Brian Niemeier’s blog raised a valuable topic, and my response is too long for a comment.
The Idea of a Mall
h ttps://brianniemeier.com/2024/03/the-idea-of-a-mall/
19 March 2024
Yesterday a fascinating intergenerational conversation took place on X. And it put me in mind of a subject we haven’t touched on in a while: The cultural impact of the mall – how it rose to dominance, and how it faded.
The question was, “Did white people stop going to the mall because of ecommerce, or did white people start using ecommerce because the mall became a live action set for Camp of the Saints?”
Trick question. The Jew is both usury and immivasion.
I don’t want to keep ranting about them, but they’re everywhere. They run the economy. They micromanage the media. They ARE the government. There aren’t any other headlines to talk about. No other criminals, just the occasional Florida Man. I want to at least blame Jesuits and Freemasons, too, but the latter lost and the former are allies. Is anything happening in the world outside of Ukraine & Gaza’s fallout? Even the Vatican, it’s cheerfully done all kinds of wickedness over the centuries, but “mutilating kids is what Jesus would do” is something new and straight outta Tel Aviv.
Events are happening so quickly, I’m only middle-aged yet have living memory of when society was functional.
When society had malls.
It’s hard to explain to people born after the 1980s just how central the local shopping mall was to a town’s social and economic life. I remember when Conservatives would lament that nobody went to church anymore, and that malls were the new secular temples.
Now people are still going to church, and the malls are empty.
My hometown mall was one of the largest in the Midwest outside of Chicago when it opened in the 1970s. As kids growing up in the 80s, that meant my friends and I were kind of spoiled. We got two bookstores, two record stores, a two-story pizza place, and an arcade that remained a major social hub until the early 2000s.
See AlsoAnthony Gould is your old-school alternativeWebelos My Safety Adventure for 2024In A Dream You Saw a Way to Survive and You Were Full of JoyAlpha Wives and Alpha WidowsThat’s all gone now. Anything that didn’t cater to bored housewives, vapid teenage girls, or stoners disappeared ten years ago. Borders bought out the last bookstore, closed it down, and then went out of business themselves. Best Buy did the same to the video store. They’re not dead yet, but online retailers are steadily driving them to the same fate that the big box stores inflicted on the mom & pop outfits.
It might surprise you that young men used to go to malls. They’ve since been driven out, just like they’ve been driven from pretty much every public establishment and institution. As is the case with college and the office, young men have retreated to their homes and the internet. Online gaming rang the death knell for the arcade much as Amazon did for the anchor stores.
I used to frequent the mall on Saturday afternoons starting in junior high. Chances were I’d run into not just one, but several, friends, which was how socializing happened before the internet. That habit continued through high school and beyond. The mall wasn’t just a place to blow money on PS1 games and comics. It’s where many of us got our first jobs and even worked our way through college, back when you could still do that without hawking street drugs.
Was the shopping mall a secular temple of Mammon? Yes. But it preserved echoes of traditions going back to the Roman forum. Now shopping is a solitary affair conducted via smartphone. Video games are likewise played alone or with strangers from over the horizon.
Above all else, the mall is now the canary in the coal mine of American isolation and atomization.
It was certainly an early example of social collapse. That boldfaced slur is unfair, however. Materialism the sin, is not the possession of many material goods. It is envy of other peoples’ possessions, or the urge to acquire as an end in itself. White Americans have never suffered it much; compare our history of gratitude and charity to other races. If we need a screwdriver then we buy a screwdriver. We don’t feel the urge to steal our neighbor’s screwdriver.
So, malls were where you could buy a long list of stuff without hitting a dozen stores. What Amazon does today. The genius of those retailers, however, was noticing that while women do most shopping, their money comes from men. By including stores that also catered to men, those stores enjoyed more patronage. Men would hang out at the mall’s Basspro shop for longer than if they were at a standalone Basspro, because the Missus was still trying on clothes.
Which provided the incentive, for malls to become social venues. Retailers made the mall a pleasant, safe place where everybody could hang out. Arcades. Toy and game stores. Newsstands. Mini-parks with benches and gardens. Food courts where the family would meet at noon and there’d be no bickering over where to eat.
What changed? Partly, white people lost the freedom of association. “Racial profiling” was the Narrative of the time. But mostly, feminism and usury. Feminism, because malls quit catering to men. Usury, because those big-butt-box stores REFUSED to make shopping an enjoyable experience AT ALL. When I go into a Home Depot, I see product still on the shipping pallet. No decor. No directions. No map. “Aisle 15: Plumbing” is not sufficient. I bring a smartphone when I go to Home Despot because only their website lists the actual locations of items, and that only for the benefit of employees. (They have to use the website to find items, too.)
Their shopping experience is not ‘cost-efficient’. It’s ‘actively hostile’. I would rather shop anywhere else, but can’t. Whatever reason the other retailers had for closing, it wasn’t because the big-butts have superior marketing & salesmanship.
Male spaces have been deliberately targeted for destruction by the Empire That Never Ended, imported between 1940 and 1965 from Poland. America had malls forever before and thirty years since.
