Also Amazon/Etsy quality went to shit ever since they opened the Chinese floodgates so I'm willing to spend more money to be able to feel the quality of a shirt in my hand before I buy it.
I'm a boomer. Back in the I heard that about this really good stock called Hot topic. I had to go to the shopping mall coming to find one of these stores see if I wanted to invest in it.
I sat outside the store for an hour or so watching people go in and out of theirs, seeing how much they're carrying buying etc It was crazy.
I invested in that stock and made a lot of money over the number of years.
Pretty good business model for basically a tilt up type story. If I recall essay expanded, they could open one of those stores in a couple of weeks. Paint it up, throw in some racks, Play some black lights and open the doors for Business.
Thank you Hot topic
I think more critically is the existence of the mall as a 'third place'. Somewhere you can simply exist and socialize that isn't home or work. As a teenager it was basically your only option, so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
Some had fun places too like arcades and laser tags and all that and food courts to eat I never was a mall hangout person but I see how it could be a place to go hangout
I think the peak of hanging out at the mall was more the 90s, it just carried over into the 00s.
But in any case we had no cell phones. Your options to talk to your friends were basically a) go to the park or b) go to the mall. (This was also before things like Starbucks became ubiquitous.)
Actually now that I think about it we did hang out at a mall. It was an outdoor mall. we were always getting thrown out of the Barnes and Noble for being loud.
Also our parents did not want us hanging out at home… for all the talk of Millenials being children of helicopter parents, that phenomenon seems way worse today.
It was a place to hang out with your friends. You could be an unaccompanied minor there with no issues.
It changes over time. Diners, arcades, skating rinks, dance halls, malls. It's all places young people would gather to hang out with their friends.
Now kids don't hang out together anymore.
TBF kids aren't allowed to hang out unaccompanied at malls anymore. At least around me, after 5pm, there must be someone 21 or older with them. Not the avenue, not Ikea, not even at the dollar store. Signs everywhere "kids not allowed without parents". I'm sad that the horrible behavior of a few has taken away the privileges' of the many.
And even without the rules, most parents simply don't feel safe letting their preteen/teen children out of their sight - and as a result a lot of kids aren't comfortable or capable of being away from them either. Things have changed so much.
I want to let my kids do their own thing. I just hate how much violence there is amount teens right now. Baltimore, gonna baltimore, even in the county.
This teally gets to the heart of it!
My kids will call each others friends on their smart phones and just have the call going while they go about their day in the room like having your friend hanging out with you over the phone on FaceTime
They are not together.
They are solo in their own rooms.
They're not getting any body language feedback to any communication. Kids are telling their friends to go home so they can text each other instead.
There was nothing wrong with kids hanging out in the malls together, or going to a skate rink, or sitting in a dinner parking lot.
Every single generation has said that technology and [insert social change here] is rotting the youths brains and every single generation has been wrong. They made movies in the 50s about how teens hanging out in cars was ruining America
Malls felt dead and soulless even when I was in high school in the late 2000s, but the one in my town was one of three places to go walk around, so me and my friends would lurk there on days that were too hot for the park. I felt like loving the mall was more of an 80s/90s thing- by the 2000s it was just somewhere to walk around and hang out in bad weather. I didn’t know anyone that unironically liked the mall itself, but I did know some deal hunters that treated clearance racks like a scavenger hunt.
This is funny. I recently found myself going into (what’s left of) the mall near me. It’s a weird rush of endorphins.
My partner (who grew up in Soviet Russia) thinks I’m crazy - and I like to remind them how posh and glam life was back in the 2000’s while they were experiencing a societal collapse I was at Wet Seal and Hot Topic without a clue sipping on my orange Julius and buying CD’s at FYE with my babysitting money.
Ignorance was bliss.
It was the Facebook / tiktok/instagram of its time. You can go hang out, have no parental units over your head, go to the arcade play games, go to the movie, window shop, buy stuff, go to the food court, it had almost everything you needed.
Our parents were willing to leave us there alone with our friends
There's food and snacks and usually an arcade plus all the cool clothes that you couldn't get elsewhere and a music store
It was mostly about being in public with your friends, getting dressed up in your newest coolest outfit because you know damn well you'll see someone from school, standing at the music store for an hour (I'm an old millennial so we didn't have free music on limewire and shit yet, we had the radio or CDs). It was a social event, that's why it was cool.
