Hot Topic, daycare for hardcores.
MALL IS NOT LOST
BY TROY JOHNSON
M
y daughter and her preteen friends hang out at Target. Not to go shopping; they just walk its aisles in herds, cruise the place, look for other groups of preteens. Maybe get
are “the people’s own remedy for stress, loneliness, and alienation.” They’re “gathering places where community is most alive and people are most themselves.” Target, while a quality retailer, is not much of a third place. It’s a place you go to get the cream that will undo the rash, the place for bed sheets and starter electronics and birthday toys for kids you don’t really know. And these 11-year-old girls choose to go hang there. They do laps, gossiping and pointing and laughing and exploring the world through the lens of a highly successful and functional mass-market retailer. Granted, it has a Starbucks. (My daughter has made it clear that this Starbucks is not the real thing, that the drinks taste watered down or like an off-brand extension.) But still, I can’t help but feel that this really blows. This is all due to the death of the American mall and other factors that could take up another essay
trinkets. The big red bullseye has become their social space. They will come of age right next to the shampoo and the affordable clothes and the TP. I can’t tell you how sad this makes me. These kids have tech that makes Atari game systems look like cave paintings from the Mr. Belvedere era. Plenty of diseases have been eradicated or tamed for them. But their third places really, really suck. For those unfamiliar with the term, a third place—coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg—means a separate space just to be other than home and work or, in the case of these kids, school. Good hangout spots, Oldenburg wrote in 1989,
DECEMBER 2022 704 MAY 2023
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