I personally don't like shopping malls. But I can't deny that they're a social outlet, a "third place", a hangout location for a lot of people (senior citizens, teens and children). Not everywhere has Northern California climate.

Malls can certainly be done right. For example, Ikea run ones (I mean the rest of the mall not just ikea store) are usually pretty nice. It’s just that in US they tend to be very low quality and there are too many of them and location usually sucks. West coast tends to be worse at this too

I generally prefer shopping for clothing in-person over online shopping. It's just too hard to get the fit right online without some luck and the back-and-forth of returns and re-orders. I had to get a dress shirt and pants ASAP for a funeral recently when I realized my old ones no longer fit. I went to the mall, and I had to go to multiple stores to find something that I liked and that fit well, but I found it -- without having to drive all over to visit multiple stores, and without having to wait for shipping and/or deal with returns.

I don't visit malls often, but I can see some value in having them around.

True. Clothes are perhaps the only thing that can be hard to shop online. However, getting the wrong fit when shopping online is kind of understandable. The real frustration for me comes from brands that fail to size their clothes properly. How hard is it to make all jeans models of your brand to measure the same waist-wise and length-wise?

Pretty hard when they're 'brands' and not actually making anything, I imagine.

> Would anything of value be lost if it didn't?

Yeah: online shopping is terrible, especially for clothes. If shopping malls die, your options will be online or driving all around town between strip malls and the like.

The choice isn’t between malls and the internet. There are plenty of brick-and-mortar stores in, say, town centers.

Or living in a walkable city, or advocating for walkable areas in your city/town.

> Or living in a walkable city,

So, basically: be rich or make worse tradeoffs in other areas?

> or advocating for walkable areas in your city/town.

Doubt that would happen in any reasonable timeframe, with any amount of certainty. In the mean time, I still have to buy clothes.

Where I am they're an oasis in a hot humid summer, and freezing winter where people can hang out.

I'm not sure what it's like these days, but when I was in my early teens, before I could drive, my mother would drive me and maybe a friend to the mall, and we could walk around and hang out without our parents. They'd go get something they needed, and we'd go to the record store, or the food court, and just talk and stuff. It was a place where you could meet kids who went to other schools than you. It was basically our first taste of freedom from parents and freedom of choice. If we had some pocket money we could pick up an album we liked, or buy a shirt or poster we thought was cool, or whatever. As mentioned in the article, as we got older, it became a place of conformity, but from about age 10-15, it was a really nice reprieve from family life, and was a relatively safe place to have that reprieve.

It's nice to walk around in South Texas during the summer when heat indexes are pushing into the one-teens.