Post by SimsFan_1 on Jan 27, 2023 17:50:33 GMT -5
I will say I am #blessed to live near two thriving malls. One even legally has to do well... Ok storytime, I guess. Basically the mall was sold and the new owners kept raising rent and refusing to fix things and the stores were able to prove they had no intention of running it as a mall and just wanted to lose money on it and then develop the land. The thing is... that violates the lease agreements with the existing stores which they took on with the purchase of the mall. The owners were used and forced to sell the mall. Unfortunately, it is now owned by Simon Malls possibly the largest and soulless mall management company... but also their properties are lively, clean and have diverse stores with different price-ranges so it isn't all bad.
Sadly, I think a lot of malls nowadays are run by slumlords who are just squatting on the land until they can cash in on it by selling it off to a lucrative developer. You especially see this in cities that got "overmalled" in the 70s and 80s and have more malls than the population can support.
Interestingly, malls were one of the things that actually contributed to the death of drive-in theaters. When malls first started to get big in the 70s, drive-ins began to be seen as a "wasteful" use of land that could instead be used for retail. Tons of drive-ins got plowed over in the 70s and 80s for shopping malls or (worse) big box stores.
Of course, what comes around goes around, and this same argument is also being used to justify bulldozing shopping malls nowadays. They're seen as a "wasteful" use of land that could instead go to a "mixed-use" complex that has an apartment building, an office building, and a Walmart.😑
Say what you will about malls, but they were community gathering places for many people. It's sad that we seem to be losing all of those kinds of spaces (whether it's malls, theaters, bowling alleys, and so on) to "progress." And, then, we wonder why more people are living their entire lives online and have sky-high rates of mental illness.😒 A future that looks like the COVID lockdown is a future I don't want.
Also have movies gotten shorter? I feel like they used to be two hours but now it seems like they're closer to 1h 40m.
I think Fridays were especially the most popular night for seeing movies. Most people don't have to go to work or school the next day, so they can stay out later on Friday night. In turn, this is why the "Friday Night Death Slot" became a thing in television. The common wisdom was that more people went out on Friday nights, so TV shows that aired on Friday night got lower ratings.