Today? IIRC from the last time I checked, my most-local mall had 22 dedicated stores for womens’ clothing, 2 for men (suits and work clothes), no bookstores, no game stores, no hobby/sports stores and all the loitering opportunities were retooled into child-care pens. With the sole exception of trying on clothes before buying them, I have no reason to go there.
This happened too universally to be coincidence. I don’t want to either buy everything online or dodge forklifts at the warehouse. I want a place to meet friends, hang out, do stuff. I cannot do that A.N.Y.W.H.E.R.E. in society anymore. When I look at Craigslist and Meetup.com in desperation to find some male events, there’s nothing but wine tasting, witchcraft and LGBT struggle sessions.
THERE IS NO MALE SPACE ANYWHERE IN CALIFORNIA and that is not an accident. There’s demand. There’s a crown wrapped in Benjamins lying in that gutter. Don’t tell me “but muh cost-efficiency”.
But you CAN tell me “the government said no”.
If retailers acted selfishly and profitably, every department store would rush to install a hardware section staffed with callused salesMEN authorized to chat about projects and let you try your hand at chainsaw-carving wood or something. Anything to give menfolk something to do while Barbie shops.
It’s what malls did.
When I was young, my mother was a member of the “Mall Walkers”, a sponsored group of women that walked the mall for exercise. Make the circuit twice and get validated parking, or something. Meanwhile, I was turned loose in the bookstores and game stores, always returning with exciting ideas of what my next gift should be. Everybody won.
When I was a teenager, I met friends at the mall after-school. Homework in the food court, a few dollars in the arcade… online gaming doesn’t compare with racing against your friend sitting in the adjacent co*ckpit with steering wheel, pedals and gearshift.
The salesman at the piano store played the keyboard for passers-by, and advertised lessons. Holidays were celebrated more elaborately than just sales events; schools did productions. Stand-up comics and garage bands got their first gigs at the food court. If you chatted with the guy at Sears, he was handyman enough to advise. Kids these days might not realize what a difference it makes, having staff that are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about their products.
All of the online stuff today is a cope against us men not being allowed to do it in the real world. Anywhere. Men are hated and neglected and again, don’t tell me it’s “cost-effective” to hate & neglect men.
The death of malls was not natural. It was engineered, and by forces powerful enough to force nationwide conformity against economic self-interest. That’s what government does, when you think about it… force conformity against self-interest… sooo, who has run our government since at least the 1980s?
If the behavior is not being driven by market forces then it’s being driven by political forces. The Jew sees me at a coffee shop, enjoying coffee while blogging or meeting friends. He seethes that a white man is happy. Then he buys out the shop, replaces it with Starbucks crap (Starbucks intentionally burns its beans so you don’t enjoy it as much), jacks the price, proudly donates the profits to ugly fat lesbians breaking though glass ceilings, floors, and chairs, and if that doesn’t drive me away, he invites drug addicts to shoot up at the front door and leave their syringes in the bathroom. When I’m gone, the government (his cousin) bails him out with my tax money. He declares victory, shutters the store, fires the staff and gloats at the economic wasteland he leaves behind. He found happiness and killed it.
Ditto the mall.
Look at our economy. It’s nothing but online sales and social media. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN BECAUSE ORDINARY PEOPLE WANTED IT. I don’t want coffee from Sixbucks, so why are they the only shop in California? I don’t want to shop at Home Despot, but every hardware store is out of business. Anything I do want, is a crime unless I let the pavement apes participate & ruin it. They call it “organized retail theft” and it started when… surprise… Sacramento decriminalized theft.
Let me re-quote a few passages from above:
Anything that didn’t cater to bored housewives, vapid teenage girls, or stoners disappeared ten years ago.
Because men quit buying stuff ten years ago?
As kids growing up in the 80s, that meant my friends and I were kind of spoiled. We got two bookstores, two record stores, a two-story pizza place, and an arcade that remained a major social hub until the early 2000s.
Because men stopped spending money on books, music, pizza and competitive sports? Because online shopping alone is so much cheaper and more fun?
Borders bought out the last bookstore, closed it down, and then went out of business themselves.
How randomly self-destructive.
Best Buy did the same to the video store.
Less random.
Now shopping is a solitary affair conducted via smartphone. Video games are likewise played alone or with strangers from over the horizon.
How not random at all. That’s the logical end result of every socioeconomic trend since WW2. Actually, just the ONE SINGLE socioeconomic trend over the last century, of getting rid of white male Christians. Only a coordinated, multigenerational, interstate team of thousands of sociopaths could accomplish such a vile, counterintuitive & counterproductive feat of social engineering.
They wear tiny hats and hate Christ. And malls.
You cannot tell me that such a massive conspiracy is unlikely, not after the Covid Plandemic & Coverup.
Now people are still going to church, and the malls are empty.
People aren’t going to church anymore, either, and for the Exact. Same. Reasons. First they were feminized, then men were falsely accused & run out, now they’re child care for Sunday Morning Nightclubs and self-funded NGOs for Zion. Because tiny hats hate Christ and for no reason at all, white Western men just as much.
The very definition of an atomized society is “no social venues”. And that’s why malls were closed.
