





































ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

 

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
 

SOCIALIZING AT THE 

SHOPPING MALL:  

A REVIEW OF LITERATURE  

TO REASSESS THE SOCIAL 

VALUE OF THE  

AMERICAN MALL 
 

ELIZA K. PETERSON,  

ANDREW URBAN, PHD (FACULTY ADVISOR) 

 

✵  ABSTRACT 
The shopping mall was not just a monument 

to consumption, as it is often framed, but also a 

place where American suburbanites could find 

community. The American shopping mall was pio-

neered in the 1950s, partially as a way to fix the so-

cial gaps that are present in a suburban environ-

ment and rose to its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s. 

During this time, the mall became a place for subur-

ban residents to socialize, as illustrated by the phe-

nomena of “mall rats” and mall walkers. Despite this 

social significance, the mall was typically only seen 

as a place to fulfill consumer needs rather than so-

cial needs. I will survey the literature surrounding 

the social legacy of malls in an effort to reframe the 

legacy of the institution, in light of the benefits pro-

vided by hindsight. Shopping malls should be rec-

ognized for their ability to facilitate social connec-

tions and community during the late 20th century in 

a space as atomized as the suburbs.  

 

1 INTRODUCTION 
The shopping mall looms large in the Amer-

ican historical imagination. In many ways, it em-

blematizes the prosperity and optimism of the late 

20th century; the mall was a place with all the mod-

ern conveniences, serving the citizens of the newly 

exploded suburbs and their ever-growing con-

sumer appetites. At the same time though, its image 

has been used as a shorthand for the vapidity of 

consumerism; the public often saw mall shoppers as 

mindless consumer zombies. These critiques, how-

ever, have not all stood the test of time. In hindsight, 

shoppers can see malls for what they really are – a 

public space that serves social needs as much as it 

serves consumer demand. Fond memories of the 

evocative sensory experience of mall shopping, 

combined with the sense of community found in 

many of these spaces, has outweighed moral panics 

about the mall and its denizens. I will be arguing for 

the deeper social significance of the shopping mall 

through an exploration of the literature and philos-

ophy surrounding the institution as the American 

shopping mall was an important space for socializ-

ing, particularly during the mall’s heyday in the 

1980s and 1990s.  

 

2 BACKGROUND 
The introduction of the mall made the ac-

quisition of goods, and lots of them, easier at an un-

precedented level. No longer did suburban con-

sumers have to contend with the inconveniences of 

downtown like bad weather, short hours, or, worst 

of all, parallel parking. The enclosed shopping mall 

— which usually features one to four “anchor stores” 

as well as various other tenants for retail, service, 

and dining — was initially developed in the early 

1950s in the Midwestern suburbs before spreading 

across America followed by the rest of the world in 

the latter half of the 20th century. This piece will fo-

cus on American shopping malls, which became a 

major social and cultural force, reaching its height 

of power in the 1980s and 1990s. The American 

shopping mall, while often seen as artificial and 

shallow, in fact provided many citizens, and espe-

cially American suburban teenagers, with a place to 

gather and socialize. For these mall-frequenters, the 

mall was not simply a place to fulfill consumer de-

sires — it was also a place to fulfill social desires.  

Malls were not always seen as social spaces. 

For much of their history they were denigrated as no 

more than shrines to consumerism. The word “con-



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

sumerism” was first used in 1915, although its theo-

retical underpinnings were established in econo-

mist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 trea-

tise, The Theory of the Leisure Class, which intro-

duced the concept of “conspicuous consumption.” 

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argues 

that members of the upper class, particularly the 

noveau riche, will buy items excessive in quality 

and/or quantity to signal their elevated economic 

status.9 Consumerism springs from this idea of “con-

spicuous consumption” though consumerism trans-

cends class in some ways, especially in America. 

America is widely known for our robust consumer 

culture, with consumption being inextricably tied to 

identity and status, and the individualism pervading 

American culture rendering that tie even tighter. 

