We want to make sure Josh and Chuck have something interesting to talk about at the end of their malls episode years from now. So we're going to change the tax code. And they did. And they created or allowed for something called accelerated depreciation. And this changed everything. Chuck. So I'm going to go back to 1961. The Wall Street Journal wrote a little article trying to describe this financial situation for a real estate company

named Crater Corp. Sounds totally made up. Like an evil villain's business that he would run. Or an STD. I abbreviated. What does that stand for? Crater Corp. It won't go away, doc. So I'm going to million to one, I tell you. So this is the 1960. I'm going to round the numbers just to make it easier. So let's say Crater Corp in 1960 made about 10 million bucks overall. Is everyone writing this down as we're saying this? You don't need to. So deductions from operating expenses and mortgage interest is about five million bucks. So they still make about five million bucks, not a bad income, but not good enough. Then came the depreciation accelerated depreciation to the

tune of about seven million dollars. So all of a sudden Crater, instead of having a profit of five million dollars on the books, has a loss of a couple of million dollars on the books. And everyone has these huge tax write offs. And now you fully understand, if you didn't before, why our next president doesn't pay income tax. It's basically this accelerated depreciation on real estate that allows you to write off these massive amounts of money to show big losses where you're in fact making gains. Right. And the big change to the tax code was to the IRS, they're still getting the same amount of taxes over the life of the building. They just said, if you want to deduct this depreciation at the beginning of the life of the building, that's fine with us. It's all the same to us.

Well, if you were a developer, you would build this building, deduct as much as you could over, say, three, four, five years, maybe even break even just from the tax deductions, and then sell that mall for pure profit of 50 or 100 or 150 million dollars and walk away laughing and laughing and laughing. And so, right, exactly. We're in your cape. But here's the thing, they wouldn't like put that money back into the mall to make it better. They would sell it off, like you said, and just go build a bigger mall further out. And now we'll call these X herbs. They're not even suburbs because they were all about going where the land was cheapest. Right. The mall stopped being a place to actually service people. They would just build malls where they could get the best

deals on land and found that people would drive to them and sometimes even build entire towns around them. Right. Yeah. Let's move to the mall. And it's true. And so under this view, when you really understand why there were 2000 or 3000 or a million malls built in the United States, huge, huge mall, some cities have multiple malls. When you realize that they were built for tax breaks and not to fulfill some consumer demand, then of course they were destined to shrivel and die because they were part of an artificial supply. And once that became exposed and the tax breaks went away, mall started going down. And it's sad in a way when a mall goes under, people have associations of memories with the mall, you know, like you think about all the

mall walkers you've seen and loved walking around the mall. And when it dies, it's sad, but even more than that, it can actually, depending on the town, can take an entire city down with it. Yeah. There was a place North Randall, Ohio. No. I'm satisfied. What do you mean, really? I mean, it's outside of Cleveland. I figured half of Cleveland probably tried to move to San Francisco. Even Emily didn't cheer for that one. I know. She's from Ohio. Yeah. So they had the Randall Park Mall and it cost about 175 million bucks to build in 1975 and get this, the grand opening. 5,000 guests had champagne, 1200 pounds of fresh shrimp, crab, cold roast turkey, hot corn, beef and ham, melon and cheese, small

crepes filled with chicken and spinach, coffee and dessert. It was like a Roman orgy basically. And disguise of the opening of a mall. You got, you got the world's largest cup of lemonade. Yeah. It wasn't too bad. I just hate that I put my mouth on that thing along with all those other beer. You should have at least had smaller cups. Or maybe not professional swimmers inside the cup. No, there were seahorses. Oh, I don't know. See monkeys. Those are fine. You just, they pass right through your digestive tract. You don't metabolize this. So gross. Tommy Dorsey showed up at the grand opening of this mall with his orchestra to play. It was a big event, but Randall Mall has since fallen on hard times and those 2.2 million square feet of retail space

have been shuttered and almost along with it, North Randall, Ohio is a whole. That whole town is sort of on life support basically because of closing of the shopping mall. It's really sad. Yeah. But there are some malls that are still doing well. Outlet malls are thriving. High end malls. In case you were wondering how the really wealthy are doing. Pretty good. High end malls are thriving like you would not believe. They're up by 14.6% since the economic crisis. And there's this dude, his name is Rick Caruso. He pretended the death of the mall. Malls are dead. They're gone unless they reinvent themselves. And it just so happens that I build the type of mall that malls should reinvent themselves into. So he basically is trying to

recreate downtown, but a nice, happy Disney-esque downtown where nothing ever goes wrong and everything is great. And by the way, it's also a mall and it's outdoors. And to follow this trend, malls are doing the exact opposite of what they did when Gruen started designing enclosed malls. They're tearing the roofs off and following this new trend to try to survive. Yeah. He calls them lifestyle centers. I don't know if there's one here. There's one in Atlanta called Atlantic Station. I hate them more than anything. Chuck has really strong opinions on malls. Well, I mean, at least a mall is a mall. It's not pretending to be a small town. Yeah, that's true. You know? It's true. It's like, look, we just built these

streets and it looks like a stoplight, but your child can control it fully. And no cars are allowed. And there's no cars with a button. So it's like downtown USA. There's no crime anywhere. Security guards everywhere. And all you do is shop, shop, shop. So to me, there's like, there's a certain sadness over the death of the mall. Like for me personally, I think even for some of the booers in here, you spent time at the mall. The mall represented something to America. But if you step back and look about exactly what the mall represents and even more to the point what the death of the mall represents, is it really the death of a golden age or a golden era when things were great? Because if you look at the mall, it's an outpost of consumerism.

It's like a church of consumption, right? So if we've lost that, then maybe out of the ashes, out of the things that are so broken right now, you can find some kind of weird hope that maybe we can rebuild in a new, better way to where the most important part of civic life isn't the mall. Wow. And that is malls. That's malls. Thank you, everybody. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood

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