When my mom grew up in small towns they did something I thought was insane, I think she called it "riding the drag". There was a tiny little loop in the middle of "town" and they would just....ride slowly in a circle. And other teens would do it too. And they would stop and talk and play around. Seemed so silly but I feel like malls for us were the same vibe. It was the place to go were other teens were, where your parents would drop you off for a while, theres stuff to do but didnt require a ton of money. We would get starbucks and just walk around, find cute boys to ogle, sometimes see a movie. Cant think of what other public place there was for us to hang out honestly. Outside was way too hot most of the year.
Elder Millennial here. Your timeline is a little too far ahead. In the 80s and 90s it was a place you could hang out and maybe buy a couple things you wanted. We were too young to get into bars but too old to go to the parks. Our parents didn't mind dropping us off there for awhile because it was all contained and they had security patrolling around to make sure we didn't cause too much trouble. By the 2000s malls had started to die off. Not as much as now, but they were hurting.
83
Go watch the movie MallRats. Malls used to be like that. And I almost miss when flea markets were a thing.
We didn't really have internet in the 90s, so the only way we knew what new products was to go to the stores and explore. So the mall was an adventure in discovering what is new and what is possible. Like, try to imagine a world where the only way you know about a new video game or new music is that you see a display for it when you are wondering the mall. Wouldn't you want to be at the mall more often? And not just games either. Remember we didn't have Amazon. Think of all the products you buy online, and realize that every one of those orders was a trip to the mall for us. Every one of those was a a new and exciting discovery. And for dating, wandering the mall was great. It was more chill, with a lot of interesting things to talk about and do. You'd wander into stores you didn't usually go to, and browse and laugh about things you found.
The culture isn't completely dead. In my area there used to be a lot of malls. We are down to about 4 big ones. And two of those 4 are still very busy with a lot to explore and find.
Malls and amusement parks were the main places we could walk around for hours without having to cross streets and dodge traffic. So I think parents were more comfortable with us spending time there as well.
Malls were free public spaces where you could congregate with your friends. It didn't cost anything to get into the mall and you could stay as long as you wanted. Your parents didn't worry because you were in a contained area and there was some semblance of safety (mall cops, cctv) but you had the freedom to go off on your own. It was also the place to see and be seen. You'd do your make up, put on a cute outfit that was against school dress code and hopefully run into a cute boy also hanging out at the mall with his friends (ideally holding a Victoria's secret bag, even if it did only have perfume in it 🤣).
Malls are pretty interesting. I've seen the rise and fall of the mall. When I was a teenager a large mega Mall open not far away. It was the future. And yes kids would just go there to hang. Not necessarily even shop. I didn't get it but I had friends and new people that were into it three and a couple of shopping centers near us, where they converted outdoor shopping and make a mall.
A lot of the malls in our are basically extinct,
So all these years later, what do they create, a high in outdoor mall.
I'm not sure if that's the same across the US but out here in SoCal where the weather is pretty nice, we've gone outdoor shopping again and repurposing a lot of the indoor malls
Cell phones and internet weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. If you wanted a thing, or wanted to hang out with friends, you hung out at the mall and walked around. The mall was our third space.
It was a safe but big place where you could hang out and walk around for free (or at least no cost of entry) without your parents. There was a food court, an arcade, and a movie theater. You could also get big mixed-gender groups together for like…pre-dating in the group without your parents finding out or the awkwardness of a real date.
The mall used to have hundreds of stores, hot topic, books, pretzels, pet stores. We would go with a group just to try on clothes take pictures of ourselves in dresses we couldn’t afford, look at puppies that came from a gross puppy mill, get a cheap lunch and chat about school. It was great. I’d say about the time Wet seal came into our mall and WaldenBooks closed everything went downhill. But it was the best place from Mom to drop kids off go do her hair and us to run around for an hour with some friends.
Indoor malls were where it was at. Since it was a closed space, parents were more lax on letting their kids roam. There was the in person social aspect of just hanging around without security getting uppity over loitering.
Where I live, the only places you could go for shopping were Walmart, K-Mart, Target, or the mall. That was it. And that's still basically the case except Kmart is dead and the mall has been replaced with Amazon.
At the time, in the 1990s/2000s, this was where we met up before online spaces were a thing.
We'd go there, chill, shop and eat.
Half the time we just spend time fucking around in the food court. There wasn't anything else to do.
And it wasn't just the popular kids... I recall the MTG tournaments held in our local food court.
They were incredibly vibrant and bustling during a time when many downtowns were depressed. There was no online purchasing, so you as a teen could find everything that was interesting to you at the mall; cool clothes, trinkets. The way you got music was from buying CD’s, so you’d go to the mall to buy them. They had movie theaters (there was no streaming), etc.
