Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio. Guess what, Mengo, what's that? Well, all right, I know you love shopping malls, so I'm sure you've noticed these people, but you know the people who like to exercise by walking back and forth through the mall. Sure, mall walkers. It's like half the country's grandparents at least, and as you mentioned, it's especially popular with senior citizens. But they're actually not the only ones doing this. There was this two thousand fifteen report from the CDC that shows that shopping malls are now the second most popular place to go for a walk, just behind neighborhoods. How weird is this? It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on mall walking? Well, this isn't a small report either. It's actually fifty six pages long and I'm reading every word of it is just riveting. But to be fair, taking walks is a way to prevent certain diseases. And the CDC is actually the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And I bet you forgot that silent p at the end of the CDC. There's one funny thing that I learned. It actually turns out that most mall walkers don't actually shop at the mall. At most they might buy a coffee at the food court or something like that. But according to the CDC report, they really just want the camaraderie, you know, to spend some time strolling and socializing. And that actually puts mall walkers right in line with the original idea for shopping malls. So the architect who designed the first mall in America's name is Victor Gruen. He actually envisioned the mall as a place to quote find opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment. That's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything, mall walkers are really the only ones doing mall's right. Yeah. I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind for shopping malls than what they would ultimately become. But what exactly did he envision, why didn't it work out? And most importantly, is there still a chance that his high hopes for shopping malls could still be fulfilled? Those are just a few of the questions we'll try to answer today. So let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and it's always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and on the other side of that soundproof glass, just tucking into a feast of food Court staples. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here. I know, Mrs Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon, a pretzel from Anti Ads, and a huge orange Julius to wash it all. Man, it's like a trip to the mall in food form. But from what it sounds like, that wasn't exactly Victor grew his vision of them all. No, I don't think so. But to understand what his vision did entail, we should first talk about who Gruin was and where he came from. So he was born in nineteen oh three in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in a middle class Jewish family, fell in love with the city's thriving art scene, and this was at a pretty young age. So in the nineteen twenties he spent many of his evenings performing satirical theater at various cafes, and then during the day he studied architecture and this was at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, so it was actually the same school that had rejected Adolf Hitler just a few years earlier. Just a little fun factor growing, I feel like too good for Hitler should be on all their t shirts. Well. Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't the only point of overlap between Victor Gruin's life and Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi Germany annexed Austria back in nineteen thirty eight, grew And knew it was time to leave his country behind, and weirdly, he left the same week as Sigmund Freud. I keep throwing in these little side facts about all these people that I like them. Well, leaving was easier said than done, so Grewin turned to one of his theater buddies for help with the escape, and it's actually kind of remarkable. His friend, dressed up as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Grewin and his wife to the airport and then made sure they were allowed to board a plane to Zurich. So from there the couple made their way to England, where they found passage on his ocean liner and traveled over to New York City. So Growin later looked back on this journey and he said that he had arrived quote with an architect's degree, eight dollars and no English. Pretty tough. Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story. So how do you make it work? Well? He once again turned to the art scene. He joins up with some other German immigrants and together they formed what they called the Refugee Artist Group, where Grewin did set design. So the group caught the attention of some big names in the music business. This included Al Jolson Irving Berlin, and they ended up helping them with their songs and all of that help actually paid off. So the next summer the group was a the Stage, an original Broadway show, and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight, which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving with eight dollars and howevery much longer later, the guy's putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks. It's not bad, you know. So so things were going well for Grwin, but his architecture career had you know, suffered since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown, grew In bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna, was this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to open this leather good store on Fifth Avenue, and he asked Grewing to help him design it, and so Grewin agreed, and what he ultimately came up with with something of a game changer for American store design. So rather than build the entrance flush, you know, with the street like all the other shops in the area, Grewin actually made this recess like arcade style entryway with the tall glass cases on either side to sort of draw in the customers. So once they came inside, these guests were just dazzled by these faux marble floors, a green glass ceiling, a slew of bright spotlights that sort of reflected these display cases, and you know, the result was a store that felt decidedly