Recently I walked into a department store in a mall and I felt ancient. It was not anything physical. At the age of 66 I regularly do ultra marathons and finish ahead of people half my age. No, it was a “This is your life moment.” It was not about age-related changes in me—but changes in the world around me.
Getting old is a strange experience. It can sneak up on you.
One of the reasons I dove headfirst into
running and fitness a few decades ago was my desire to try to stave off the
inevitable by being active. I hope and believe that I will be active into my
nineties and perhaps even running a race or two.
But there are no strategies to stave off the changes in
everyday life that the passage of time brings. When I look back, I realize that
our day-to-day existence has changed dramatically over the course of my life. I also understand that to anyone under the age
of 40, my childhood and early adulthood probably seem as ancient as the pilgrims.
It hits me at strange times. It can be an old classic song
on the radio, or when I hear about the death of TV star who is a stranger to today’s
young people. Once when I forgot my cellphone as I was driving to work. I
wasn’t sure I would survive the day without it. Yet it occurred to me I have
survived most of my life without one. How is it now that I am completely
dependent on it?
More recently it hit me when I was walking in the Rockaway
Mall.
As I went into JC Penney and later walked through the mall it hit me that I was old. It was not because of the clothing styles or the music that was playing. It was the lack of people, the shuttered storefronts and the limited merchandise in the stores that were open. I was walking in a place that was dying. It was a relic of another age. Nothing about the mall shouted “this is the future” or this is a “happening” place.
Malls were where it was all happening when I was growing up.
Teens piled in cars and buses to just go to the mall. If you needed to buy
something you went to the mall. It had not only stores, but movie theaters,
arcades and food courts. Who needed anything more? You ran into people you knew
at the mall.
I remember as a kid the talk about the construction of
Willowbrook Mall was big news. All the surrounding communities were excited. It
was as if we were no longer hick towns but cosmopolitan just because we had a
mall. Our community status somehow rose with this one addition of a mall. Around
this time, malls started popping up all across the state of New Jersey.
You see I remember when malls were the future. I was even
part of that future, even if it was reluctantly. I was a recent college
graduate and the only job that I could acquire was as a management trainee for
Kinney Shoes at Willowbrook Mall in Wayne N.J. At the time it was one of the
busiest malls in North Jersey. The stores were all stocked to the ceiling with
merchandise. Finding a sales associate was easy, the trick was trying to avoid
them as they swarmed all around. During the Christmas holiday the parking lot
was full and you may have had to drive around for awhile to get a spot – or
follow shoppers who were finished shopping and were walking to their cars to get
a coveted parking spot.
If you had asked anyone back then about the future of malls
and retail, you would probably hear that malls would just grow bigger and more numerous.
In 1992 the Mall of America opened in Bloomington Minnesota–the biggest mall in
the country.
Now finding a sales associate in a mall store takes a good
eye and it is nearly as difficult to find a cashier. Paying for merchandise can
be nearly impossible. Merchandise is
also very limited. The shopping experience is frustrating. But I’ll say this: Parking is easy now.
I was there for the birth and heyday of retail malls. Now as
I walked through the mall it felt like I was there for their death. It is like
I have gone from visiting the maternity ward to visiting hospice care. I am sure there are people much smarter than
me trying to figure out what to do with these monuments to American
consumerism.
The new monuments to American consumerism are the Amazon,
Fed Ex, and UPS trucks that now roam neighborhood streets on a regular basis. I
buy almost all my running gear online. I
joke that if my wife stops using Amazon I will tell people to unload their
Amazon stock.
But here is a strange paradox. I never particularly liked
working or shopping in a mall. While I love my online shopping, I am also very nostalgic
about the fate of shopping malls. It is as if part of my childhood and young
adulthood has been erased. Maybe it is always just sad when any institution
comes to an end.
I think that is why I am wistful about the death of the
major retailers and the mall. There are things that you just take for granted
and think that they will last forever. You are confident about what the future
will hold in some areas. Yet there is no K-Mart, Toys ‘R’ Us, Kinney Shoes, or Thom
McAn, while Macy’s is just a shell of what it used to be. Sears, once the
largest retailer in the U.S., has fewer than 10 stores left. As Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t
what it used to be.”
While I am somewhat sentimental about shopping malls, I am
less wistful about landline phones. And I know that world would make today’s
teens scream. But that is a story for another blog.
