How a once great mall died: the story of Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio

It's weird to hear this mall called legendary in the Urban Exploring (UrbEx) world.  I was born within five miles of this mall site, nearly a decade before it was built.  We moved out of the area when I was two, but my grandma lived in Wadsworth, Ohio, about ten miles away.  I asked my mom, and she remembers this mall.  Without a doubt, this was one of the malls I went to with my family as a kid.

Rolling Acres is also the mall that sparked my interest in dead malls recently.  I stumbled across skater Rick McCrank's Abandoned TV show on the new Vice channel.  The first episode I saw he explored this mall, having heard about it on the internet, I presume.  I figured I'd been to the mall, but didn't know for sure.

Malls were a major part of my childhood.  Many weekends were spent going to malls with my family, whining to get a big, hot pretzel, and sitting with my dad, people watching, as my mom shopped with my little sister.  I knew there were a lot of abandoned factories and warehouses and houses around the Eastern U.S., but dead malls weren't on my radar until I saw that Vice show featuring Rolling Acres.

My first question was: Why couldn't anybody figure out a way to reuse all this space?  Then... How does a mall die?

The guy in this video tells the story really well.  But what's the bigger picture here?  On one hand, malls were the capitals of the over-consumption economy of the 1970's and 1980's.  Buy some cool stuff to impress your neighbors, so they will go buy even better stuff.  Then you go to the mall and buy even better stuff... and the U.S. economy thrives.

"A house is a place to put your stuff, why you go out and buy... more stuff." -George Carlin

 The over-the-top consumerism itself has died quite a bit over the past three decades. That's one big part of the picture.  Today's young adults tend to want more environmentally friendly products.  The Millenials grew up in a tech-enabled world that didn't exist when I was a kid.  The youngest of that group, and the post-Millennial kids, now in their teens, have come to age in the struggling economy of the Post Great Recession years.  Only a small fraction of them have had the money for excessive consumption.  Most want to spend their money on better tech gadgets, video games, and experiences.  They want to spend money in a place worthy of a good selfie or two (or 50).  Wandering around retail stores isn't that exciting.

In addition, Generation Xers, like myself, brought on the big wave of action sports.  I spent my teen and 20-something years learning tricks on little bicycles and skateboards.  That was a geeky thing in the 80's, but the action sports have spread around the world, continued to evolve, and were TV fodder for most Millennials.  People pushing themselves physically and having adventures and pranking is what they grew up watching.  Malls are fucking boring... until a fight breaks out.

Another aspect of this whole picture is that it's hard to sell anything for high retail prices anymore.  The exceptions seem to be new hit video games, crazy looking sneakers, and for a decade, the latest Harry Potter book.  Everything else can be found online or on an app at a huge discount.  Why go to a mall with insane space rents and pay super high retail prices?  Oh... and then there's Amazon.com.  It was inevitable that some bright group of people would use tech to reinvent shopping, and Amazon led the way, and continues to progress online shopping.

 Then there's the last reason I can think of why Rolling Acres Mall, and so many others, have died.  They made their money selling overpriced, name brand, mass marketing crap that was boring as fuck.  Boring doesn't sell anymore.  Not well, anyhow.  The mass market world of my youth has shattered into millions of niche markets.

As the entire business and social world went through one technological revolution after another, the old school retail giants kept doing the same old thing they'd done forever.  It just doesn't work anymore.  Those business empires of my youth, like Sear's, J.C, Penney's, Montgomery Wards, K-Mart, and all the rest, didn't innovate until it was way too late.  Then they pushed whatever good ideas they had through corporate committee after committee until the ideas were completely lame.  Our current, rapidly changing, highly connected, social media rich world is a realm they can't function in. 

These are the big lessons I've learned recently from looking into this retail collapse that I wrote about last post.  The questions now are: How many of these buildings can be reused with new ideas?  And how many will die and be demolished?  That's what happened to Rolling Acres Mall in the last few months.