modern and unlike anything else on Fifth Avenue or really American retail in general. So it's kind of hard to imagine now, but customers and critics ate up this new design, and as a result of this, Gruin was swamped with job offers. I mean he was going to these upscale design stores all around the city and beyond getting these offers. So obviously designing these high end boutiques and then going to big, boxy shopping malls seems like quite a leap, and not exactly an upward one. Maybe so, But keep in mind that Gruin was commissioned to design the country's first indoor shopping mall in nineteen fifty two and it opened in nineteen fifty six. So prior to that, malls as we know them really didn't exist, so there wasn't any stigma that we might associate with them today. So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like in America pre mall? Well, it was, you know, mainly mail order catalogs and department stores for the most part. Outdoor shopping centers started to catch on in the nineteen twenties, but they were basically just strip malls as we think of them now, like a bunch of different stores stuck together and just happened to share a parking lot. So Gruen's big idea was to put all of these stores and walkways under one roof, and then you'd have the addition of central air and heating to make this complex sustainable year round. And that last part was especially important given the location of Gruen's first mall. This was the Southdale Shopping Center and Adena, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, where the winters are obviously frigid. Exactly, I don't think people would want to be walking around in those parking lots in the cold of winter, and so the project grew unsigned on for was meant to address the residents demand for a temperate place to be able to shop, and one where they wouldn't have to brave the cold if they wanted to visit a different store after they've gone to the first one. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what about this bigger idea he had of them all being kind of the social hub. Well, a lot of that was just in how he arranged the interior. So just as an example, most shopping centers of the era were on a single level. So you know, you think about the number of stores in Southdale, it was actually meant to house seventy two stores plus these two big anchor department stores. So making your way from one end to the other would have felt, you know, like forever just to get there, so instead Grewing opted for this two story design. They were linked by escalators, of course, and now we're all envisioning kind of the modern shopping center. So not only did this break up that monotony and make for a much easier trip back to the car, but it also ensured that people would circulate better, have more opportunities to socialize. But probably the most prominent example of his people first design is what he put in the middle of it. It was kind of an indoor garden court, I guess they called it, complete with the skylight, a goldfish pond, towering live trees, balconies, hanging plants, like all of this other stuff, including a bustling cafe. There was even a twenty one ft tall cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds. And so it was basically Gruin's ode to the European piazzas that he had grown up within Vienna, and he wanted to bring some of that old world European charm to the American shopping scene, which he kind of saws characterized by urban sprawl and tacky design. So you fast forward a few years later where in nineteen sixty at this point, and Gruen wrote a book in which he outlined his hope and belief that the malls could really be more like a town square. And you know Greek Agora's of the Past, which is not exactly what we think of malls today, right, definitely not so. When Southdale opened in October of nineteen fifty six, it was met with this glowing praise from shoppers, as well as dram list from every publication from Newsweek to the New York Times, the Women's Wear Daily. In fact, my favorite review though, comes from Time, which heralded Gruin's mall as quote, the pleasure dome with parking. You know, it's just it's such a great quote. But with all that said, there was at least one person who absolutely detested the Southdale Shopping Mall, and that was none other than the legendary architect Frank Lloyd. Right. So, a month after the mall opened, and you know, it's gotten all this national press, right made the pilgrimage to Minnesota to see it for himself, and he was not impressed at all. So after his visit, right Penn the scathing article for the Star Tribune writing, quote, what is this a railroad station or a bus station? You've got a garden court that has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm. I love that the way he really criticized it was by calling it a railroad station. You really really burned them with that. So I'm guessing even in the minorities, since you know, every mall seems to have cred most of his design from Gruin's, I mean, somebody must have liked these, right, oh absolutely. I mean the design was such a success that it became really the de facto blueprint for indoor malls throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And Gruin embraced all the love at first, and for about a decade after the south Dale Mall opened, he gave speeches, he wrote books about his creation, and really kind of pondered what he hoped it would do for American society. But sadly though Gruin's view of his work soured in the nineties, sixties and in the seventies, is more malls began to dominate the landscape. I mean they popped up everywhere, and worst of all, these copycat malls were built with tweak designs aimed at maximizing profit rather than, you know, more fostering that sense of community. So he even started to see malls that he designed himself in a new light. So when he visited some later in life, he wrote of the quote severe emotional old shock, heat experience, and the ugliness and discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that sprang up around me. So it definitely changed the way he thought about them, and it was a bit disillusioned, and he decided to move home to Vienna. But when he got there, he was actually heartbroken to discover