A few years ago, I met an old friend at an outlet mall in Minnesota. It still seemed to be thriving. The outlet mall nearest to me, over in Post Falls, Idaho, is nearly dead. One steucture is different and seems to be under separate ownership. It still plods along while crumbling away. The other buildings were under different management, I think, and it had two long buildings mirroring one another on either side of a street. One has been bought as factory space by Tedder Industries for manufacturing Alien Gear holsters. The other has a couple odd shops and who knows what will happen with the space in time.
Oh for sure. All of the local malls have been really hurt. It seems like the big anchor store go away, then the smaller shops dont draw the people and dont last long. Amazon has really put the hurt on brick and mortar stores.
Modern shopping malls came into their own in the 70s and 80s, and I think the outlet malls probably got big starting in the 90s. The big box stores built their businesses in retail, and some adapted to mail-order. But the internet threw them for a loop thanks to bureaucratic inertia. Sears could have been what Amazon is, but corporate culture isn't built around innovation and risk the way startup culture in the tech world was.