Shopping Malls

Shopping malls have become a central fact of modern life. As the hub around which most people’s purchasing revolves, they are at the center of commercial life. Their main predecessors were the late nineteenth-century luxurious arcades and emporia, or department stores, that appeared in Europe and America. In California during the twenties and thirties came the supermarket, or food mart equivalent of the department store. The first enclosed shopping mall was built in Southdale, Minnesota, in 1956, and many pedestrian malls were built in the decade that followed. The vertical gallerias and or more spacious shopping plazas developed in the late seventies. By 1985 there were fifteen thousand enclosed shopping malls in the United States alone, with an annual turnover of around 5 billion dollars. Most recently we have seen the arrival of the giant megamalls or shopping worlds, comparable in size to older downtowns or suburban centers.

The typical suburban shopping mall has somewhere between one hundred and two hundred shops and several hundred thousand square feet of floor space. The megamalls are in a different category: the MetroCentre, Gateshead, outside Newcastle-on-Tyne in England, has its own specially constructed railway station; the Mall of America, in Bloomington, near Minneapolis, Minnesota, occupies seventy-eight acres; and the West Edmonton Mall in Canada, the world’s largest, covers the equivalent of forty-eight city blocks. For all their similarities, however, there are national and regional differences between malls. Outside North America, shopping malls tend to include supermarkets as the main anchor stores. They also have more regular public transportation. Malls are more numerous and in closer proximity in the United States, in some regions one for every 175,000 people. Where the climate is sunny and mild, malls may be partly or even wholly outdoors. More recently we have seen the construction of smaller, elitist malls for an upper-class clientele.

Popularity and Significance of Shopping Malls

Over the last fifty years shopping malls have become extremely popular. Why is this so? Due to the variety of shops there is greater choice. Since stores are closer together, shopping itself is easier and more efficient. Direct public transportation, easy access by car and parking are convenient. Malls provide a safer, cleaner and more climate-controlled environment. In general they lend themselves to a more casual and egalitarian approach to shopping that fits our less formal and less elitist culture. For all these reasons, people find shopping malls the most effective way to do their purchasing. The malls themselves are also designed from top to bottom to capitalize on this and induce impulse buying. This is why mall goers often have to walk considerable distances to reach elevators, cross upper-level galleries or find toilets and why anchor stores are placed at the extremities so that shoppers have to pass a range of smaller shops going to and from them. Old town centers, department stores, shopping centers, and minimalls have difficulty competing with the ambiance and convenience of malls.

This is not the whole story. Studies reveal that approximately 40 percent of mall goers do not go to buy. They have other reasons—symbolic, social, festive and religious—for spending time in malls. For example, malls appeal strongly to people’s fantasies. They are shopping palaces in which people can indulge their material dreams, wishes and hopes. Even though people may not have the money to buy their dreams, there is always the substitute satisfaction of window shopping. In this way everyone can share the experience of royalty. Malls also appeal to people’s desire to be with or even ahead of the times. The presence of futuristic architecture is an example of this. Yet malls also appeal to nostalgia. They evoke this through reproducing in their galleries or atriums elements of small-town life: main street, the city park or the village square. This is attractive to those cut off from their roots who have longings for a more integrated and animated life.

Shopping malls also exercise a strong appeal to those wanting to socialize. “See you at the mall” is a very common expression. For teenagers—mallrats as they are sometimes called—it is a place to seek out or hang out with peers, particularly on Friday and Saturday evenings. For others visiting malls is a way of overcoming the loneliness of the suburbs. This is especially true for housebound mothers, who can join with each other in an expedition that is more an excuse for company than for buying anything. Older people, fearful for their safety on the streets, are also attracted to the mall. Many exercise and meet there, and some malls open up early to welcome them or provide meetings rooms where they can hold functions. The social center of malls is the food court. This is generally a free and open space, with a picnic atmosphere, where people can come and go, eat and talk, in pleasant and upbeat surroundings. As malls add to their complexes hotels, conference facilities, libraries, other educational activities, professional services, civic functions and cultural functions, the social and communal significance of the mall is growing.

Malls appeal to those who are looking for fun and festivity. They are commercial fairgrounds or amusement parks, providing a variety of entertainments. These include stage performances by musicians, dancers, variety acts, pantomimes, puppet shows and clowns, as well as visits by radio and television celebrities. The spirit of a carnival and pleasure resort is enhanced by the bright lights, vibrant colors, echoing microphones and pervasive sound of music. Increasingly there are playgrounds, carousels, fun arcades, cinemas, zoos, fairground rides, pools and ice rinks. This tells us that shopping can be fun, a message the mall retailers hope we will hear. But this message is always on the edge of telling us that there is more to life than shopping, a risk they take in introducing so great an element of play. In the most sophisticated malls, such as the Mall of America, the centerpiece is a large theme park, a small Disneyland. The whole mall revolves around this. This and other attractions have made megamalls huge tourist attractions, to which people travel by charter bus or plane from hundreds and thousands of miles away.