that the new shopping mall had been built just south of the old Vienna and that it was driving independent shops out of business. And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in a piece for The New York Or, quote Victor Gruin invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America. That's awful, But you know, I'm a little confused it. It It sounds like Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots, so were though something that was added later and and not a part of his original design. Yeah, that's actually pretty right. I mean, Gruin's mall designs included a much more modest parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we're used to associating with malls today. And in fact, when Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed it in the center of this four hundred and sixty three acre plot, and to fill all that surrounding space, he drew up designs for apartment buildings and schools and a park and actually even a man made lake. But unfortunately none of that ever came to pass, and instead the space was used to make this massive parking lot. And of course future malls followed suit, and very few of them ever adapted Gruen's multi use approach to these developments. That that is a shame. You know. The whole story kind of reminds me of what happened with the inventor of the TV file of Farnsworth. You know, he was another guy who saw his invention grow up in a way he wasn't expecting and grew to kind of hate it over time. Yeah, it is weird to kind of resent the thing that's held up as the biggest achievement of your life right for both these and in Gruen's case, he actually took his distaste even further than Farnsworth by completely disowning his creation. So, two years before his death, which was in nineteen eighty, grew And gave a speech in London and he washed his hands of malls entirely. Here's what he told the crowd. I'm often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our city. Okay, well, and now that we've unspoiled the long and sad history behind the birth of shopping malls, where do you say we stepped inside of one and take a closer look at some of the behind the scenes tricks that developers used to keep the customer shopping. Sounds good, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about all the sort of devious design tricks that shopping malls used to empty our wallets. But to be clear, none of the stuff we're about to talk about came from Victor Gruin, as you can probably guess by now, he was fundamentally opposed to any design always aimed at manipulating customers into spending more money. I think he would have felt like he was betraying that sense of community that he was hoping to instill in these malls. Yeah, but there's another dark layer to the story because despite his principled approach to design, Grown still wound up having a shady mall tactic named after him. So, you know, sometimes you get disoriented in a mall or a big store, like you're just walking through this giant maze and you kind of lose track of where you are in the building or how long you've been there. That's known as Gruin transfer, and Grown would have hated the name, but the effect is a real thing, and stores actually put a lot of effort and thought into how to best trigger this reaction in their customers. So Victor Gruen might have wanted malls that we're easy to navigate, but future designers learned that confused shoppers actually spend more money, and that's why so many malls have these maze like layouts with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around. Other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can think about things like music that's relaxing and played through the pipe speakers or um eye catching entrance displays. And the more time you spend in this mall days, the more likely you are to make impulse buyes. Right, Like, an article on New Scientists describes it as being quote confused into a state of unplanned consumption. I call this the Ikea effect. I think, and and and all. This makes sense, And I get why they called it after Gruin, but you know, because he helped build these malls. But actually help me out with that last part, the word transfer. Yeah, so what's actually being transferred is the desire to have a specific item. So you go to the mall to buy a sweater, and it's only a sweater that you're looking for, But if the designers play their cards right, you will be so dazzled by the time you get to the store that your desire for a sweater will already have been transferred to a bunch of different items that you never planned on buying. Okay, that makes sense, but I mean I'm still curious if grew and didn't come up with the different sales tricks that we find in malls now than who is responsible for that? Like it was just mall architects who followed him or what I mean, that's where some of the ideas came from and new methods were added over the years, certainly, but a lot of the common features and malls actually originated with one of Gruen's contemporaries, This Fellows storefront designer. His name was A. Alfred Todman, and he goes on to be a huge mall mogul. In the late nineteen fifties, Todman followed Gruen's lead by building his own indoor shopping mall in California, and over the next fifty years or so, he just kept on building. So he actually passes away in two thousand fifteen at the age of but his company is still going strong with twenty four malls spread across eleven different states plus Puerto Rico, South Korea, and China, and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by Todman over the years. Alright, so can can you give me some examples of what these designs are? Yeah? I mean this is gonna sound a little hyperbolic, which I guess the kind of is. But a lot of Todman's innovations were sort of like perversions of what Gruin had designed. So, you know, we talked about grew and wanting this two level mall. It was so that people could circulate easier and bump into more people. But Tobman kind of took that trick and moved the escalators to the ends of the buildings, so you wouldn't meet up in the center, but rather you'd have to make the full loop around the mall and buy more as a result, And Tobin's mall has also applied the circulation