This is rich: Netflix, which played a pioneering role in luring Americans out of malls and onto our couches, is opening themed stores at, yes, the mall.
Can Netflix House — which will sell show- and movie-related merch and meals, offering customers a chance to dance like characters on “Bridgerton” and walk over a glass bridge as on “Squid Game” (presumably with fewer deaths) — bring back the glory days of the mall?
I rose from the couch and drove over to Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg to find out. The first live interview targets I found, right near the curiously quiet entrance to the mall’s five-plex movie theater, honked with derision when I described a Netflix store where you don’t watch movies with an audience, but rather buy things emblazoned with movie-themed logos.
When I looked up from my notebook, I realized my interview was going poorly because I was speaking to two Canada geese seeking a bit of shade on a broiling day. The geese were the only signs of life at Lakeforest. The theater doors were boarded up. The vast parking lots were dotted with tall weeds rather than vehicles.
The chain-link fence surrounding Lakeforest should have clued me in. The mall, born in 1978, died last year, victim of not just Netflix, but Amazon, eBay, Etsy, big boxes, social media, the pandemic — the infinite allure of clicks and screens.
Hundreds of malls have shuttered in recent years, including about half of those in the D.C. region, representing not just the obvious pivot from in-person purchasing to online shopping, but also the reduction of retail to a solo sport, largely stripped of its social function. People who still want to wander among other shoppers and touch the wares can do that, but mainly in more targeted retail settings, often among people like themselves, at high-end shopping meccas such as Tysons Galleria or CityCenterDC or at discount big boxes. As in so much of American culture, the middle has dropped out.
It’s easy to mock the mall culture of the ’70s and ’80s — those cookie-cutter behemoths with tacky food courts, essentially high school cafeterias with slightly better food; endless hallways where old folks took morning constitutionals; fashion shows and local barber shop quartet concerts; evening scenes of strutting, cruising teens.
Making fun of the mall was always a way to assert one’s superiority. Likewise, today’s fascination with dead malls is a somewhat snide exercise in nostalgia. YouTube offers languorous strolls through Lakeforest in its final weeks, or Alexandria’s Landmark Mall (1965-2017) before it was turned into a shelter for homeless people, then demolished, the site now slated for a hospital, fire station, more than 2,000 housing units, some pickleball courts and, of course, retail and restaurants.
Landmark, never spiffy, is probably not on Netflix’s radar as a future site for its House concept. The first Netflix stores are scheduled to open next year in former department store spaces at King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia and at a Dallas mall known for its ice rink and glass vaulted ceiling.
White Flint, long Montgomery County’s fanciest mall, would seem to be more Netflix’s taste, but when I wandered by, it too was fenced off, its buildings leveled, leaving the 45-acre expanse looking like an African savanna. As its anchor stores died, White Flint (1977-2015) tried adding entertainment, hosting the region’s first Dave & Buster’s video game emporium. It didn’t work.
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Netflix’s experience-oriented store is hardly a new concept. Disney was in malls with themed shops decades ago. Nor is Netflix starting from scratch with its “phygital” outlets. In Europe, the streamer stages a live symphony orchestra (playing the score from Netflix’s “Life on Our Planet”). In Britain, the company is producing a stage play prequel to its sci-fi hit, “Stranger Things.” And Netflix opened a “Stranger Things” shop in Las Vegas, featuring mock-ups of the sets — and merch, natch. The company tried a pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles last year; Netflix Bites offered pricey (and bad, critics say) food featured on the streamer’s cooking shows.
Other formerly all-digital companies have nodded to the power of brick-and-mortar reality, from Amazon’s failed bookstores to mall tenants such as Tesla and Warby Parker.
Thriving malls these days (they do exist!) often feature entertainment, such as escape rooms, ax-throwing outlets and casinos. My last stop was Westfield Montgomery, where the shuttered Sears anchor is labeled “Future Development” on the mall map. Still reasonably full — though I counted 28 empty slots in the 133-store mall — Montgomery offers experiences such as a flight simulator, kids’ indoor gym and bowling alley.
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Adding experiences takes malls back to their inventor’s original concept. In 1956, Victor Gruen, envisioning more than a collection of stores, wanted malls to host schools, doctors’ offices, even museums. In recent revival efforts, we’re seeing motor vehicle bureaus, urgent care clinics and housing where Hecht’s, Filene’s and Marshall Field’s once thrived.
Netflix has no such civic intent. It wants to make more money and deepen fans’ ties to its productions. Which is fine, but their goal is not to bring back mall rats. It’s to encourage people to go home and plunk ourselves back on the couch.
