for a mall. Sure, it's lost an anchor store (I'm guessing a Sears?) and there are a handful of empty store fronts inside. But for a Friday afternoon, there was a decent number of shoppers inside. Something weird though...I would've *sworn* GNM was a two-story mall. I was in a wedding in '95 (the infamous--at least among my friends and family--"blue foot wedding", where everything that could've gone wrong did, but hey, the couple had two kids and remain happily married, so they got the important part right), and I'm almost 100% positive it was at GNM where we picked up our dresses and got our hair done the morning of the wedding. But...I really thought the dress shop was on the second floor. I was looking at the ceiling of the mall today and it looked highly unlikely to have once supported a second floor, so I must be misremembering where the dress shop was. Or at least blocking it out; while *I* didn't have any trouble with my bridesmaid dress, bff had a LOT of trouble with hers, hence the reason she had to practically run to the dress shop the second her hair was done to pick up her dress, praying all the way that it fit.
I'm constantly fascinated by the state of malls these days and have, over the last couple years, made a point to visit as many of the remaining ones in NE Ohio to assess their state of wellbeing. It blows my mind that indoor malls are a fairly recent invention--the first one, Southdale Center in Edina, MN, didn't open until 1956--but many have already closed permanently and some have even been razed to the ground. Here in NE Ohio, at least two that I know of--Euclid Square Mall and Chapel Hill Mall in Akron--are now Amazon fulfillment centers. Now that I'm in retail, indoor malls make more sense than ever. There have been numerous days when we've had few customers thanks to bad weather but I'm sure some of those shoppers would've been content to park once, nip inside a large building and hit a bunch of stores all at once.
On a semi-related note...while I fully support, and definitely engage in, online shopping, I continue to prefer shopping in a brick and mortar store. That preference has only grown now that I work in a brick and mortar store, NOT because I wish to keep my job (I don't) but because I'm learning even more ways for online shopping to go wrong now that I'm one of the people fulfilling online orders for our customers.