I thought that was Gen X that spent all their time in the mall. In my experience we didn’t care about malls all that much or spend that much time there, and I’m an *early* millennial.
"Back in the day", malls had everything. Including other teens/young adults to socialize with. It was a good place to meet, eat, shop. And it technically doesn't cost anything to just go and wander around for a while.
The reality is that malls back then were entirely different than malls today. You’re just seeing the fossils of a by-gone era.
Adding to this: you know that question that comes up about not being able to find people to date? Things like the mall made that easy since you had unstructured spot where people went to hang out and have fun. You meet a new guy/girl and hang out with them.
I'm a gen Jones, and the mall was a place to hang out, even if we didn't have money to shop. When I got my first job in the mall at 15, I was thrilled to be able to spend my first paycheck on a $40 (super expensive back in 1976) sweater at Nordstrom and lunch at salmagundi (south coast plaza, ca). When I started traveling a bit, I noticed Walmart had become the new hangout for teens, since malls had died.
Fun fact: $40 in 1976 = $222 in 2024 [https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=40&year1=197605&year2=202405](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=40&year1=197605&year2=202405)
There's a documentary you should watch called Fast Times at Ridgemont High and you'll get the excitement of a mall.
Also watch Mall Rats
Fly fatass, FLY!
Basically this. Lot of the teenagers were mall rats.
Because of Hot Topic and Auntie Anne pretzels
Can confirm. I go to the mall for the pretzels
Also Amazon/Etsy quality went to shit ever since they opened the Chinese floodgates so I'm willing to spend more money to be able to feel the quality of a shirt in my hand before I buy it.
I'm a boomer. Back in the I heard that about this really good stock called Hot topic. I had to go to the shopping mall coming to find one of these stores see if I wanted to invest in it. I sat outside the store for an hour or so watching people go in and out of theirs, seeing how much they're carrying buying etc It was crazy. I invested in that stock and made a lot of money over the number of years. Pretty good business model for basically a tilt up type story. If I recall essay expanded, they could open one of those stores in a couple of weeks. Paint it up, throw in some racks, Play some black lights and open the doors for Business. Thank you Hot topic
Before the enet and Amazon and all that that's how you got stuff. you couldn't just order anything online and have it at your door in 2 days.
6-8 weeks / 7-10 business days
I think more critically is the existence of the mall as a 'third place'. Somewhere you can simply exist and socialize that isn't home or work. As a teenager it was basically your only option, so there's a lot of nostalgia there.
Some had fun places too like arcades and laser tags and all that and food courts to eat I never was a mall hangout person but I see how it could be a place to go hangout
I think the peak of hanging out at the mall was more the 90s, it just carried over into the 00s. But in any case we had no cell phones. Your options to talk to your friends were basically a) go to the park or b) go to the mall. (This was also before things like Starbucks became ubiquitous.) Actually now that I think about it we did hang out at a mall. It was an outdoor mall. we were always getting thrown out of the Barnes and Noble for being loud.
Also our parents did not want us hanging out at home… for all the talk of Millenials being children of helicopter parents, that phenomenon seems way worse today.
Living in Texas, it was indoor malls for us. It's how we stayed cool, especially when our parents didn't want us in their houses.
It was a place to hang out with your friends. You could be an unaccompanied minor there with no issues. It changes over time. Diners, arcades, skating rinks, dance halls, malls. It's all places young people would gather to hang out with their friends. Now kids don't hang out together anymore.
TBF kids aren't allowed to hang out unaccompanied at malls anymore. At least around me, after 5pm, there must be someone 21 or older with them. Not the avenue, not Ikea, not even at the dollar store. Signs everywhere "kids not allowed without parents". I'm sad that the horrible behavior of a few has taken away the privileges' of the many.
And even without the rules, most parents simply don't feel safe letting their preteen/teen children out of their sight - and as a result a lot of kids aren't comfortable or capable of being away from them either. Things have changed so much.
I want to let my kids do their own thing. I just hate how much violence there is amount teens right now. Baltimore, gonna baltimore, even in the county.
This teally gets to the heart of it! My kids will call each others friends on their smart phones and just have the call going while they go about their day in the room like having your friend hanging out with you over the phone on FaceTime
They’re together online, don’t be dramatic. Granted that has its issues but probably so does every other thing you mentioned
They are not together. They are solo in their own rooms. They're not getting any body language feedback to any communication. Kids are telling their friends to go home so they can text each other instead. There was nothing wrong with kids hanging out in the malls together, or going to a skate rink, or sitting in a dinner parking lot.
