One Nation Under Goods by James J. Farrell

Author:James J. Farrell [Farrell, James J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58834-433-5
Publisher: Smithsonian
Published: 2014-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Americans go to malls for many reasons. We’re “just looking” for stuff and the self, commodities and community, novelty and time, and, of course, a bargain. We’re hoping to buy what we need and, occasionally, what we don’t need. But sometimes we go to the mall just for the fun of it. “Entertainment is a major component of American culture, maybe the major component,” says Michael Beyard, coauthor of the Shopping Center Development Handbook. It’s no surprise, then, that shopping centers try to capitalize on their entertainment value, selling fun in addition to all the stuff.1

One year before Victor Gruen’s landmark Southdale Center opened in the suburbs of Minneapolis, another influential mall opened its gates on the West Coast. Despite its official designation as a theme park, Disneyland was, and still is, a mall. It’s a mall—in the original sense of a pedestrian promenade—and it’s a shopping center too. An early visitor said that Main Street USA is “an ordinary shopping center where they sell souvenirs, film,… ice cream, have a movie house—all functioning as would any ordinary shopping center. Except for one thing. It’s a stage set of Main Street circa 1900.” From the beginning, this mix of merchandise and entertainment has made the Disney shops highly profitable, achieving some of the highest sales per square foot for retail properties in the United States.2

As a consequence, Disney’s lands have greatly influenced the malling of America. “If malls influenced the design of Disneyland,” suggests Karal Ann Marling, “the malls of the 1990s are being transformed by the theme park.… Since the mall is among the essential American public spaces of today, the application of Disneyland theming techniques and aesthetics to the shopping center has far-reaching consequences for architecture in the ‘real’ world.” Coming full circle, a few megamalls, like West Edmonton Mall and Mall of America, have even incorporated amusement parks, in order to get the synergies of theme parks and themed retail.3

In recent years, Las Vegas casinos have also marketed retail entertainment in shopping centers like the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace, the Grand Canal Shoppes at the Venetian, and Desert Passage near the Aladdin Casino. Like Disney’s lands, these themed retail venues have mixed fun and merchandising, and have influenced other malls of America. Especially since 1990, American stores and shopping centers have made entertainment an essential element of the tenant mix. Like Disney’s lands, these mall entertainment projects have tried to provide, in the words of Mall of America, “a place for fun in your life.” In the process, they provide a way to think about the place of fun in American life, and the cultural work of fun.4

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.