Thursday, April 16, 2009

De-Malling America: 200 local Malls Go Belly Up

OK maybe not Belly Up.
Their parent corporation has filed for bankruptcy.
Full national story here:

Back in the late 70's and early 80's I knew one of the investors /builders of Quail Springs Mall north of Oklahoma City. Like all malls in America I've watched stores come and go, and several generations of teenage mall rats troll the halls and walls of the place. Eventually the guy lost his second fortune and his group sold the mall.



Today, or maybe yesterday, it is or was under the control of General Growth Properties Inc. who have filed the Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Bold words of survival are being utter by the Inc. as they always are.

Malls are more than a place with a lot of stores. They have become the down-towns of late 20th Century America. When you start messing with the malls you are messing with our core values.


They are our right to assembly. They are our right to free speech (ever heard the shit people say to each other there?) They are our right to bare arms and legs and midriffs and butt cheeks and ...well that's enough. They are the symbol of Capitalism. "Mall Eat Mall" has been the mantra of Free Market Dogma for the last 40 years or more. But Malls just dying ? No way. Up till now when a Mall succumbed it was because a bigger better more centrally located with better movie theaters Mall knock it out of profits. 200 biggies taking the dive at once is not the same.



If Americans were still in denial that times were changing then this will bring it home to them.
Mess with our freedoms, mess with our religions, mess with our politics, our ethics, or morality, but damn you do not mess with our right to shop till we drop.



True many Americans can't afford to shop there anymore. But that doesn't mean they didn't go to the Mall and smell the newness of the products and goods they could not buy and sit in the fashionable near big leather chairs and watch the remnants of the middle class go by.


It is as if the local Mega-Church one day roped off its parking lot and put up signs saying go away
Well maybe I'm over-reacting some here, but there are three of these Malls in Oklahoma alone,
Quail Springs Mall in OKC, Sooner Mall in Norman, and Washington Park Mall in Bartlesville.
So which ones are bankrupting in your backyard?

Check it out:

2 comments:

TStockmann said...

I suspect the malls owned by the bk company won't actually close, at least not until more retailers start going out of business.

None of the 3 closest malls to me are on the list.

drlobojo said...

My guess is that they will sell off some of them to take the tax breaks. They might also be cannabalized by a hostile takeover. Blood in the water always brings sharks.