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Hello and welcome to Mental Floss Video. Today we're going to talk about shopping malls
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You remember malls, right? They were the places that you used to go before everything got delivered directly to your door
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They had carousels and gumball machines and that one store that smelled like patchouli and sold Nirvana shirts
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Alright, let's get started. I want to begin by introducing you to a man
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Duh. Amanda, that's me. No, this man's name is Victor Gruen. He grew up in the early 20th century in Vienna
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He emigrated to the United States, later reflecting that he brought with him an architect's degree
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$8 and no English. Gruen went on to design dozens of American shopping malls
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His malls came to be known for two things. They were some of the first with roofs
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and they had two stories. Sound like a place you've been in your life? As Malcolm Gladwell once put it
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Victor Gruen didn't design a building. He designed an archetype. But there were slight differences between what Gruen was trying to do and how malls ended up looking
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Like, he once wrote that he was creating a shopping center, not a selling center
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He viewed these places as community gathering spaces with art and landscaping
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He preferred his malls to include outdoor areas. And eventually, he wanted them to include housing, libraries, and medical centers
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In fact, when he was older, Gruen seemed to have regrets. He once said, I am often called the father of the shopping mall
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I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all
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He had grown to hate malls. In particular, he found the layouts confusing, which was the exact opposite of what he intended
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Gruen wanted people to be able to access what they needed with ease. But his successors had other plans
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They knew that malls could be designed in such a way so that shoppers have to walk a much greater area than originally intended
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seeing lots of things to buy along their journey. It's so disorienting that people may forget what they came to buy in the first place
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They start just generally shopping. And it's not only the layout that causes this experience
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Things like fountains and music and lighting all add to the mall atmosphere
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And poor Victor. This phenomenon was named the Gruen Transfer. The macro version of the transfer is that you actively seek out a mall to stroll through without a purpose
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Quick list time, here are some facts you may not have known about department stores
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Macy was founded by a man named Roland Hussey Macy At some point in his life he got a red star tattooed on his arm According to legend it was after getting lost at sea and using a star for navigation Eventually he used his skin art as the logo for his new store
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Another famous department store founder is Barney Pressman. Back in 1923, he pawned his wife's engagement ring to get enough cash to start the first Barneys
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which, by the way, does not have an apostrophe in the name. Maxwell Cole of Cole's first built his fortune with grocery stores before diversifying into department stores
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And Halle Berry was named after a popular department store in Cleveland, Ohio
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Halle Brothers. In the mid-1980s, you could buy Glazonice from Bloomingdale's. It was 35 ounces of ice chips from a glacier in Greenland
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If you happen to still have those laying around, you might want to mail them back to Greenland
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I hear those glaciers aren't doing so well. Speaking of weird department store merchandise
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here are some items that were featured in the infamous Neiman Marcus holiday catalog over the years
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A Boeing jet, a camel, a $100,000 chicken coop, and a replica of an X-wing starfighter from Star Wars to scale, of course
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Sam Walton, who founded Walmart, worked at JCPenney right out of college
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In the 1960s, the CIA used Vietnamese spies to get information about the Viet Cong
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And instead of money, they sent their spies Sears catalogs. The spies would mark which products they wanted the CIA to buy them, and then they would send them back
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There's a famous legend about a person who successfully returned two snow tires to a Nordstrom
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even though the store doesn't sell car parts. While Nordstrom is notorious for its generous return policy
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and several executives say it is true, Snopes has declared this one fiction
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At the Saks Fifth Avenue store in New York City, the shoe department takes up so much room that it has its own zip code
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Really? Not a lace code? No. Mark is making a face at me
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I think that means I'm done. Let's back up to before Bloomingdale's was selling glacier ice and give you some
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highlights in mall history. From around 1100 BCE through 600 BCE, public buildings went up at the Agora in Athens
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which was a community space, but also a marketplace, so kind of a mall
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Centuries later, around 110 CE, Trajan's Market opened in Rome, where there were shops
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and also apartments. Fun fact, the main street was given a name similar to the Latin word for drink, so it's
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it's definitely possible there was some partying going down. Jumping way ahead, over a thousand new markets popped up in England during the Middle Ages
