Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 22, 2023

He is therefore taking a staycation.

Perhaps the neighborhood around the mall was declining? That is the case with my nearest mall.

I was in the Willow Grove Park Mall near Philadelphia yesterday. I was surprised to see it thriving so well. Built on the site of a defunct amusement park, 2 of the 3 stories of the former JCPenney store were recently converted to an amusement center that includes bowling, all sorts of video games and pinball.

The malls in my local area are doing very well.

My local mall has a go-cart track in a former Dept store, and an attached sports bar with axe throwing

Let’s see, America started with family owned downtown Mom&Pop stores, supplying a limited selection of goods to meet local demand. They were supplanted by larger “department stores” with a much wider selection of goods in multiple departments. Then came the shopping mall, which aggregated M&P stores around anchor department stores and offered all-weather shopping to the suburbs. Then came online shopping where a physical store became unnecessary, but finding what you wanted was more difficult and shipping costs made the items ultimately more expensive and less timely. Then came the membership warehouse stores, where the selection of items was limited and constantly changing, but the prices were better than retail. Then came Amazon where you could find the least expensive version of anything you wanted and, for a membership fee, minimal shipping time and costs.

Now the physical infrastructure that was required by department stores and malls are being razed or repurposed. The mercantile ecosystem is much more diverse than it has ever been in history.

Visiting Kansas City, went into a Target to find something.Mistake! It wasn’t an ordinary store, nor a Super store. It was some kind of Super Duper store, three times the size of the largest I’ve ever seen.Searched methodically for an hour, making one go-thru of every aisle, looking for a particular item. Failed. Found similar things in three places; not what I wanted.Left in frustration and resentful, without what I’d come for.My sister chastised me. “You have to look it up online, find the aisle number before you go!”Well. If I’m going to go online to find the darn thing, I’m gonna press Buy and Next Day Delivery and to heck with Super Duper stores. What use are then, then? If I have to do the online thing before I go in? They’ve become a sort of distribution center except I have to fulfill my order myself?!

I live in the city, and try to shop at smaller, local stores, if at all possible.

Notice anything odd about the speech balloons? Lots of open space. The “AL-MOST” in the first panel is what I first noticed.

And they look “artificial”, like they were drawn, and then the dialogue typed in and put in place automatically. And badly.

I wonder when this started? Probably not today. Might have been going on for a long time, but I just noticed it today.

I’ve been to all three of my local malls in the past week. Two of them are thriving and have a surprisingly low vacancy rate with only one unoccupied anchor store between the two of them. Both of them have a good number of the typical mall stores such as clothing and shoes, while also bringing in more atypical businesses. There’s a store which sells rocks, minerals, gems, and fossils. The former Payless Shoes is now an activity center for children. There’s an airgun shooting gallery. There’s even one store which was converted into a full sized swimming pool which offers memberships and swimming lessons. I’m sure these malls are not bringing in the kind of money they used to in the 80s & 90s, but it was good to see them thriving with a significant amount of foot traffic, and I liked seeing the diversity of businesses

The third mall had completely died at one point but was purchased by a local doctor. It has a long, long way to go to full recovery, but they did take the risk of having an someone open an independent movie theater (during the middle of the pandemic, no less) which offers heated recliner seating, a kitchen serving fun food, a full bar with a wall of draft beers, new and classic movies, and special events tied into some of the movies. This little theater is absolutely kicking the behind of the big chain movie theater in town, and it has since expanded to two more locations. Now if the new mall owner could just build on their success.

Malls in my city led to the complete deterioration of our downtown area….

Here in the Detroit area two malls have gone out of business and been demolished in recent years. Another enclosed mall was remodeled into an open-air shopping center. The last time I was there it seemed to be doing alright.

Cheap thrills!

If you’ve seen one shopping center, you’ve seen a mall.

(stolen from an old Frank & Ernest strip)

In St. Louis, we had a mall that was going vacant. The St. Louis County Executive moved some county offices into it, in a questionable manner. This raised questions in the daily newspaper. These questions didn’t prevent the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from endorsing him for re-election.

The FBI also had questions. One was “Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?” There may have been some more, with him on the witness stand. Or he took a plea deal. I forget which.

He spent some time in a federal penitentiary. Only a couple of years. I’m thinking plea deal.

We’re flying down to Victoria Saturday to visit one of our daughters. Apparently the provincial government does not recognise USAian Thanksgiving and she can’t get the days off to come up here. /s. So we are bringing some of it down with us. She wants to try vegan and instead of turkey we are going to have a favourite savoury nut loaf with all the other TG trimmings. Except the green bean casserole because that is not her favourite.

Haha… so true… Airports really do have the best malls these days. A captive audience helps with that I’m sure.