alt Hacker NewsYes - Valley Fair in San Jose is thriving even as all the other area malls turn into mausoleums. It would be interesting to study why. My guess is conspicuous consumption, people who want to be seen wearing certain brands want to be seen buying them too. For anything more pragmatic, it's just to easy to click Amazon.
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One reason is that Valley Fair is the closest there is in the Bay Area to a good East Asian mall. For example, their recent expansion brought in a good variety of restaurants, particularly Asian restaurants, that attract the wealthier Asian residents of Silicon Valley (plus Whites, who in the Bay Area are pretty Asian in habits). These bring in a crowd of regular visitors that will stick around to occasionally shop at the expensive stores, even if they don't love conspicuous consumption enough to buy there all the time. Also a decent number of more youth-focused stores that draw in all demographics - after all, everyone in the younger generations loves anime and K-pop.
I assume Santana Row is still doing OK as well although that's not really a classic mall. And a lot of Vegas malls seem healthy though it's been a few years--even if I sort of half joke I couldn't afford to buy anything at a lot of them.
As you say, there's always Amazon for a lot of things I might have bought in malls. I still want supermarkets and big box DIY stores but I don't really need to go into malls for those.