Farewell shopping center in the USA collapses the myth of shopping temples

NEW YORK - What's the end of the shopping mall? Temple of Consumption, a symbol of American society, a meeting place in many cities that have no historical center: All this was true until today: today the malls are closed, and there are those who theorize their extinction. But it is not a symptom of an economic crisis. America, a happy world-wide exception, has a vigorous growth, a labor market that pulls, consumption is on the rise. The shopping mall is not bogged down by a frugal, happy decline, or share economy tsunami. Nor does the Network, that is, the advancement of online sales, has more to do with it. No, the traditional shopping malls are the inequalities.

The traditional shopping mall is a cross-class, transversal model, at a time when American society polarizes: on the one hand, minimum wage workers, from purchasing power, who go shopping in hypermarkets discount Costco; on the other, the rich people who prefer the glamorous, Sax Fifth Avenue stores. Crushed in the middle is the formula of the shopping mall, invented at a time when the middle class of the American social model was a large middle class, inclusive of middle class and working class.

In the last decade, some thirty of these shopping malls have closed.

Other 60 could do the same in quick time. The phenomenon of "dead" shopping centers emits a sort of macabre charm. A specialized site has been created to censor them, it is foreseeable to call www.deadmalls.com. An investigation into this phenomenon on the New York Times website is illustrated by a photo gallery of "dead malls": they look like ghost towns, cathedrals in the desert, imposing and ghostly buildings. Once crowded by family armies, with Suv's cluttered car parks, these dead or agonizing shopping malls evoke science-fiction movies, a suddenly emptied planet of its inhabitants by an alien attack or a climatic catastrophe.here is Best investment opportunity in Lahore. And indeed recently Hollywood has decided to set up some scenes of the Gone Girl movie at one of these ghost centers. The power of shopping malls on the collective imagination of Americans is such that the shopping malls association is desperately trying to counter the theory of inexorable decline. The Council of Shopping Centers recently hired the largest public relations company, Burson-Marsteller, "to counter negative advertising." But the data are clear. On the 1,200 commercial centers surveyed in the United States, 15% are at risk of disappearing because they are deserted by consumers. I'm a minority, of course, but still 180 shopping malls that could be on the ground, no longer profitable.