Malls Are Dying. Hollywood Is Dying.
Is America Dying?

A formerly profitable mall, once worth $1.2 billion has just closed in San Francisco and was sold for, essentially, scrap.

An iconic mall in San Francisco foreclosed for a fraction of the billion-dollar valuation it once commanded as Covid shutdowns and out-of-control crime left the seven-story behemoth a shell of its former self.

Valued at $1.2 billion nearly a decade ago, the San Francisco Centre Mall, previously known as the Westfield Emporium, was sold at an auction on Wednesday to lenders Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the mall served as a shopping hub in San Francisco, with residents and tourists flocking to its vibrant energy and big-name brands.

As consumers turned away from the city's sketchy downtown and toward online shopping, however, the mall's value declined drastically. An appraisal at the end of 2022 valued the property at only $290 million, a 76 percent drop from its height before the pandemic.

But lenders purchased the property for even less than appraisals, with the final sticker price for the sprawling 1.5 million square-foot mall only $133 million - or just 11 percent of its top valuation.

Beyond the matters of covid getting people out of the habit of going outdoors for shopping -- or eating, or anything else -- the other big contributor to the end of the mall is blue-city tolerance of hypercriminality.

At the time, Westfield blamed 'unsafe conditions' and 'lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity' for the mall's decline.

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Since then, the number of retail stores has declined rapidly. The mall's flagship store, Nordstrom, shuttered its doors the same year. Bloomingdale's soon followed suit, and the mall's movie theater later shut down.

The mall currently has only leased 9 percent of its storefronts, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

One visitor from Los Angeles described the mall as 'eerie' during a recent interview with CBS News.

'Coming in, you're expecting so many stores, you know, like a typical mall but it's not that at all,' Romel Pacheco told the publication.

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San Francisco isn't the only city facing a drastically changing retail climate. According to data compiled by Capital One, an average of 1,170 shopping malls closed every year between 2017 and 2022.

Projections indicate that the trend is expected to continue, with estimates revealing that up to 87 percent of large shopping malls may close over the next decade.

Meanwhile, even the NY Times reports that its communist allies in Hollywood are in a Biden-steep decline, with October ticket sales are the lowest in history, adjusting for inflation.

Note that the entertainment media never adjusts for inflation, because they're industry shills and always want to claim that we're breaking records which we're definitely not even close to breaking.

But October's takings were so puny that the Times realized it had a story if it for once adjusted for inflation, so they bothered to do the very simple math.

Theaters in the United States and Canada collected $445 million across all titles in October, the lowest total on record, after adjusting for inflation and excluding 2020, when the pandemic darkened screens.

For context, October ticket sales in 2019 totaled an adjusted $1 billion, according to Comscore.

Christian Toto writes:

Why? How much time do you have? It's easy to point to the obvious causes:

The rise of streaming competition
The shrinking window for films hitting VOD platforms
The rise of consequential video game titles
Social media
Shrinking attention spans in Gen Z
The pandemic fallout

And the ones media outlets won't go near.

Stars made themselves toxic to half the country with their political views
Stars are, for the most part, over-exposed
The movies just aren't very good, in toto
The Woke Mind Virus still infects the industry
Hollywood has lost touch with the common man

That's all true, but I have a darker idea. I wouldn't say it's a theory, because I don't have much faith in it. It's more just a speculation of a possibility.

Malls and movie theaters are -- or used to be -- the favored hangouts of bored teenagers.

Young people used to love going out just to look for attractive members of the opposite sex. I remember when I used to be a young person, before I turned 29 this past November 13th.

Oh, how we young people loved to show off our new "BUM" sweatshirts, our exciting and classy Swatches, our Flock of Seagalls haircuts, and our Frankie Says Don't novelty-t shirts.

This wasn't just about these wonderful pieces of eternal fashion.

It was about hooking up. All young people think about, or used to think about, was attracting a mate. So even if we could just sit home and watch a movie with our parents, we'd go out to the theaters to see if we'd run into any classmates. Or go to the mall for the same reason. Maybe we'd run into someone attractive while waiting for the Cinnabon sous-chef to finish ladling on the frosting.

Have young people stopped caring about sex?

Are they just homebound? Or to coin a term: phonebound?

Or, alternately: Do young people no longer need to cruise the Main Drag at the wall to have a chance at romantic or sexual stimulation? Do they now just arrange hook-ups on the phone?

Is this the biggest reason why Hollywood, and the mall, are taking? Half of kids are incels and the other half are just having random sex with Tinder strangers, so why bother going out either way?

Older people have also become more homebound and phonebound but the economic impact isn't as great because older people are settled, usually, and don't go out as much. The post-29 crowd (which I will be joining myself in several years; I plan to remain 29 throughout the 2020s) is mostly married and thus do not gain the extra benefit of seeing potential mates when they go out.

I really don't know what the hell is even going to happen when young people no longer seem particularly interested in finding mates.

Related: Billionaire investor tries to help young people actually make contact with the opposite sex by offering a pick-up line. Or rather: An ice-breaker, as we never called it when I was young but they did call it that in the 70s at the Regal Beagle.

Ackman -- who is now worth $9.3 billion, according to Forbes -- claimed the pick-up line "almost never got a No" in his younger days, adding that "the combination of proper grammar and politeness was the key to its effectiveness."

"Just two cents from an older happily married guy concerned about our next generation's happiness and population replacement rates."

Perhaps also helping Ackman's early romantic life -- having married his first wife, Karen Herskovitz, in 1994 -- was his investment firm Gotham Partners, which he co-founded in 1992. It had grown to more than $500 million in assets just a few years later.

Users online quickly turned the dating advice into a meme, jabbing at the pick-up line's apparent success rate -- or lack thereof -- in dozens of posts.

I don't think it's a good line but I like what he's trying to do. The question is, at least, polite, which is a plus, and also attempts to express an interest in the other person.

I think that last part is key. I think women would be actually happy to have someone show an actual interest in meeting them, rather than the usual super-casual, we-can-talk-if-you-want-to method of "showing interest" while actually hiding all interest because anyone who shows interest is uncool and needy and desperate. (Or so the thinking goes.)

Related: It was simpler when I was young. Way back when, pickin' up chicks was as easy as getting in your Chevy Chevette, cranking up Def Leppard, and driving to the nearest roller-disco.

posted by Ace at 03:50 PM

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