The New Main Street and the Inconvenient Truth about Convenience

My parents used to tell me all the time of how they spent their Saturdays cruising up and down Main Street and how it was the place to see and be seen. With the invention of the shopping mall by Victor Gruen main streets all across America are now either dead or a knocking on its door. A new generation of kids finds itself roaming up and down the corridors inside shopping malls just to see and be seen as their parents were before them. This comparison has caused me to ask myself why I appreciate Main Streets and despise shopping malls?

Every now and again when I am driving the four hours home from Clemson and not in a hurry I take the back roads. This allows me to slow down a bit from the busy interstate and to drive through the once vibrant main streets of America’s small towns. While mostly dead and rundown I can easily imagine the commerce centers that these strips used to be and I find it sad that they aren’t anymore. It is true that shopping malls have made shopping much more convenient but in them a particular charm has been lost that was omnipresent in America’s main streets.

Every main street and the businesses in it were specific to their town. The interiors of the new centers of commerce, shopping/strip malls, can be anywhere. They’re sterile and homogenous in their aesthetic and their stores are generally all the same. Additionally, no one lives in a shopping mall. There is no mixed-use or live-work environment that made main streets across America so dynamic. It is just a collection of stores that serves to further promote the troubling consumer culture that has populated in our society. Additionally shopping malls generally offer no connection to the outside and destroy their surrounding landscape with a sea of parking that intends to maximize consumer convenience.
The next wave of consumerism, online shopping, has already started to make shopping malls obsolete. If shopping malls are the new main street then online shopping is an empty lot. I am of the opinion that having a bad main street is better than not having one at all because at least the bad one gives us something. Which brings to mind the questions of what we will lose in this new wave of convenience in consumerism and how much of our society we are willing to sacrifice for it.