Saturday, September 13, I was feeling exploratory (and in need of a fitted sheet), so I pranced onto the overcrowded bus bound for Cornell students’ favorite weekend getaway: Target. Arriving in the glorious Disneyland of consumerism I had been drooling over, I bounced from Fruit Roll-Ups to Dyson V8 cordless vacuums to seasonally scented candles. (There is something seriously wrong with the Pumpkin Spice Cupcake candle — whatever makes it that way has got to be illegal in the European Union).
Mall culture in the States represents decades of social habits, economic evolution and political soft power. Pop culture tropes would have you believe malls are sanctuaries — like for Cher in Clueless — or a meet market for teenage romance — like for Eleven and Mike in Stranger Things — soon, you’ll find yourself yearning to experience that same mall thrill. The underlying message that comes with the propagation of such a positivist view doubles as a call to consume more and more. Malls become a vector of American teen freedom and an engine of excess, benefitting big corporations.
Take the fictional Starcourt Mall in Stranger Things. While the show sets an affectionate tone capturing the 1980s, it also depicts the weight of the Cold War and of capitalism’s role in polarizing the world. The evils of replacing local businesses in exchange for creating social hubs, homogenizing culture, demonstrate the paradox of freedom at the price of destruction. This isn’t just a fiction. In the 1980s, rural and independent businesses fell victim to the convenience of malls consolidating corporate hubs. In 2025, we’re facing a new wave of consumer reorganization, one far less poetic, which won’t inspire love stories in TV shows or make my generation sigh with longing: last-mile delivery.
We often talk about doom-scrolling, about the newer generations’ inability to separate our social lives and intellectual ideas from the media we are spoon-fed each day we retweet, repost, like, follow, etc. What if this robotization of human interaction as algorithmic cycles enabled the market to become even more centralized than the mall fever of the 1980s? Since we no longer need to migrate in order to socialize, marketing had to come knocking on our doors. Consider now the impact of being able to buy anything, from anywhere, from the comfort of your Ikea-delivered and assembled couch. I’d bet that the coffee table you were eyeing from Darty, or the lawn-mower Home Depot dazzled you with seem like smart purchases when you subtract the physical effort of buying them. This reimagined consumerism has pros as well as cons. The plot of Dawn of the Dead, where a group of survivors takes refuge in a mall during a zombie apocalypse only to discover that zombies are intrinsically attracted to the mall because consumer culture equates to mindless consumption, wouldn’t even be possible today, since we can now thankfully be braindead from the comfort of our homes.
More sympathetically, last-mile delivery has bettered the quality of life of many: elderly citizens don’t need to risk driving as much, which, although they stubbornly deny it (hi, Mema), increases their stress levels and puts them more at risk. The same idea applies to those living with disabilities or limited mobility.
Environmentally, ironically enough, the numbers speak louder than words. Overproduction is responsible for a large part of the ecological crisis overall, but malls have the upper hand over online shopping due to exorbitant packaging necessities. In 2022, Amazon generated approximately 208 million pounds of plastic packaging waste in the United States alone. If laid end to end, this quantity of plastic waste could wrap around the Earth over 200 times. According to Oceana, roughly 22 million pounds of this waste entered waterways.
A point to be argued for online shopping’s sustainability, is the absence of buildings that require constant energy fueling, contrary to malls. However, any energy saved on this front simply gets reinvested in last-mile delivery: an extremely carbon-intensive practice. Fast Fashion brands, such as our homecoming queen, Shein, are notorious for their overproduction of low-quality items that have a short life expectancy, inducing the consumer to buy more in order to compensate for the quality.
And here’s the best part: we’re lonely. The kitsch romanticizing of the boy working at the Wetzel’s Pretzels that lured us to the mall every Wednesday between 2:45 and 4:45 p.m. may actually have driven human connection.
Malls represented community, corporate power, giddiness, capitalism — but they were real places. Reality is overrated, but so is fiction.
Elise Clifford '29 is an Opinion Columnist and a Philosophy and Russian student in the College of Arts & Sciences. Her fortnightly column, State of Confusion, approaches the liberties and anxieties honed by disagreement, and the responsibility that comes with forming identity. She involves aspects of symbolism and skepticism that accompany the weight of glorification. She can be reached at eclifford@cornellsun.com.
