I Sing the Praises of the Shopping Mall

There are only a few shopping malls remaining in Denver- one being the Cherry Creek shopping mall, which is upscaled and very modern and doesn't possess a lot of the nostalgia factor you'd think shopping malls would have given their relative obsolescence in the age of e-Commerce. To the contrary, it's doing very well for itself and has glamorous posters advertising fancy getaways to New York City, in addition to some of the most exclusive fashion outlets I've ever seen. On the lower floor there's always some kind of car gated off by velvet ropes, as well as a complete player piano being given away in a lavish sweepstakes. 

The only other mall which comes to mind is the Aurora mall, which is much further out yet is well worth the trip. It is every bit a nostalgic setting, virtually unchanged since the 90s. Here there's an arcade full of dust-coated consoles, with tan walls which echo the Backrooms, a food court which is such an anachronistic throwback you half expect to see Jay and Silent Bob sitting two tables over, and polished chrome escalators. Despite its lack of modernity, it serves as a stalwart symbol of unrestrained American consumerism, which is what all malls worth their salt should stand for, and considering that I buy absolutely nothing I wander the premises guilt-free, a kind of temporal specter witness to a bygone era which persists against all odds. 

Perhaps shopping malls are intriguing to philosophers and eccentrics because they are more thematically honest than the e-Commerce giants of Amazon or Trivago. Websites tend to hide behind a veneer of social progress, pretend as if they're doing something for the common people. Malls are much more honest, they cut right to the point- this building is here to take your money, give us your money, buy things here in these physical shops, put them into your physical handbags, spend as much money as possible. It's refreshing, in a way, and to me at least, immensely preferable. As a salesman myself I admire honesty, when a product is able to admit that it has no motive, no real objective to pursue, the only race it's running is to get more investors which in turn will fuel more expansion which in turn garners more investors which raises the value of the company's stock, which will culminate in Dillard's building a Dyson Sphere in the year 2894 to sell gray polyester jackets in. 

Despite our attempts to make shopping malls go extinct, they persist. I can't say why they do, we can only theorize as to why they do, perhaps in our collective will we want them to stay open, we don't want a world where everything is bought online, because going out for a real shopping experience is still worth it. As much as a musical genre like Mallsoft purports to lampoon and ridicule malls, I do think more often than not there is an underlying element of sentimentality and desire hidden beneath the smug veneer on most Mallsoft albums. Very few come to mind which are explicit denouncements of malls. 

I have a book on hand from the 1970s which predicted vast multiplexes of the future. It stated that by the year 2000 we would see vast indoor megastructures which would practically become entire cities in their own right. This was before most people had an understanding of the practical application of a computer network, and the author seems to be less of an actual infrastructure expert and more of a deranged utopian lunatic. Nonetheless, his ramblings about the indoor enclosures of the future are very captivating, and offer a unique insight into what could have been, if the entire country was coated in a thick swath of bustling corridors and asphalt parking lots which went on in uniform white painted lines for as far as the eye could see.