Though people buy different tiers of items based on 

their class, Americans, from blue collar laborers to 

the elite, are united by their voracious appetites for 

consumption. Sociologists and economists, among 

other scholars, have taken issue with Veblen’s the-

ory of conspicuous consumption in the light of new 

developments in corporate power, the growing im-

portance of consumerism to personal identity, and 

the moralistic nature of his arguments.4 Consumer-

ism can refer to policies that encourage consump-

tion, but for the purposes of this paper, I will be fo-

cusing more on consumerism as a cultural rather 

than an economic phenomenon. Since the early 19th 

century, consumption has taken on deeper mean-

ing in American culture; not only can it elevate social 

status, but it can also serve as a confidence boost or 

a representation of patriotic citizenship for many 

Americans.  

The mall was both a symbol of and a vector 

for the consumerism that characterizes postwar 

America in the nation’s historical memory. In her 

highly influential 2003 book A Consumer’s Republic, 

historian Lizabeth Cohen argues that American so-

ciety was socially, economically, and physically re-

structured around mass-consumption in the after-

math of World War II. She devotes an entire chapter 

to shopping malls, which “promoted themselves as 

the new civic centers of booming suburban towns,” 

as the process of suburbanization shifted the popu-

lation from urban centers into these new neighbor-

hoods.8 Cohen convincingly argues that there was a 

direct link between suburbanization, the rising tide 

of consumerism, and the birth of the shopping mall. 

She points to the feelings of suburbanites — that 

there were not enough retail options in their new 

communities, that urban downtowns were not easily 

accessible by car – and retailers’ response to these 

feelings as the major reasons behind the growth of 

the shopping mall. In fact, Cohen positions the re-

gional shopping center as a direct result of the 

growing American consumer appetite, an appetite 

that was flourishing under the prosperity and secu-

rity of the postwar era. The regional shopping cen-

ter served a purpose beyond fulfilling the desire for 

consumption; it was borne of a desire to forge a 

community from the atomized residents of the sub-

urbs. Despite the flaws in its execution (such as the 

fact that many malls were de facto segregated due 

to the discriminatory housing practices of the sub-

urbs in which the malls were situated) the mall was 

designed with idealistic intentions and in many 

cases was able to reach some of those lofty goals.  

Architect Victor Gruen, the “father of the 

mall,” pioneered the idealized image of the mall. In 

1952, in a seminal article written for Progressive Ar-

chitecture, Gruen outlines his vision for the mall:  

 

A shopping center must be more than a 

mere collection of stores and shops. A 

shopping center must be even more than its 

name implies – a center for shopping. The 

regional shopping center must, besides 

performing its commercial function, fill the 

vacuum created by the absence of social, 

cultural, and civic crystallization points in 

our vast suburban areas.”17  

 

Gruen would go on to design the first en-

closed shopping mall in the United States, the 

Southdale Mall of Edina, Minnesota, which opened 

in 1956. Over the course of the next twenty years, 

his firm designed over fifty more shopping malls 

across the United States, intending to provide “a 

new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle 

with other humans – to have social meetings, to relax 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

together, to enjoy art, music, activities, the theater, 

films, good food, and entertainment in the company 

of others.”18 Unlike the downtown area of cities, 

which had performance venues, shopping options 

galore, restaurants, as well as other social and cul-

tural pleasures, the suburbs at this early juncture 

generally only had houses and highways. To Gruen, 

the mall was a panacea to the problems of the 

American suburbs, which he felt were lacking in cul-

ture and, what we now might call a “third place.”  

 

3 THE MALL AS A THIRD PLACE?  
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg popularized the 

idea of a “third place” in the late 1980s in his influ-

ential book, The Great Good Place. Oldenburg de-

scribes the term “third place” as the “generic desig-

nation for a great variety of public places that host 

the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily antici-

pated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms 

of home and work,” and writes that there is a dearth 

of them in “newer American communities” like the 

suburbs or the recently-drained inner cities.10 Ol-

denburg rejects the notion that the mall could serve 

as a third place in the introduction, pointing out that 

Gruen felt the same way: “[Gruen] came to reject the 

designation ‘father of malling’ because his plan was 

stripped down to commercialism only. He had envi-

sioned a true community center.”11 The Great Good 

Place contains many such indictments of the mall 

such as: “merchandizing, not socializing, [which] 

marks the character of the mall” and that the mall is 

“a drifting amalgam of nonpersons; there are no 

‘characters’ there,” with a specific eye towards the 

80s teen obsession with the institution.12 Yet, the 

fond memories of so many Gen-Xers, of long days 

spent by the mall fountain or in the food courts, con-

tradicts his conclusions about the shallowness of the 

mall experience: the shopping mall was the center 

of the social world for most American suburbanites 

who came of age in the last part of the 20th century 

and even the first bit of the 21st.  

