Can the American Mall Survive?

In the days before the pandemic, when I visited the Museum of Modern Art, I would stop at Mrs. Fields. Mrs. Fields does not have the best cookies, especially in a city teeming with boutique bakeries. But getting a snack there was never about the quality of the food itself. A Mrs. Fields cookie summons up a weekend in the early 1990s when my parents would pack me and my siblings into our Volvo station wagon and drive us half an hour over state lines to the mall in Stamford, Connecticut. There, my mom would peruse high-end stores that didn’t have locations in our hometown, while my dad would take us kids to buy cookies and eat them on the steps that formed the mall’s gathering spot.