Apropos of nothing: Shopping Malls, demise of

While I wait for my freshly-fed sourdough leaven to rejuvenate, and have nothing better to do on a quiet Saturday afternoon, I thought I'd post on my experience yesterday at a local mall.

I went there to visit an Apple store and, wandering its long corridor to reach it, I looked at the various stores, and realized that there was nothing they offered that I couldn't buy from Amazon, without the bother of driving to a mall, parking, and then taking a long hike down hallways and up stairs, and waiting for an item to be rung up. 

Not that there was much there that I desired or would buy, but if I, a 60-something shopper, have deserted these kind of establishments (although admittedly, I've never been a mall shopper), it's easy to understand the woes of traditional brick and mortar stores.

Nothing new here: the demise of malls and retail stores has been well documented, but it was still a revelation to personally experience and understand why malls are obsolete.

Many years ago, one of my assignments as a young associate was to help draw up leases and such for mall developers. Those developers were making a killing back then, and I assume they continued to make still more in the following decades. Not that I found those clients particularly attractive human beings, but I hope for their sake that they bailed out early.