Despite the positive glow of hindsight, this 

sort of handwringing about shopping malls is not 

unique to Oldenburg, nor unique to the 20th cen-

tury. The early aughts saw the coining of the term 

“mall rats” to describe these teens that frequented 

the shopping mall, although the trend of the mall as 

a teen social space goes back to the 1980s, if not 

earlier. The term “mall rat” is derisive and implies 

bad behavior on the part of the teenagers. For ex-

ample, the Youth Cultures in America encyclopedia, 

published in 2016, defines mall rats as “shopping 

center patrons, usually teenagers who frequent the 

mall not simply for shopping, but as a space for so-

cial interaction and illicit behavior.”15 These so-

called “mall rats” should not be demonized but ra-

ther grudgingly admired for their ability to carve out 

a third place for themselves in a world that was chip-

ping away at their access to such spaces due to 

trends such as lack of public funding for parks, com-

munity centers or transportation, a rising drinking 

age, and moral panic over crime or stranger danger. 

Were mall rats majoring in “consumership and pas-

sivity,” as Oldenburg phrases it, or were they simply 

victims to the escalation of capitalism and govern-

ment austerity? Where some may see these mallrats 

as vapid, troublemaking teen consumers, I see them 

as young people creating a community of their own, 

repurposing the commercial space for their own so-

cial needs. The linked phenomena of stranger dan-

ger, satanic panic, and worries about the illicit or un-

savory activities of unsupervised teens in time wore 

away at the perception of the mall as a safe space 

for adolescents. Authority figures such as mall oper-

ators, law enforcement, and parents began to push 

for stricter regulation of teenagers in shopping 

malls, which changed the nature of teen movement 

in the mall space.7  

Teens were not the only age group that 

used the mall as a place for socialization, however, 

as evidenced by the lasting popularity of mall walk-

ing groups among the elderly. “Mall walking” is a 

term used to describe the phenomenon of people, 

typically senior citizens (although it also can include 

mothers of young children), who use the mall as a 

place to walk in a temperature-controlled environ-

ment. Many times, mall walkers will go in groups, 

both formal and informal. Mall walking can provide 

a sense of camaraderie, as it tends to be a frequent 

and regular activity with the same people participat-

ing every week.2 Like the mall rats, mall walkers may 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

shop, but the mall’s function is more social than fi-

nancial for them.  

 

4 COMMUNITY CREATION IN THE 

CONSUMER SPACE  
There has been some pushback on the 

mall’s portrayal as no more than a shrine to consum-

erism, though I would argue certainly not enough 

pushback. In his 1996 book Main Street Revisited, 

Richard V. Francaviglia, a scholar of religion, posi-

tions the mall as a more evolved, almost utopic ver-

sion of main street.13 Main street was the heart of the 

American small town, with the main purpose of 

providing retail options, though it also was a place 

to foster a sense of community. Francaviglia argues 

that on top of the trappings of main street, the mall 

has the additional benefits of temperature control, a 

“flourishing social life,” and evolution into a cultural 

icon of sorts.13 Francaviglia was ahead of his time in 

this opinion; even though the social community of 

the mall is currently in a state of decline, nostalgia 

for this particular social world has never been 

higher. This is especially notable because there was 

a massive lack of the appreciation for the social cul-

ture of the mall back in the mid 90s when he was 

writing. Despite the mall’s prominence as a social 

space, it was mainly recognized only for its usage as 

a site of consumption.  

Others have pointed out that the maligned 

phenomena of mall walkers and mall rats can be 

seen as a social good, creating thriving subcultures 

within the world of the mall.6 In his 1986 book, The 

New Religious Image of Urban America: Shopping 

Mall as Ceremonial Center, religious scholar Ira G. 

