I Hope He Never Lets Me Down Again 🚘

The Empty Echo: What Happens When Our Malls Disappear?

You're pulling the Halloween decorations down from the closet, and right behind them, there's the box marked, Christmas. In a few weeks, you'll be shopping for gifts—probably clicking through Amazon at midnight, maybe making a quick Walmart run between errands. It's efficient. It's convenient. But something has been quietly vanishing while we've been adding items to our digital carts.

Across America, the malls that once anchored our communities are being demolished. Eastland Mall in Columbus, Ohio—once a bustling center of commerce and community—began its demolition this year. The Outlets at Hillsboro in Texas, Jamestown Mall in Missouri, and dozens of others have met the same fate or are scheduled for the wrecking ball. These aren't just buildings coming down. They're town centers disappearing.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Between 2016 and 2024, a net 18,730 mall stores closed their doors. This holiday season, online shopping is projected to grow nearly 8% while brick-and-mortar sales limp along at just over 2%. We're spending more than ever—just not in the places where our neighbors work, where local entrepreneurs once took a chance on a storefront, where teenagers got their first jobs.

Remember circling pictures in catalogs? That ritual connected us to something tangible, a destination where we'd eventually go to see, touch, and buy. Today's children will grow up never knowing the particular magic of a crowded mall at Christmas—the competing store music, the elaborate window displays, the long line to see Santa, the food court packed with families taking a break from shopping. They'll never understand why their parents get nostalgic about going to the mall.

But this isn't just nostalgia talking. When malls die, we lose more than shopping venues. We lose gathering places. We lose the small business owners who took out loans to open a specialty toy store, a bookshop, a jewelry repair kiosk. We lose entry-level jobs for young people. We lose the spontaneous human interactions that happen when we share physical space—running into a neighbor, watching a street performer, helping someone reach something on a high shelf.

What's replacing these community anchors? Sometimes housing developments, sometimes open-air lifestyle centers, sometimes nothing at all—just vacant lots where memories used to be made. The least inconvenient Target isn't a town center. It's a pit stop. Amazon's infinite aisle offers everything except what we didn't know we were losing: the texture of community life.

As you hang your decorations this year, consider what your town center looks like now—and what it might become. Our efficiency has a cost, and we're paying it in empty parking lots and demolished dreams. The question isn't whether we can stop this transformation. The question is whether we'll notice what we've lost before it's completely gone.