Amazon and Air Conditioning: We Lost More than Our Shopping Malls

My wife is from a town along the Marmara Sea just a short way south of Istanbul. The past two years we have been able to spend summers there with our family, swimming in the sea and hiking in the green hills of Cinarcic.

Most people in Turkey live in apartments, often with multiple generations together under one roof. Even in a rural fishing village like Cinarcik we have neighbors upstairs and an HOA.

Like most people in the world, our family does not have air conditioning. So like most people in the world, we go outside as much as possible.

Every evening the whole family piles into Baba's tiny Peugeot and we head down to the sea where we join everyone else in town in the nightly ritual of walking along the shore, greeting friends, having tea and dondurma (ice cream), and browsing.

That is "browsing" in the archaic sense of walking into stores and looking at things, as opposed to the contemporary meaning of "searching the internet."

It turns out this quaint tradition is common throughout much of the world, particularly in less affluent nations and warmer climes. In Italy is is called "La Passeggiata," but I have found it to be practiced many places that apartments are cramped and hot.

Phoenix is hot too, but here we need a reason to get out. We need somewhere to go. We have it good here - big homes, big rooms kept as cold as we desire with ubiquitous air conditioning. Here if you tell your partner "let's get out of the house," they will reply: "where do you want to go?"

We go to eat, we go meet friends, we go to an event, we go to the bar, but we don't just "go out." 

Is this just a phenomenon of the Southwest? Is your city like this? Is this normal for human beings to live this way?

This week we learned that Metrocenter Mall is closing. Many longtime Phoenicians thought it was long closed already. It had been limping along as a zombie mall for years. This South Park clip captures the phenomenon of zombie malls across America:

By coincidence, I spent a lot of time at Metrocenter the past few months. Aaron and I were doing a bunch of free work for the struggling businesses there, and we were entertaining the idea of renting out a gigantic space to do with whatever we wanted. The mall was willing to sign leases at such an extraordinary discount that we didn't need a plan - with a 5100 square foot playground, we would make one up.

During that time we befriended the management and a lot of the business owners there. About half of them were immigrant entrepreneurs trying to make ends meet, and the other half grew up near the mall. I spoke to more than a couple people who said they used to ice skate there back in the 80's. I thought I did too, but when I checked the dates, I realized the ice rink was closed before I was five years old. I guess it is an invented memory.

Now I find myself missing a life I never really had. By the time I had a driver's license (16) and money to spend (older than that) Metrocenter was already well into the advanced stages of its decline. I never really got the the mall rat experience of the movies. My parents grew up cruising Fremont Street in muscle cars, like in American Graffiti. I grew up playing Cruisin USA in my air conditioned room.

Malls around the country have failed and closed as we shift our shopping behaviors. First it was the the strip malls organized around a Kohls or a Target, and now it's Amazon and same day delivery. My wife and I order groceries without leaving our bed.

I am all for creative destruction. My free market, classical liberal instincts say it's a good thing for malls to fail and for the land to be put to more productive use. If people prefer shopping online and spending their time on other activities, who am I to say they are wrong? No bailouts, no subsidies, no tears of sympathy. This is progress.

But there's nothing in the classical liberal playbook that says we have to ignore culture, and in fact the older I get, the more I think culture is everything. The tragedy isn't losing our shopping centers; the tragedy is losing a way of life where we had a place and a reason to go out.

The truth is, it was gone before I got here. I was born into a suburban palace of ample air conditioned space where I could enjoy my own little screen all by my lonesome. I never even knew that I was missing out on evening strolls in the summer breeze where every day had the opportunity of some chance interaction that might change the course of my life.

In matters of economic policy, I'm a classical liberal. But that's just part of the story of how each of us will build the world we want our children to live in. Working within the classical liberal framework of laws and rights and freedoms, we have to be entrepreneurs of the society we want to make.

The malls are gone, and we're not giving up air conditioning. As we overcome the "push" of hot, cramped spaces that once compelled people to go out, we have to innovate on the "pull".

Unless people really do prefer this social distancing, in which case who am I to judge? I'll move to Cinarcik.