The Fall of Mall Culture
- tufbeditorial
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The Franklin Mills of the past looked like a science museum, filled with early-2010s colors like turquoise, orange, and bright red, with “FRANKLIN MILLS” plastered on each entrance. Back then, it was a weekend retreat for my family and me. Even after the colors and whimsical décor were stripped from the exterior, and the name was changed, the mall never fully lost its sense of whimsy. It was a place where we wandered from store to store, like Forever 21 or Five Below, with a bag of Auntie Anne’s pretzels in hand. Oftentimes, we didn’t even know where to start, as there was too much to do.
Maybe it was all of us getting older, or maybe it was the world changing itself. But the last time I went there, the only thing I could remember was how the color was now drained from the inside too. What replaced the bustling of the stores and walkways was emptiness. It was a ghost town.
The once Philadelphia Mills, or should I say Franklin Mills now, isn’t the only mall getting sold to be redeveloped into another industrial facility. Neshaminy Mall and Exton Square Mall, along with hundreds of other malls in the U.S., have faced the same problem. From 2017 to 2022, an average of 40 malls closed every year.
So what happened? For one, COVID-19 did. In 2020, during the peak of the pandemic, foot traffic in malls decreased by 40%. Even after the lockdown, malls were having difficulty recovering. In 2022, foot traffic in malls was still 12% less than the previous year. After the pandemic, online shopping normalized the acquisition of products at the tips of our fingers. From 2019 to 2024, fashion e-commerce sales increased by 50.5%, and in 2025, fashion e-commerce accounted for 59.4% of the total apparel market revenue in the U.S.
But online shopping wasn’t the only thing making malls close left and right; it was the fact that there were a lot of malls in the first place. When the high demand and over-saturation of the mall market began to die down, it was natural for many to close their doors. Malls were no longer the main entertainment centers for families, as the age of technological advancement was ushered in. From 1986 to 2017, about 764 shopping malls closed per year.
The rise of thrifting was another factor. From 2021 to 2025, there was a 325% increase in resale listings, from marketplaces like Depop, Mercari, and Goodwill. Additionally, the secondhand fashion market is expected to double from 2025 to 2034.
As a result of online shopping, the previous over-saturation of the market, and thrifting, about 14,000 mall stores have closed from 2016 to 2025, and at the end of 2024, the vacancy rate of malls was 8.7%. When you walk into the King of Prussia mall, you notice the Lolli and Pops store is no longer there. The huge Forever 21 store that was two floors tall and two stores wide wasn’t so forever after all. Lord & Taylor is replaced by the Netflix House. More and more food stores are opening up, like Eataly. Rather than clothing, mall culture has shifted to other forms of entertainment, like the Netflix House and restaurants. In 2025, malls with other forms of entertainment, such as cinemas and arcades, had 20% more foot traffic than malls without. But that doesn’t mean that the mall culture is completely gone. Since the pandemic, Aritzia and Alo Yoga have become popular in the market, and Hollister is changing its brand with a flashback to past styles.
Overall, major malls like KOP are seeing an increase in revenue. Mall culture as we once knew it was falling, but maybe now it’s just in a different form. Maybe it’s the end of an era, but now there’s a new one in its place, one defined by technology and a new culture that you all have the power to control in some way. Whether or not this change is good is only something you can decide.
Written by Angelina Dang
Edited by Graeme Duffey
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