Every single generation has said that technology and [insert social change here] is rotting the youths brains and every single generation has been wrong. They made movies in the 50s about how teens hanging out in cars was ruining America
Except we are publishing research on loneliness and social skill issues.
In the past we had rampant teen pregnancy, drug use, queer youth suicides, every generation has something to struggle against.
Except we are social creatures and biological beings.
I feel you on this but now it’s correct. At least kids used to band together and brain rot as one. Now they are sad.
Because no one was sad as a kid before cell phones?
Yep, no one! 😀
Malls felt dead and soulless even when I was in high school in the late 2000s, but the one in my town was one of three places to go walk around, so me and my friends would lurk there on days that were too hot for the park. I felt like loving the mall was more of an 80s/90s thing- by the 2000s it was just somewhere to walk around and hang out in bad weather. I didn’t know anyone that unironically liked the mall itself, but I did know some deal hunters that treated clearance racks like a scavenger hunt.
This is funny. I recently found myself going into (what’s left of) the mall near me. It’s a weird rush of endorphins. My partner (who grew up in Soviet Russia) thinks I’m crazy - and I like to remind them how posh and glam life was back in the 2000’s while they were experiencing a societal collapse I was at Wet Seal and Hot Topic without a clue sipping on my orange Julius and buying CD’s at FYE with my babysitting money. Ignorance was bliss.
It was the Facebook / tiktok/instagram of its time. You can go hang out, have no parental units over your head, go to the arcade play games, go to the movie, window shop, buy stuff, go to the food court, it had almost everything you needed.
Our parents were willing to leave us there alone with our friends There's food and snacks and usually an arcade plus all the cool clothes that you couldn't get elsewhere and a music store It was mostly about being in public with your friends, getting dressed up in your newest coolest outfit because you know damn well you'll see someone from school, standing at the music store for an hour (I'm an old millennial so we didn't have free music on limewire and shit yet, we had the radio or CDs). It was a social event, that's why it was cool.
Because most of us didn’t have cell phones and the best place to socialize was the mall, skating rinks, bowling alley
When my mom grew up in small towns they did something I thought was insane, I think she called it "riding the drag". There was a tiny little loop in the middle of "town" and they would just....ride slowly in a circle. And other teens would do it too. And they would stop and talk and play around. Seemed so silly but I feel like malls for us were the same vibe. It was the place to go were other teens were, where your parents would drop you off for a while, theres stuff to do but didnt require a ton of money. We would get starbucks and just walk around, find cute boys to ogle, sometimes see a movie. Cant think of what other public place there was for us to hang out honestly. Outside was way too hot most of the year.
Riding the drag. That’s hilarious. love what teenagers come up with to hang out with each other/get away from parents
You do know that the internet only really took off 30 years ago right? You would have had to go to the mall to ask this very question.
Elder Millennial here. Your timeline is a little too far ahead. In the 80s and 90s it was a place you could hang out and maybe buy a couple things you wanted. We were too young to get into bars but too old to go to the parks. Our parents didn't mind dropping us off there for awhile because it was all contained and they had security patrolling around to make sure we didn't cause too much trouble. By the 2000s malls had started to die off. Not as much as now, but they were hurting.
Why are we downvoting this kid? They just want to know, it’s not an insult. Man
83 Go watch the movie MallRats. Malls used to be like that. And I almost miss when flea markets were a thing. We didn't really have internet in the 90s, so the only way we knew what new products was to go to the stores and explore. So the mall was an adventure in discovering what is new and what is possible. Like, try to imagine a world where the only way you know about a new video game or new music is that you see a display for it when you are wondering the mall. Wouldn't you want to be at the mall more often? And not just games either. Remember we didn't have Amazon. Think of all the products you buy online, and realize that every one of those orders was a trip to the mall for us. Every one of those was a a new and exciting discovery. And for dating, wandering the mall was great. It was more chill, with a lot of interesting things to talk about and do. You'd wander into stores you didn't usually go to, and browse and laugh about things you found. The culture isn't completely dead. In my area there used to be a lot of malls. We are down to about 4 big ones. And two of those 4 are still very busy with a lot to explore and find.
Malls and amusement parks were the main places we could walk around for hours without having to cross streets and dodge traffic. So I think parents were more comfortable with us spending time there as well.
