The Atlantic

The New American Mall

The future of large shopping centers will encompass much more than shopping.
Source: Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty

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The mall isn’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:


The “Experience” Era

Images of the fallen mall—the shop floor littered with mannequins, the dusty escalators leading to an abandoned food court—have loomed large in the American cultural imagination over the past decade. And it’s true: The mall of your childhood, whether it had big department stores, Orange Julius counters, or flip-phone kiosks, may no longer exist as it once did. Malls now feature escape rooms, axe throwing, and the occasional brand-sponsored “immersive experience.” The mall has changed, but some version

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