Found out my local mall has been dead for way longer than I thought

I was digging through old newspaper archives online last night and found an article from 2003 talking about how my mall lost its second anchor store. I always assumed it died around 2010 when the big box stores moved in. Turns out the parking lot was already half empty by 2005. I remember going there as a kid in the late 90s and it felt packed. But the article said foot traffic dropped 40% after the first anchor left in 2001. Kinda crazy how the timeline in my head was completely off. Has anyone else found old news articles that changed when you thought a mall started dying?

3 comments

3 Comments

victor_carr5417h ago

Yeah and it's weird how that happens with a lot of things, not just malls. I've been noticing more and more that the way I remember stuff from my childhood is totally off from what actually happened. Like I thought my town's downtown was always a little sketchy but then I found old photos and it was already pretty run down in the 80s. It's like our brains have this soft filter that smooths out the decline so it feels like it happened faster than it really did. Makes you wonder what else we're remembering wrong just because we weren't paying close attention at the time.

lewis.mila17h ago

Seems like the only thing declining faster than the malls is our memory of them.

lewis.mila10h ago

Figure the past is like a bad movie sequel, we remember the cool parts and ignore how lame it actually got. Sounds like your mall was running on fumes for years while we were all still buying overpriced pretzels. I guess the brain's highlight reel just doesn't include the slow death spiral of retail.