Yeah I get it. I grew up on malls for sure. They were still a big deal in the 90s and early 00s. Hit the restaurants, theaters, shopping for clothes, music stores. It's a bygone era.
You know ... you and Johnny U have hit upon some things. Not merely thinking of malls as retail space, but also as places for young people to simply hang out ... and what kinds of things have changed the relevant dynamics.
I actually think online shopping has a lot less to do with struggling malls than commonly thought -- though the Internet itself, in general, has played a big role.
Let me lay out a few things. Some of these could be more local-to-me factors that may not be present in other areas:
1) Pre-teen kids aren't anywhere near as independently mobile as they were 25+ years ago. When I was coming up, plenty of 8-12 year-old kids ratted the streets all day on their 20-inch mag bikes ... heading here, there and everywhere and generally engaging in unplanned fun without their parents. No, this younger age group wasn't the one that was filling the malls. But not being independently mobile of parents at that age started a pattern.
2) Teens aren't anywhere near as independent as they were 25+ years ago. Both mobility-wise and financially. Teens don't bike anywhere anymore, don't drive as early as we did in the 1980s, and typically don't have their own money anywhere near as soon as we did. I'm sure there's exceptions and maybe some US locales are different.
3) Teens don't have to leave the house to socialize. Internet, social media, Discord and similar, etc. SMARTPHONES! My 16-year-old son "hangs out" with friends online all the time and doesn't feel like he's missing anything. Lots of parents don't mind, because the kids are "safe at home" (just like many of us didn't let our kids, when younger, go anywhere independently on bikes -- or heck, just walking around).
4) The music stores
Ilov80s mentioned. Well, we all know music is consumed very differently these days and has been for over 20 years (Napster through iTunes/Spotify). When physical media nosedived, so did your Sam Goodys, FYEs, and Camelots. Not too different from what happened to video-rental stores.
5) Movie theaters? Well before the pandemic, movies were a place where parents dropped off their teens, and then picked them up at the end. No more biking to the show -- or catching a ride with a driving teen friend. And without independent unscheduled time ("
Mom's on her way!") there's no perusing the mall, hitting the food court, etc.
6) Shopping for one's own clothes and shoes -- at least some of them -- was once an important teen rite of passage. But without having one's own money, it's the Mom and Dad Show once again. And, locally, all public schools went to uniforms in the mid-1990s -- so buying cool clothes to wear to school hasn't been a thing in decades. Additionally -- and maybe locally -- after-market clothing stores have proliferated over the last 25 or so years -- selling many of the same brands as the mall stores, but at significant markdowns.
7)
Johnny U mentioned arcade games in the OP. We all know what happened there -- and that ball started rolling even pre-Internet.
So ... there aren't a lot of table legs left (read: none) to prop up young people hanging out at malls anymore. And a lot of these factors have been in play for so long that you've got an entire generation of kids that don't feel anything special for malls -- "
Mom might drag me into one now and then, but there's nothing I want to do there."
