What I Think of Shopping Malls and Why
By: Barbara Radisavljevic
Tags: Retail Industry, Retail, Life, American Life, Shopping Mall

I opened the door to the labyrinth of hallways the customers of the Oaks Mall never see. Immediately I wanted to flee back to the colorful brightly lit part of the crowded mall from which I’d come. In contrast, the deserted dark hallway I was entering freaked me out.

I couldn’t help but remember a recent news story of a woman who had been murdered in such a place. Were I to scream, no one would have heard me. As the approaching freight elevator groaned to announce it was almost to my floor, all I wanted was to escape. When its door opened for me, it took all my courage to get in.

I can’t remember now why I needed that elevator. That was forty years ago. I was the manager of Robbie’s Hallmark Store. What I do remember is how it felt to leave the safety of the lights, the crowds, and the store to be isolated in the creepy gloom of the interior back passages during the holiday season. I was never so glad to finish a chore and return to the light. Since I left that job, I‘ve never even been tempted to spend time at malls.

Malls kill independent businesses and encourage people to buy what they don’t need. They dress up their exteriors and hide their most unattractive features from all but their employees. I won’t miss them if they disappear.

The mall that helped kill Bellflower businesses

I grew up in Bellflower, California in the 1940s and 50s. I was in high school when it incorporated in 1957. About 46,000 people filled the new city’s 6.2 square miles. (Bellflower, California — Wikipedia)

We had one main street through downtown, Bellflower Boulevard. The entire commercial area was about twenty blocks long, and most shops were contained in fifteen of them. It was an easy walk. My friends and I often took that walk to browse in the shops whenever we had nothing better to do.

Back in those days, Bellflower Boulevard housed a variety of independently-owned businesses. The owners of those shops were well-known around town. They were our friends and neighbors.

We bought our furniture at Thompson’s. Many of us bought our clothes at Bobbie Lynn. Evelyn’s was the place to go for flowers. We watched our movies at the Nubel Theater near the center of downtown. Only a few of these businesses remained when I last visited Bellflower in 2005. A Google search tells me they are all gone now.

In the 1970s the downtown began to die when the new 91 Freeway divided the town down the middle. About that same time, the Hahn Company opened the Los Cerritos Mall in the neighboring new city of Cerritos. People began to shop more at the mall than on Bellflower Boulevard. By that time I had married and moved away from the area. I don't remember ever visiting the mall that changed the face of my hometown. But I was familiar with malls. I had worked in one.

Lakewood Center Mall

The Lakewood Center Mall was built in 1951 when I was still in elementary school. My mom often shopped in the mall, but it was far enough from Bellflower that it did not hurt the Bellflower businesses much. We only went to the mall for major shopping expeditions, not for everyday needs. The mall was not enclosed until years later.

During my junior year of high school, my cousin started to work at Melody Dress shop in the Lakewood Center Mall. She got me a job there. I hated it.

We part-time clerks were expected to keep busy even if the store was empty and we’d finished all the straightening, folding, and cleaning there was to do. We had to look busy even if there was nothing to do. Even then we were not allowed to talk to each other. Very rarely were all of us needed. I think they hired us to make sure the full-time employees couldn’t make commissions.

We were trained to upsell any customer who bought anything. The manager watched us every minute to make sure we didn't forget to suggest more items for a customer to add to her purchase. He chewed me out when I did not try to upsell a customer who had made it clear she was in a great hurry to buy the bra she came for and get out. I helped her do that.

When I explained to the manager why I did not suggest the customer get some panties to match, he was still angry. In that store, pleasing the manager seemed more important than pleasing the customer. At least I didn’t lose my job over it, but I was happy when it ended with the beginning of my senior school year.

The only thing I liked about that job besides the dollar an hour I earned was spending some of my earnings to eat lunch at Woolworth’s. I was very fond of their club sandwich.

Managing a Hallmark store in The Oaks Mall in Thousand Oaks

In the 1980s I was the opening manager for Robbie’s Hallmark Store in The Oaks Mall. The job was high pressure and boring compared to my previous job managing the card department in a Westwood bookstore.

The Oaks is an enclosed mall. The owner had an established store in the Santa Monica Mall, which was not enclosed. He hired all of us who would work at the Oaks Mall store, and he wanted us to train as a group at the Santa Monica Store. This oriented us to the merchandise and the owner’s way of doing things.