Though many people do not realize it, part of the appeal of shopping malls is their religious dimension. Malls provide us with a sense of order and orientation: they are planned and purposeful environments, generally with a center, certain cyclical features and a quadrilateral shape echoing the four points of the compass. They create a miniature ordered cosmos, in which for a time we can “live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and come away reenergized. It is no accident that malls often have the word center in their names nor that their actual center contains such mythical symbols of life as running water and trees. With their soaring ceilings, vaulting skylights, aerial walkways, echoing sounds and dizzying mezzanines, they provide a sense of transcendence. This a place where you can be taken out of yourself, experience a different world and come away uplifted. On the part of the designers, this is all quite intentional.

Malls not only exploit most of the main religious seasons of the year; their design and façade often reflect church architecture (see Church Building). The basic basilica model—a long rectangle with cross aisles—is central to the interior design of most malls. In some respects they are simply a collection of intersecting basilica-shaped galleries. Other malls go further and reproduce the outside look of the basilica. Newer malls even contain chapels, where people can meditate, spiritual counseling can be sought and, in some cases, church services are held. Many people regard the mall, whatever the architecture, as a sanctuary from the pressures and vicissitudes of the outside world. So the mall is not just a consumer marketplace, but it is in some sense a sacred space, a cathedral or temple to fulfill quasi-religious needs and longings. Interestingly, the most influential figure in the early development of enclosed shopping malls was James Rouse, a lay Christian with an articulate theological understanding of malls’ communal and religious character.

Given these factors, it not surprising the mall plays such a central role in our culture. It is now the place where families spend more time together than in any other activity, including the church. For many people, shopping and visits to the shopping mall are at the center of both creating and expressing their lifestyle. Others have become so-called shopaholics, who are engaged in compulsive purchasing behavior, with the shopping mall the main place where they get their daily or regular fix.

Responsible and Spiritual Use of Shopping Malls

The question is twofold: How consonant with Christian values or how idolatrously opposed to them are the interests served, activities undertaken and atmosphere established in the shopping mall, and how can we approach them with Christian integrity? To find an answer, we need to ask a related question: Where exactly is God in the shopping mall? This is a good question to ponder in a shopping mall itself, while walking around or sitting down and observing what goes on.

Some conclude, contradicting Psalm 139, that God is nowhere to be found. But God is always present in followers of Christ who work in or visit the mall, especially in their contact or fellowship with one another. Since in some measure the image of God is reflected in all people, God is present in them and it. Any products or services provided by the mall that are necessary, or generally beneficial, also have God’s endorsement. So too does anything that is done in God’s name, according to the character of Christ and as an expression of the Spirit’s creative gifts. The provision of employment to a wide range of people, with all that flows from that to others, including giving amongst other things to the church, has God’s active imprint upon it and in it. The presence of shops with an overt religious commitment, such as Christian bookstores, points to God’s presence as well.

Still, there are negative and idolatrous influences in the mall. This is present whenever people look to the mall for more than can rightly be expected of it and when mall owners purport to offer more than they properly can. Malls also overstep the mark when they claim to be the new town center. This is true only in a limited way. They are very middle-class institutions, which are not generally located near or patronized by blue-collar people. Space in the mall is not open to all who wish to enter it but is policed by security staff, who ensure that undesirable people are asked to leave. In some malls young people are forbidden to walk around in groups over a certain number. Generally speaking public meetings cannot be held in a mall, literature cannot be handed out, movie or film cameras cannot be used, and evangelism cannot be overtly conducted.

In these and other ways, malls limit the democratic rights of citizens. Mall owners defend this by saying malls are private spaces and owners can set their own rules. Although this is true, malls pretend to be the new public spaces as well. Also, there are now so many malls occupying such vast tracts of land where public rights and privileges do not apply. For malls to become the democratic, multipurpose, public spaces they claim to be, many changes have to take place. Informally and formally, through the exercise of people power and legal sanctions, we need to encourage or, if necessary, force malls to move in this direction.

After the Mall?

Though they have dominated the retail scene for a generation, shopping malls themselves are now encountering strong competition from the newer discount power centers and factory outlet centers. These have increased several hundred percent in the last fifteen years. With prices often 20-50 percent lower than prices at normal retail outlets, power and outlet centers have business turnover that is often proportionally double that of malls. In a few places power centers and outlet centers are setting up alongside or with one another, providing even stronger competition. Some of the new festival marketplaces, with their less synthetic open-air character and more attractive natural or historical surroundings, are also intruding on the mall’s dominance. In the short term, however, the mall’s preeminence seems secure.

» See also: City

» See also: Consumerism

» See also: Money

» See also: Public Spaces

» See also: Shopping

References and Resources

J. Jacobs, The Mall (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1985); W. Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: Morrow, 1985); I. G. Zepp Jr., The New Religious Image of Urban America: The Shopping Mall as Ceremonial Center (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1986).

—Robert Banks