Yes—and I think “Amazon killed the mall” is much too neat an explanation. Amazon was the accelerant, but the underlying structure was already badly compromised.
The really interesting part is the department-store collapse, because the mall and the department store were essentially one economic system. The department stores weren't merely tenants: they were the traffic generators. Sears, J.C. Penney, Macy's, Dayton's, Hudson's, etc. occupied enormous spaces at the ends of the mall and gave people a reason to drive there. Once those stores weakened, the smaller stores in the middle lost their customers, which weakened the mall, which made the anchors still less attractive—a classic downward spiral.
And there really was overbuilding. The U.S. got rather carried away with shopping centers. The Richmond Fed notes that the country has historically had roughly 24 square feet of retail space per person, versus 4.6 in Britain and 2.8 in China. Developers frequently built competing malls close enough together that they simply cannibalized one another.
But I'd go one step further: the department stores largely destroyed themselves.
They had an extraordinarily good business model in the 1950s–70s. But then several things happened simultaneously:
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discount retailers—especially Walmart, Target and warehouse clubs—offered many ordinary goods much more cheaply;
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department stores became increasingly standardized and lost the character of the old regional stores;
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the mergers eliminated much of the local identity;
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many chains expanded beyond what the market could support;
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and some of the big chains got themselves into serious financial trouble.
Sears is probably the spectacular example. It went from being an extraordinarily efficient distribution organization—originally a mail-order company—to a giant mall anchor, and then gradually became a very different sort of company. Financial engineering and debt became increasingly important while the retail operation deteriorated.
There's a delicious irony in the history: the department stores helped create the suburban mall, and then their success helped undermine the downtown department store. After the war they followed their customers into the suburbs, and the mall became the new commercial center.
Then Amazon arrived and offered something the mall could never match: “Tell me what you want and I'll put it on your doorstep.” The latest data make the magnitude rather striking. A Texas A&M analysis of Census data says that inflation-adjusted per-capita spending at department stores fell 93% from 1995 to 2024, while online retail per-capita spending increased enormously.
So I think the causal sequence is more like:
Too much retail space → weakening department stores → anchor closures → weakening malls → big-box/discount competition → Internet shopping → Amazon accelerates the process.
And that explains something that the "Amazon killed the mall" story doesn't: some American malls are doing quite well. The problem isn't that Americans suddenly stopped wanting physical stores. It's that the particular mall ecosystem of 1975–2000 depended upon a retail institution—the full-line department store—that largely ceased to work.
In fact, today's surviving successful malls increasingly look less like the old mall and more like a privately operated town center: restaurants, entertainment, luxury, services, apartments, offices, and specialty retail. The enclosed corridor full of 150 ordinary shops was the fragile part.
Which makes me wonder whether the video you watched treated the collapse of the department-store business as something that just happened, rather than asking why. That's actually the more interesting story.
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