There is a mall about twenty minutes from wherever you are reading this.
You know the one.
The fountain is dry. Half the storefronts have brown paper taped inside the glass.
Giphy
There is a kiosk selling phone cases that has been there since roughly 2011. The food court has three tenants and one of them is a pretzel place run by a teenager who looks deeply alone.
And yet the parking lot is not empty.
That is the strange part. Walk in on a Tuesday morning and there are people. Not shoppers exactly. Walkers doing laps. Older folks having coffee. A line outside one door that does not seem to lead to a store at all.
Something is still working in there. It is just not retail.
Here is the thing almost every article about dying malls gets wrong.