>strongtowns
"major problem with dying shopping malls: crime"
This brings up another couple of advantage of online shopping. Patron safety (and their physical accessibility) isn't a cost factor online. It's HUGE in malls, big in strips, and significant in individual stores. But that advantage likely pales when compared to the big one; shoplifting. One local Ace Hardware franchise told me that shoplifting was the real culprit behind why they shut down.
By taking all the standard business activity in a city — shopping for clothes and household products, getting a haircut, etc. — and moving them to the edge of town in areas built for and only accessible by car, we have robbed our communities of wealth. We inverted the standard design of cities that has been in place for centuries in which the necessities of daily life are located in the middle of town, accessible by the maximum amount of people who can take a simple walk to fulfill their basic needs.
Under that model, the closure of a few shops would merely mean that a storefront was now available for another business. Because traditional main street-type stores were built in a way that could accommodate many different sorts of businesses on a modest scale, a former tailor's shop could fairly easily be converted into a tavern — and the available space would be seen be hundreds of passersby on a daily basis.
Part of that is the rise of car culture, as Brad pointed out. But I think returning to "shops in a row on a busy city street" isn't going to be the solution, either. --The drones are coming.
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