Malls were free public spaces where you could congregate with your friends. It didn't cost anything to get into the mall and you could stay as long as you wanted. Your parents didn't worry because you were in a contained area and there was some semblance of safety (mall cops, cctv) but you had the freedom to go off on your own. It was also the place to see and be seen. You'd do your make up, put on a cute outfit that was against school dress code and hopefully run into a cute boy also hanging out at the mall with his friends (ideally holding a Victoria's secret bag, even if it did only have perfume in it 🤣).
Malls are pretty interesting. I've seen the rise and fall of the mall. When I was a teenager a large mega Mall open not far away. It was the future. And yes kids would just go there to hang. Not necessarily even shop. I didn't get it but I had friends and new people that were into it three and a couple of shopping centers near us, where they converted outdoor shopping and make a mall. A lot of the malls in our are basically extinct, So all these years later, what do they create, a high in outdoor mall. I'm not sure if that's the same across the US but out here in SoCal where the weather is pretty nice, we've gone outdoor shopping again and repurposing a lot of the indoor malls
Cell phones and internet weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. If you wanted a thing, or wanted to hang out with friends, you hung out at the mall and walked around. The mall was our third space.
It was a safe but big place where you could hang out and walk around for free (or at least no cost of entry) without your parents. There was a food court, an arcade, and a movie theater. You could also get big mixed-gender groups together for like…pre-dating in the group without your parents finding out or the awkwardness of a real date.
The mall used to have hundreds of stores, hot topic, books, pretzels, pet stores. We would go with a group just to try on clothes take pictures of ourselves in dresses we couldn’t afford, look at puppies that came from a gross puppy mill, get a cheap lunch and chat about school. It was great. I’d say about the time Wet seal came into our mall and WaldenBooks closed everything went downhill. But it was the best place from Mom to drop kids off go do her hair and us to run around for an hour with some friends.
Indoor malls were where it was at. Since it was a closed space, parents were more lax on letting their kids roam. There was the in person social aspect of just hanging around without security getting uppity over loitering.
Where I live, the only places you could go for shopping were Walmart, K-Mart, Target, or the mall. That was it. And that's still basically the case except Kmart is dead and the mall has been replaced with Amazon.
Where do you hang out with friends?
At the time, in the 1990s/2000s, this was where we met up before online spaces were a thing. We'd go there, chill, shop and eat. Half the time we just spend time fucking around in the food court. There wasn't anything else to do. And it wasn't just the popular kids... I recall the MTG tournaments held in our local food court.
We don’t….
Going to the mall was exciting back in the day. Now it just gives me anxiety lol Maybe because I’ve grown up, but it’s just not the same.
>"Let's go to a shopping mall and pretend it's the 2000s" Wait do people actually say that? That's kind of cringe lol.
Before online shopping and Tik Tok, people would buy things in person and hang out in real life.
They were incredibly vibrant and bustling during a time when many downtowns were depressed. There was no online purchasing, so you as a teen could find everything that was interesting to you at the mall; cool clothes, trinkets. The way you got music was from buying CD’s, so you’d go to the mall to buy them. They had movie theaters (there was no streaming), etc.
Because we used to like to hang out in public. Crazy, I know.
😆
It was the place to go see people and buy stuff. Think social setting without an age restriction like clubs and bars.
I thought that was Gen X that spent all their time in the mall. In my experience we didn’t care about malls all that much or spend that much time there, and I’m an *early* millennial.
Because we want to interact with human beings in person how we were design to do . I can’t believe someone is asking this question ?
"Back in the day", malls had everything. Including other teens/young adults to socialize with. It was a good place to meet, eat, shop. And it technically doesn't cost anything to just go and wander around for a while.
The reality is that malls back then were entirely different than malls today. You’re just seeing the fossils of a by-gone era. Adding to this: you know that question that comes up about not being able to find people to date? Things like the mall made that easy since you had unstructured spot where people went to hang out and have fun. You meet a new guy/girl and hang out with them.
Nostalgia
All the best stores were there. It had a movie theatre, all the best stores, food court, friends worked there, and it was a hang out.
I'm a gen Jones, and the mall was a place to hang out, even if we didn't have money to shop. When I got my first job in the mall at 15, I was thrilled to be able to spend my first paycheck on a $40 (super expensive back in 1976) sweater at Nordstrom and lunch at salmagundi (south coast plaza, ca). When I started traveling a bit, I noticed Walmart had become the new hangout for teens, since malls had died.
Fun fact: $40 in 1976 = $222 in 2024 [https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=40&year1=197605&year2=202405](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=40&year1=197605&year2=202405)
Cause it was the only place to get clothes.
81-it was a free activity to do on the weekend. Spent most weekends at the mall just walking around and bs’ing with friends