theory to the exteriors. He was actually the first to put a circular road around them all and add a bunch of extra entrances so that shoppers could easily get to any part of the building. Oh, it's interesting. And that bit about the moving of the escalators, I mean, it's such a good example of how a simple tweak can change the focus from you know, customer comfort to something that really more benefits the sellers. And I'm curious, did you find any other cases like that? Yeah? So another good example is what Tobman did with the lighting. So he kept all the skylights from Gruen's design, but he made them recess so the sunlight would never directly affect the storefronts. And he also added these tiny lights around the skylights so that when the sun started to go down, customers wouldn't take the shift in lighting as this queue that it was time to leave. And uh, speaking of visibility, Topman insisted on using transparent handrails in his malls so that you could always see the stores around you, regardless of what level you were at. I mean, apparently it was he was trying to battle something called threshold resistance, which I guess refers to both the physical and psychological barriers that might prevent a customer from entering a store, Like they could block your view and keep you from seeing a store in the upper level that you might otherwise go inside. I guess that that's part of it. Well, I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about music earlier, and I have to mention this weird fact that came across this week. So, according to a two thousand eleven report from Stanford, all the malls in America put together consume more than a gig a lot of electricity every month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed to make you shop more. And when you do the math on this, that energy usage comes out to three thousand metric tons of C O two added to the atmosphere each year just from this open music. Yeah, I mean, I guess not only as an annoying and manipulative it's also contributing to climate change. Well. To be fair, human society admits around thirty giga tons of greenhouse gases per year, so it's not like three thousand tons from the mall is doing that much damage. But I just thought that that was interesting. And you know, of course, once you factor in all the energy that malls used to heat, cool and light these massive interiors around the clock, their contribution actually starts to look a bit more significant when you put it in, you know, as a whole. I guess, yeah, I'm sure. I Actually, Gabe was telling me about this one mall he was in Kentucky where there were only like two or three actual stores, and the entire complex still open like every other one had been shuttered. But the A C. The lights, the escalators, the music, you know, all of that was still going on throughout the building. And that's actually not a one off thing. There are hundreds of malls like that across the country. I feel like you see them on YouTube a lot, like Urban Explorers will will go and take videos of them. But a lot of these dead malls, as they're called, are actually just limping along kind of on life support, like the one he saw in Kentucky. Yeah, I feel like we should probably talk a little bit about why that is in the state of malls you know today, But let's take one more quick break and then we'll get back to that. Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, So it's been sixty three years since the country got its first indoor shopping mall, and during that time as many as hundred more malls have been built in the US, sometimes growing up more than twice the raid of the population. And you can tell by those numbers that America's malls have actually had a great run. But I want to ask, how are they holding up in the digital age? Like, do the next sixty years look as promising as the first? Oh? Not even close. I mean it's it's not. Yeah. I was gonna say, thanks for that tough question. I mean, those fifteen hundred malls you mentioned, we're now down to about and you know, if you ask a lot of analysts, they project that hundreds more will close over the next decade alone. So what do you think is behind that decline? Is it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping or what is it? Alright, Well, maybe cover your ears, because predictable or not, the rise of online shopping has definitely done some serious damage to the mall industry. And that said, the demise of brick and mortar retail has been greatly exaggerated though, because according to the Atlantic, it's actually growing at a rate of three percent per year. Even e commerce space companies like Amazon and Apple, they've doubled down on the physical retail game, which is something they definitely wouldn't be doing if brick and mortar retail was truly on its way out. So why are malls closing then? Why is it so desperate? Well, to put it simply, our country devotes way way too much space to retail stores. So forty eight square feet per person, to be exact, that is twice as much retail space per capita than any other country in the world. And a lot more than that in some cases, four times more than Japan and France, six times more than England, nine times more than Italy, eleven times more than Germany. I'm just gonna keep going. I've got fifty seven more of these. But a retail analyst told CNBC that America is quote the most overstored place in the world, and when you look at the numbers, it's hard to disagree with us. So obviously this isn't a new development. We've been hearing about urban sprawl for years now, and it was a big part of why I grewin turned his back on malls entirely in the seventies. So why is the rug being pulled out now? Like, did it just take a while for the effects of all that retail expansion to manifest? Yeah, I mean again, the arrival of online shopping was kind of the tipping point in in all of this, and being able to shop at home really shine a spotlight on just how out of control retail construction had grown. So suddenly you had all these empty stores, malls without customers. So we may have just started seeing the effects recently, but the so called retail upon elipse has actually been a long time coming. I mean, the big question now is what to