This Saturday we discovered that apparently all of the Suncoast (and Sam Goody) stores in St. Louis are closing.  This means that places like the West County Mall and Chesterfield Mall no longer have a place you can go to browse for DVDs and CDs.  Okay, sure, I bet Sears has a selection, but really…

Okay, I know it’s just a store in the mall that sells DVDs for essentially list price.  Nonetheless its closing truly saddens me.  I think I’m really mourning yet another nail in the coffin of the shopping mall as an interesting place to be.

I’ve always liked shopping malls.  At the risk of sounding shallow or materialistic some of my fondest memories of childhood are going to the mall with my mom.  In those days, the mall had all kind of cool things – toy stores, hobby stores that sold things like chemicals and test tubes, and of course book stores.

If this sounds like an old-guy rant on the good old days, and how civilization/kids/music/sports/food was so much better back then then that junk we have today, well, so be it.

I’ve been lamenting for years how the interesting stores seem to be vanishing at the malls, and the trend continues.  In a few years, unless buying clothes is your major thrill, there will be little point in going to the mall.

As evidence, here’s an off-the-cuff list of neat stores that we’ve lost from local malls in sem-recent memory:
The Warner Brothers Store
The Nature Company
Waldenkids
Rand McNally
Suncoast
Camelot Music
B. Dalton (as a small in-mall store)
FAO Schwarz
KB Toys

I know I’m missing at least a few bookstores.  Sure, we have huge stores now (Borders, B. Dalton), and that’s nice in a way, but it’s much more of a monoculture now, and that’s never a good thing.

End of old-guy rant.