An enclosed mall is a whole different world than the main street of a town. For the customer, it often serves as a free entertainment center, almost like a mini theme park with no entrance fee. It usually has a movie theater, an arcade, and a food court. It’s designed to draw customers in and encourage them to spend money and shop for hours. Some even have playgrounds for small children. Some even host live entertainment for customers at certain times of the year.

The Oaks is like one big store because the doors to all stores are wide and always open. That encourages wandering in and out of stores easily. Tired customers can rest on one of the many benches in the parklike center between the stores that surround it. Each manager has to make sure that the merchandise closest to their entrance will draw people into the store.

While working at Robbie’s I learned that manager is really another word for slave. The owner really ran things. I was just there to carry out his orders, listen to his tales of woe, and to train the sales clerks and oversee their activities. I also had to take care of payroll. I had little control over what we stocked.

That was hard since I’d done all the buying where I’d previously worked. The buying would have made the job tolerable. But at Robbie’s the buyer in Santa Monica did the buying for both stores. Although they promised I could start buying later, it never happened.

Working with Hallmark was new to me. While in Westwood, I was used to buying from many greeting card companies because Hallmark wouldn’t sell to our small nonprofit store. That turned out to be an advantage when our variety drew customers away from the three stores within two blocks of us that did sell Hallmark products.

One was next door and the other across the street. The Hallmark Store was around the block. When I left my job after nine years, that Hallmark store was gone. The other two stores no longer sold only Hallmark. I used to love finding products my customers loved that the other stores didn’t have. That didn’t fly at Robbie’s. Hallmark didn’t like competition.

I soon discovered that the main reason I’d been hired was to train the employees and to make sure everything got on the shelves in time for the opening. Imagine a hill of merchandise piled halfway to the ceiling, about five women, and about a week to unpack and move what was in the hill onto the empty shelves. I wish I had photos, but that was before the days of digital cameras and smartphones.

Hallmark representatives spent a day in our store when we began to stock the shelves. They showed us how and where to place the merchandise. They had a system we needed to learn. I made sure we accomplished the task so we would be ready for opening day. The opening went well.

I still was restless. I was never designed to just take things out of boxes and put them on shelves and send in reorder cards when something sold out. I was used to handpicking every card, not taking an assortment picked by the supplier. I was used to finding and experimenting with new product lines. At Robbie’s I made more than I’d earned at the bookstore, but I felt I’d taken a step backward in professional growth.

The thing that bothered me most when I managed the Hallmark Store was how fake the mall itself seemed. There were no windows looking out. Inside, the weather never changed and the birds never sang. There was no sky. It was easy to lose touch with the real world outside. It could be pouring rain in the parking lot, and inside you’d never know it. There was no difference between day and night. The mall entrances were bridges between two different worlds.

The customers saw a beautiful exterior and enticing displays of merchandise. Employees saw the ugliness behind the facade in dingy back offices and dark passages in the bowels of the monster building. The freight elevator was downright spooky. There were two different environments — one for shoppers and one for employees.

Life without malls

Downtown Paso Robles at Dusk, author photo, © Barbara Radisavljevic

I’m very thankful we have no mall in the north end of the county where I live now. Instead, we have mostly independently-owned businesses in a small but thriving (at least before the pandemic hit) walkable downtown area. The business owners are people we know. They live among us. They support our charities, run for public office, and volunteer to help at our civic events.

I think malls are beginning to die out. During the pandemic, many of the large department stores that anchor them are closing. Here in Paso Robles we have shopping centers rather than malls. They are anchored by chain supermarkets and big box stores and are near the neighborhoods where people live. We visit them to buy the necessities of life and services we need to keep ourselves healthy and beautiful. Most towns in America have these and they pretty much all look alike.

Downtown Paso Robles Shops in Spring, author photo, © Barbara Radisavljevic

We go downtown when we want to dine, go to the movies, see art, or shop in boutique shops that carry what big box stores don’t. Downtown attracts the tourists and the locals go there to find special gifts or just enjoy themselves. Our necessities are within a five-minute drive from home. Downtown is just a few minutes farther for most people. We don’t have a mall and we don’t need one.

Note: I wrote this in response to Death of the American Shopping Mall by Aimée Gramblin