From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
Shop Till You Drop
A visit to the Mall of America.
BLOOMINGTON, Minn.--This is the 10th anniversary of the great Mall of America--some 525 stores four stories high on 78 acres in Bloomington. For serious shoppers it is Mecca. For critics of American culture it is madness. Oblivious to its detractors, hundreds of millions have made pilgrimages to this retail holy land in Minnesota. I thought I would come to see it before it dies.
The Mall of America is a dinosaur. The original owners, the Ghermezian brothers of Edmonton, Alberta, are regaining operating control of the Mall and say they have ideas to revitalize the grand old shoppery. For starters, they and their partners likely will drive down the street from the Mall of America and erect 5.7 million more square feet of retail on 42 acres to create a "lifestyle center," a phrase the industry uses to describe the newest creature in shopping-center paleontology.
In America, there are 45,721 shopping centers, as counted two years ago by the International Council of Shopping Centers. The number of adults materializing in these centers each month is 199 million, meaning more or less everyone. But there are only 1,150 enclosed malls. A 9 p.m. trip to strip-mall Blockbuster counts as a shopping-center visit. An expert I read says that every day the average suburban American makes 13 one-way driving segments, which like the average six hours a day watching television seems incomprehensible but is probably true.
This week I made two one-way driving segments to the Mall of America. The Mall claims to be located within a one-day's drive of 28 million people. I would not drive for a day to get here, but I'm glad I came to see the Mall of America. I even spent money in it, essentially the way one would leave coins in an offering box.
As when visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which resembles the Mall of America in some ways, I needed a plan of attack. I stood in front of the directory and wrote down all the stores that sounded interesting and their locations; for example Minnesota Sweatshirt (West 327), Torrid (North 148), Chapel of Love (East 345), Club Libby Lu (North 238), Everything But Water (West 290) and Al's Farm Toys (West 370). Every quarter-mile or so in the Mall of America they have helpful "You're Here" kiosks, because in big malls people are always getting disoriented and lost, like Hansel and Gretel.
A few of the places on my list, I'm embarrassed to say, turned out to be national chains I'd never heard of. Being in Minnesota, I thought Fossil might sell fossils, but it sells clothes in 90 countries for young women, as do, it appears, about 175 of the other stores in the Mall of America. Club Libby Lu, another chain, was full of purple and pink things for seven-year-old girls; amid the colors, I couldn't quite bring any of it into focus.
One reason the thrill is gone from this place is that if you've been to your local regional mall almost anywhere in America, you've had most of the Mall of America experience many times (not counting the indoor roller-coaster) because all malls have essentially the same national stores. These highly advertised mass-market store chains, like Abercrombie & Fitch, are the magnets that draw "browser" traffic, and this guaranteed shopper volume is mandatory if developers hope to get financing for these projects. Putting 500 really funky stores under one roof would be cool, but no one will finance it.
With only a day and evening for the tour, I'm glad I resisted visiting America's 7,500th GAP or Sharper Image and instead wandered into Rybicki Cheese Ltd. (W382), which sells chunks of cheddar lined up by aging--2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. Dazzled, I bought the youngest and the oldest: two-year-old cheddar for $6.25a pound, and eight-year-old, which costs a whopping $11.95 a pound.
There is a Lake Wobegon Store (E250) overflowing with all sorts of stuff with Garrison Keillor's name on it. The display of capitalist brand extension was a little disconcerting, like stumbling into the Cesar Chavez Store. There was an "All Things Considered" T-shirt marked down to $10, but I resisted.
Better to spend one's money at Al's Farm Toys (W370), the best store in the whole place. It is filled with tiny, exact replicas of farm machines made by John Deere and CAT, such as Tractor with 590 Round Baler, or a Land O' Lakes long-haul semi. They even have socks with small green tractors embossed on them.
At the end of the day, nearing the end of my 50-mile hike, I rode the up escalator with two young men. "We're at Level 3," one of them said.
"There's another level where the guys hit the bars." His friend was astonished: "There's another level?" As the saying goes on a T-shirt I almost bought, "Yah, You Betcha."
I once heard that groups of women in the South fly here to spend a week at the Mall of America. That may be apocryphal, but every motel chain imaginable is within a 10-minute drive. When I left the Mall, after wondering about the almost regulation-size boxing ring in the middle of America's Original Sports Bar, I felt the way one does after touring a celebrity's mansion.
Mall of America is a grand old place. But the shopping-center business is in upheaval. "Big box" stores are the biggest thing in retailing--Home Depot, Bed Bath & Beyond, Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and the like. They've surfaced a new species of shopper--people who shop with a list, go get it, and get out. In a time-pressed world, their number is growing. The mega-malls were famous for "shop till you drop," but who has time for that anymore? Now it's "shop till you got, then go."
Big malls need the browsers to survive, and so developers are experimenting with a new design format called "lifestyle centers"--generally with open-air pathways, even apartment complexes, which are somehow supposed to create the long-lost pedestrian experience of "downtown," itself a mythical concept to many suburban 18-year-olds.
Malls are said to have turned downtowns into ghost towns, but now malls are resurrecting the spirit of "downtown" to survive the Wal-Marting of America. When the new downtowns arrive, with or without seven vintages of cheddar cheese, it will be worth at least a one-way segment drive to have a look.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