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and then during the 1880s the department store began its popularity rise in the United States And here where the timeline starts to condense From the turn of the century through the 1920s shopping centers went up all around the U including in California Maryland and Missouri
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These weren't technically malls as we think of them today, but they were usually a cluster of stores that had parking
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so you could access them by car, sometimes only by car. Our old pal Victor Gruen's first indoor mall opened in 1956
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That was the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. Or as it is known locally, Edina, Minnesota
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In the 1980s, chain restaurants that were exclusive to malls were invented
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like Cinnabon and Panda Express. That same decade, the New York Times published an opinion letter
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that referred to malls as, quote, a modern substitute for Main Street
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By 1987, there were a total of 30,000 malls in the United States
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and about 50% of all American retail dollars were spent in them
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Ten years later, malls were in the top three tourist destinations for a whopping 12 states
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By 2008, the Dubai Mall opened, which is currently the largest mall by total area in the world
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Although there are a handful that have more total leasable space, which is apparently a very important quality for a mall to have
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But of course, if you've visited a mall lately, you likely know that things aren't entirely rosy
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With the rise of online shopping, malls don't have the appeal they once did
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Looking ahead to the future, experts claim that one in four U.S. malls will be closed by 2022
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We still have plenty of malls for now. It's not 2022 yet. And people are still definitely
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using them during the holiday season to shop and do something way more important. Meet Santa
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Here's some little known facts about the mall Santa gig. Estimates vary, but according to one
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during the six weeks that are considered Santa holiday season, your average mall Santa meets
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about 10,000 kids. And the typical shopping mall has two different men acting as Santa
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As for how they find them, they're actually Santa distributors, like Nor Programs Corp
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a company that matches Santas to malls all over the United States. Malls have different requests, like for Santas of varying ethnicities or bilingual Santas
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In general, a natural beard is required. A rookie Santa earns about $10,000 per season, but veterans make more like $30,000
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It's important for Santa to know all about the latest holiday movies and toys because they never know when a kid is going to extensively question them about the details
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According to one man who'd been working at Santa for decades, I'd go through the toy catalogs every year
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In a nutshell it staying current Like any dentist or doctor has to read professional journals it the same with us but we have to stay up on everything that has to do with Christmas One of the most famous former
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mall Santas is a man named Jonathan Meath. He was a producer of the television show Where in the
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World is Carmen Sandiego? And as he got older, he looked more and more like Santa. So he took a job
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at a mall. He went on to work as Santa at Radio City Music Hall for two years and eventually even
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starred in a Coca-Cola commercial. A high honor for any Santa. December is probably the worst time to try and find parking near a mall, so let's talk
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about some ways we can make it easier any time of year. If you're always forgetting where you parked, use a Maps app to drop a pen that you can
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access later on your phone, or just take a picture of the nearest sign or landmark
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There are apps that help you find an available parking space or even book a spot in advance
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like ParkWiz, ParkingPanda, Parker, and many more. This has the bonus of also helping you remember where you parked
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Let's say your phone is out of storage though and you can't possibly fit another app on there
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How do you find an open parking spot in a crowded lot? Well mathematician Joe Pagano once shared his trick with Inside Edition
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According to his research, the average mall shopper is there for 120 minutes
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So if you find a section of 20 full parking spaces, it should only take you 6 minutes
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before one opens up. 120 divided by 20 equals just two listens of I want you back by the Jackson 5 before
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you're ready to park. If you've totally lost your car in an endless parking lot, there's a hack for you too
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Holding your car key up to your head does indeed give it a bigger range
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But if this is a consistent problem for you, in some cases you can even open up the key
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and add a little extra wire to the antenna to increase its range
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But if you blow yourself up, it is not our fault. And let's end on a weird one
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In one internet video, the driver tied an inflated balloon to the back of their car
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This way they could back their car as close as possible to a wall, knowing that when they
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heard the balloon pop, they should break. That's probably a little too much work, but hey, I want to give you the option
