“Good buys. Great people. Earthy aromas… They know me here.”

-Brodie

Let’s face it, malls are dead. They have been for a while. And while we talk a lot of shit on malls for their copy-and-paste layouts, stale food offerings, and pushy cellphone salespeople, it’s tough to argue their immense influence on American pop culture.

The advent of Amazon and 2-hour shipping of every product you could ever imagine all but murdered off each and every last mall in America. Advances in technology have made it seem like a hassle to get in the car, find a parking spot, look at the hulking backlit mall map to find out where Spencer’s was, and physically sift through hundreds of felt blacklight posters until you found just the right one. That’s what eBay is for.

Who would have thought that late-stage capitalism would usher in the demise of our civilization’s greatest monument to consumerism?

The smell of freshly-buttered pretzels, nonconsensual perfume sample sprays, and dozens of different kinds of body odor, all wafting through the skylit halls. Soon, all of these monstrous malls will be gobbled up by some behemoth e-tailer and turned into fulfillment centers housing millions of rolls of toilet paper just waiting to be bought at 35 cents a pop and flipped for 43.

Rather than slinging dime-and-a-half bags outside the pet store, this generation’s Jay and Silent Bob will be pissing in bottles while their warehouse manager yells at them about their biometric muscle-use ratings not being up to snuff. Jay’s infamous soliloquy takes on an entirely new meaning now. 

It’s devastating. And to be honest, I hadn’t even thought much about mass mall extinction until I rewatched Kevin Smith’s 1994 cult classic, Mallrats. I know, I’m part of the problem. Orange Julius could have gone extinct by now and I wouldn’t have even known.

Mallrats is a movie we’ll have to show our kids and their kids to even explain what the hell a mall was in the first place. Try telling a Tik-Tok kid that you and your friends used to pay like 50 bucks to go make a cheesy 30-second music video on a green screen after school at the mall. Sorry in advance for the ridicule you’ll face.

Maybe some of you don’t feel all that sentimental about the looming extinction of our nation’s greatest retail treasure, but that’s probably because you were just a mallwalker, casually strolling and forever “just-looking” your way through life. Disgusting. Some of us spent large chunks of our lives in those hallowed halls, wasting away one shift at a time, counting down the hours until we could take lunch and scarf down a Rodeo Cheeseburger at BK before clocking back in to measure someone’s smelly-ass foot for a new pair of Team Jordans.

I didn’t work at the shoe store, I just felt bad for my friends over there. My job wasn’t as bad. I worked at Lids, which was conveniently located right next to the Dairy Queen, where I made friends with the brace-faced girl that would always refill my slushie for free. If you read the story about my manager robbing me at knife-point after getting fired for stealing the change out of the cancer kids dropbox, you know I’m certified mallrat, through and through. Shout out Big Kuntry, who was our mall’s Jay and Silent Bob kind of rolled into one mystical mall dweller. He used to sling bootleg DVDs and above-average weed while hitting on girls who were way too young for him to be hitting on. Hope whatever smedium security prison he’s in now has internet and he can see this. I only wish I had copped a bootleg copy of Mallrats from him back then.

Though I loathed working at the mall at the time, reliving the adventures of Brodie, T.S., and the rest of the gang made me long for the long lost days of lifting up the gate, counting the register, listening to edited versions of my favorite albums over the store speakers, and having “safety meetings” to smoke snoochie-boochies in the secret hallway behind JC Penney. Back then, it felt like I’d never get out of there. But now, it’s really sad that one day, we won’t be able to go back.

RIP in peace to the great malls of America. May you live on forever, like the seemingly immortal old people who wake up at the crack of dawn to walk laps around you.