Zepp, Jr. even argues that the mall is a sacred space, 

providing meaning, community, and ritual for many 

Americans. In an even bolder claim made ten years 

later, American historian Kenneth T. Jackson, de-

spite his misgivings about the resources that they 

devour, claimed shopping malls are “the common 

denominator of our national life, the best symbols of 

our abundance,” and that they are “at the core of a 

worldwide transformation of distribution and con-

sumption. They represent, along with music, com-

puters, suburbs, and skyscrapers, one of America’s 

major contributions to twentieth-century culture 

and life.”5 Notable is the fact that these claims were 

made in the mid-90s when malls were still seen as 

thriving. Francaviglia, Zepp, Jackson, and to a cer-

tain extent Cohen were some of the few scholars 

who grasped the full social significance of the shop-

ping mall. Many scholars did not grasp the full 

meaning of the shopping mall until its current state 

of decline provided clarity. In this case, absence has 

truly made the heart grow fonder.  

 

5 DECLINE OF THE MALL 
Shopping malls were not built to last, liter-

ally or figuratively. Shoddy building materials, 

rushed plans, online shopping’s meteoric rise, and 

oversaturation have all combined to the mall’s cur-

rent state of decline. The suburban shopping mall is 

becoming a thing of the past; dozens of malls have 

closed in the past 10 years with even more pre-

dicted to follow. Though countless business news-

papers have breathlessly reported on the “retail 

apocalypse” and the “death of retail” that these mall 

closures symbolize, the relationship between a de-

clining retail and the death of the mall is not as clean 

as that framing would have you believe. For exam-

ple, sociologist Zofia Bednarowska argues in her 

2018 paper entitled “The Consumption Space Para-

dox: Over-Retailed Areas Next to Dead Malls” that 

“over-retailed areas, full of stores of retail chains, 

such as Walmart, Macy’s etc. that are usually con-

centrated in American suburbs, also host dead malls 

– shopping malls that used to be vital and prosper-

ous, now are just left unused and abandoned.”19 No-

table as well is the atmospheric rise of online shop-

ping with Amazon and its competitors being 

branded as the malls of the internet. Somewhat 

ironic is the fact that the internet, while causing the 

death of the community found in many malls, has 

simultaneously given rise to a virtual third space of 

sorts: online forums, YouTube channels, and blogs 

dedicated to dead malls. Though the rise of online 

shopping was a major factor in the decline of the 

shopping mall, leading to the destruction of the 

communities found there, the internet also serves as 

a place to build communities to honor the memory 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

of the malls of the past. This trend is likely to con-

tinue, given that Simon Malls, the nation’s largest 

mall operator, and Amazon have been in talks to 

convert old Sears and JCPenney’s stores into distri-

bution hubs.1 There is an irony in the fact that the 

same behemoth that is destroying the financial via-

bility of the mall could also be the entity that pre-

serves the physical space at least a bit longer. Even 

though these transformations preserve the build-

ings, they do not maintain the malls’ social or sen-

sory significance.  

There is something to be said for the physi-

cal experience of shopping at the mall, with its 

abundance of sensory input, which in turn contrib-

utes to the strong sense of nostalgia associated with 

the act. In the mall, one could smell the fried snacks 

from the food court, hear the sounds of Muzak and 

gossip, and feel the coolness of central air – all ex-

periences lost on the internet. In this increasingly 

digital age, where one can just click “buy” and get 

the item the next day, people long for the frictional-

ized shopping experience and surprising sense of 

community that the mall provides, not just those that 

lived through the height of the mall but also the 

young people with a rosy-eyed view of this era.16 

The adolescents of the 2020s, dealing with the iso-

lation of the pandemic and the struggles of socializ-

ing on line, see the social culture and sensory expe-

rience of the shopping mall as something worth en-

vying. In this way, mall nostalgia is not just felt by 

those who lived through its heyday but also those 

who never got the chance to experience that histor-

ical moment. 

 

6 CONCLUSION 
The American shopping mall is an institu-

tion that has gone through a lot of changes, both in 

terms of its reputation and of its function, during its 

fascinating history. In the 1980s and 1990s in partic-

ular, the mall served an important social role for sub-

urbanites. This social role was perhaps most im-

portant for suburban teenagers, who were at first 

encouraged and later demonized as “mall rats” for 

spending time there. Mall walkers, while not as 

heavily critiqued as their adolescent counterparts, 

also use the mall as a place to socialize. The mall’s 

initial purpose, of being a cultural and social pana-

cea to the suburbs, never aligned with its reputation 

as a shrine to consumerism. Despite this disconnect, 

the American shopping mall should be honored for 

its role as a place for atomized suburbanites to con-

nect with their community. It is time to reassess the 

mall’s legacy, and perhaps even revive and repur-

pose the crumbling behemoths that define the sub-

urban skyline. I think malls could capitalize on the 

nostalgia for the sensory experience and commu-

nity aspects of that era. The future of malls may very 

well be in providing a nostalgic experience or 

spaces for community events like birthday parties or 

exercise classes. Though nothing can return the 

shopping mall to its former state of glory (economic 

decline and online shopping have made sure of 

that), malls can still serve a social function in Ameri-

can society. 

