Every Store That Made a Mall a Mall, Ranked

The American mall is not quite dead, but it is doing that thing where it tells you it's fine and then doesn't return your texts. The anchor department stores are hollow. The fountain is drained. Half the storefronts are papered over, and the other half are a phone-repair kiosk and a place that sells mattresses for some reason.

So before it goes entirely, a proper accounting. Not the mall itself — the ecosystem of it, the specific stores that made a 1996 Saturday feel like somewhere you wanted to be dropped off. Ranked with total confidence, because that is the only honest way to rank anything.

12Successories

A store that sold framed motivational posters — the eagle, the rower at dawn, the single word ACHIEVEMENT in a serif font. A store whose entire product was the idea of ambition, sold to people wandering a mall on a Tuesday. Beautiful, in a way. Last, easily.

11Sunglass Hut

A kiosk that had convinced itself it was a store. You have never once, in your life, planned to go there. You have only ever been ambushed by it on the way to somewhere real, tried on a $180 pair of sunglasses, seen the price, and set them down like they were hot.

10Natural Wonders

Geodes. Wolf T-shirts. A CD of whale sounds playing softly. One of those birds that dips its beak into a glass of water forever. It was a science museum gift shop that had escaped the science museum and was now just loose in the mall, and it ruled.

9Spencer's

The store your parents told you to stay out of, which is of course why you went in. Lava lamps and black lights up front, a slow moral descent toward the back, and somewhere in the middle a mood ring and a poster you were absolutely not allowed to hang. Formative.

8KB Toys

Cramped, over-lit, and stacked to the ceiling with more toys per square foot than physics should permit. The clearance bin by the door was a war zone. It hung on until 2009 and then it didn't, and a certain kind of childhood retail energy went with it.

7Orange Julius

You could smell it before you could see it — that specific frothy-citrus cloud hanging over the food court. It has since been quietly folded into the Dairy Queen menu, its stands gone, its secret powder discontinued. We wrote the whole strange autopsy if you want to grieve properly.

6Waldenbooks

Before the bookstore was a destination with a café, it was a modest rectangle between a Foot Locker and a Claire's, and it was where you first bought a book with your own money because you wanted to and not because a teacher said so. Gone by 2011. The mall got quieter without it and nobody quite noticed why.

5The Sharper Image

The museum you couldn't afford. You went in to sit in the massage chair, be startled by the air purifier that turned out to do nothing, and touch the chrome. Nobody was buying. Everybody was visiting. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2008, which surprised no one who had ever watched it operate as a free amusement park.

4The Arcade

Aladdin's Castle, Tilt, whatever yours was called — the dark room with the carpet you couldn't see and the machines louder than the mall would otherwise allow. A pocket of tokens, a high score with your initials, and the specific dread of your mom appearing in the doorway to say it was time to go. The mall's only genuinely cool room.

3The Teen Fashion Store

Contempo Casuals, Structure, Wet Seal, Gadzooks — pick your poison. This is where the social mall happened: the trying-on, the mirror, the standing outside because you didn't have money but your friend did. It smelled like a single overpowering body spray and it sounded like whatever was on TRL. It was the whole point of being fifteen.

2The Food Court

Not a store, we know. Doesn't matter. The food court was the mall's town square, its beating greasy heart — the Sbarro slice the size of your head, the Cinnabon you could smell from the parking lot, the free samples of teriyaki chicken on a toothpick that constituted an entire social contract. Every path through the mall eventually led here. It was where you sat, and being able to just sit somewhere with your friends and nowhere to be is a thing that turned out to be rarer than it looked.

1The Record Store

Sam Goody. Camelot. Suncoast for the movies, Musicland for everything else. Yes, the CDs were $18.99 and yes, that was a crime. It didn't matter. This was the store you went to first, the one with the listening stations and the poster wall and the wall of singles where you could buy one song on a little cassette like a civilized person. It was where taste got assembled in public, where you flipped through a rack pretending you weren't hoping someone would see what you were holding.

We are, after all, named for what was on the other side of that single. Of course the record store is number one. It was the only store in the mall that was selling you a version of yourself — and unlike the massage chair, you actually took it home.

The mall isn't coming back, not really, not the way it was. But the ranking stands, and the smell of that Cinnabon is loaded into your brain forever whether you like it or not. Flip the tape — there's a whole feature on the gadget store at number five.