 

7 REFERENCES 
[1] Esther Fung and Sebastian Herrera, “WSJ News Ex-

clusive | Amazon and Mall Operator Look at Turning 
Sears, J.C. Penney Stores Into Fulfillment Centers,” 
Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2020, sec. Real Estate. 

[2] Georgia Perry, “Mall Walkers: The Suburban Exercis-
ers Keeping America Wholesome,” The Atlantic, 
September 21, 2015. 

[3] Harriet H. Duncan, Shirley S. Travis, and William J. 
McAuley. “An Emergent Theoretical Model for Inter-
ventions Encouraging Physical Activity (Mall Walk-
ing) Among Older Adults.” Journal of Applied Ger-
ontology 14, no. 1 (March 1995): 64–77.  

[4] Juliet B. Schor, “In Defense of Consumer Critique: 
Revisiting the Consumption Debates of the Twenti-
eth Century,” doi: 10.1177/0002716206299145.  

[5] Kenneth T. Jackson, “All the World’s a Mall: Reflec-
tions on the Social and Economic Consequences of 
the American Shopping Center.” The American His-
torical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1111–21. 
HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.2307/2169636. 

[6] Kyle Riismandel, “Arcade Addicts and Mallrats: Pro-
ducing and Policing Public Space in 1980s America,” 
Environment, Space, Place, (vol. 5, issue 2,  2013), 
66. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1177/073346489501400105. 

[7] Kyle Riismandel, Neighborhood of Fear: The Subur-
ban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. 

[8] Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics 
of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, (New 
York: Vintage Books, 2004), 14.  

[9] Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 
(New York, N.Y., U.S.A.) Penguin Books, 1994. 

https://doi.org/10.2307/2169636
https://doi.org/10.1177/073346489501400105


ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE IV 

 

[10] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Cof-
fee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other 
Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, (New York: 
Marlowe & Company, 1989), 17. 

[11] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, xiv. 
[12] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 118-122. 
[13] Richard V Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited, (Uni-

versity of Iowa Press, 1996), 164. 
[14] Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith Maguire, “Consum-

ers and Consumption,” Annual Review of Sociology 
30, no. 1 (August 1, 2004): 173–97, doi: 10.1146/an-
nurev.soc.30.012703.110553 

[15] Simon J. Bronner and Cindy Dell Clark, Youth Cul-
tures in America (ABC_CLIO, LLC, 2016), 439. 
 

 

[16] Steven Kurutz, “An Ode to Shopping Malls,” The 
New York Times, July 26, 2017, sec. Fashion. 

[17] Victor Gruen and Lawrence P. Smith, “Shopping 
Centers: The New Building Type,” Progressive Archi-
tecture, no. 6 (Jun. 1952): 67.  

[18] Victor Gruen and Lawrence P. Smith, “Shopping 
Centers,” 68. 

[19] Zofia Bednarowska, “The Consumption Space Para-
dox: Over-Retailed Areas Next to Dead Malls,” Acta 
Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Oeconomica 5 (338), 
23. HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.18778/0208-6018.338.02. 

 

 

 

Eliza Peterson is a recent graduate of the Rutgers University Department 

of American Studies. She is also a research assistant at the Education and 

Employment Research Center. She recently finished writing her senior 

honors thesis, “‘Meet Me Behind the Mall’: Reassessing the Social and 

Cultural Value of the American Shopping Mall,” which received the 

American Studies Best Thesis Award, as well as a Henry Rutgers Scholar 

Award. Her thesis explored the American cultural image of the mall and 

its legacy through the lens of music, movies, TV, and the internet, focus-

ing on themes of nostalgia. She is currently pursuing a career in educa-

tion.  

 

 

https://doi.org/10.18778/0208-6018.338.02