do with all the unneeded malls that we already have. And in most cases, tearing down a failed mall is considered too expensive to be a real option. But leaving them there to just decay, like that's not an appealing strategy either, Right, Well, it's not like all the remaining malls are going to close. From what I've read this week, the three hundred or so of the top earning malls like they're gonna be fine in long term. And those are the fanciest, top tier malls that sit in wealthy areas and still bring in a lot of money. But the other eight hundred or so lower tier malls, you know, you might have to get creative with, like if if they want to avoid being those sort of YouTube spectacles that that that we were talking about earlier. Yeah, and you know, from what I've seen, that's exactly what a lot of them are doing. Some of them is just being straight up repurposed, either as apartment complexes, churches, or schools. I even read about one old mall that's been transformed into this enormous indoor paintball park, which that could kind of sound, yeah, but plenty of other malls are being inverted into what are called lifestyle centers, So that's kind of a more hip or more upscale take on a mall, with specialty stores like Creighton Barrel or Pottery Barn in place of the more traditional department store anchors like a Sears or a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment options than regular malls do. So in addition to stores and restaurants, you might find life music venues, a bowling alley, fine art galleries. Sometimes it built in movie theater, and a lot of these lifestyle centers are open air too, with like these facades that make stores look like row houses, so you get some of that main street field to them. Yeah, I mean I've been to a few of those before that. There was one being built in Dirham years ago, and I remember thinking, like, you don't have to build a mall that looks like an old tobacco warehouse when you've got these old tobacco warehouses just around the corner. But exactly what I do like about this Manufacturer downtown field is that it's kind of a throwback to what Victor Gruen wanted for malls. In the fifties, like he wanted to bring a touch of culture and character to the suburbs by just giving people a nice place to gather and socialize and of course shop as well. Yeah. I think that's right, And actually in the book I quoted earlier, grew and wrote that quote. By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected, potestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. That's while the classed up look of a lifestyle center might seem like the first time malls have come close to delivering on that promise, I'd actually argue that even the crasses most commercial malls still did manage to fill an important void for a lot of people. So what do you mean by that, Well, think back to when malls were at their peak of the nineteen eighties and even the early nineties. So back then there was really some social benefit to going to the mall. You think about rural and suburban areas, there just weren't enough people to have the kind of daily interactions that you know so commonplace in cities. So in that sense, malls were a way to get people into close for proximity to one another really more prompted this meaningful chance encounters for people who might not have met otherwise. And you know, aside from accessibility to humans, there's also accessibility to products that malls provided. If you think back in the dark days before the internet, just so scared to even think about, you know, someone in a place like Minnesota, they would have very limited selection of clothing and books and music to choose from, and and any kind of international products would have been next to impossible. But with these malls coming along, you know, suddenly products from all over the country and all over the world really were available under one gigantic roof, which is a good point. And speaking of mall on nostalgia and how different it is from a world where we're getting marketed to from our phones and our computers and just non stuff. I have a quote here that I wanted to share from an author named Ian bo Ghost and and he wrote a great article for The Atlantic that kind of served as an elegy for shopping mall culture. And this is what he writes, quote, America, days of hating them all are numbered? When it gets replaced by Apple town squares, Walmart, supercenters and the online offline slurry of an ever rising Amazon. We will miss those zoos of capitalism, those prisons of commerce where consumerism roared and swelled but inevitably remained contained. I guess you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Well, we can't do it on the past forever. So what do you say we head into the fact off and share a few of the crazier mall stories we found this week. All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get us started. Let's see. Well, remember how I said that America has twice as much retail space per person compared to the rest of the world. Well, our record is even worse when it comes to parking spaces. In total, the United States has roughly two billion parking spots and only about two hundred and fifty million cars to park in them. That evens out to eight parking spots for every car in the country. And one of the biggest contributors to this over supply of parking is, of course, the giant parking lot that circles the thousand plus shopping malls that we have been talking about today. In fact, there are more than twelve and a half thousand at the Mall of America alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one person who always comes out ahead at malls, no matter what the circumstances, and that is Santa Claus. So according to a magazine you might be familiar with mental floss. Being a mall Santa is a salaried position and can net first timers around ten thousand dollars per six weeks season, and if you're a Santa with a little bit more experience under your belt, you might actually be able to earn closer to thirty thousand dollars per season. Of course, any would be Santa's listening should keep in mind most malls typically required their Santa's to have natural beards, so no false is allowed. Okay, all right, well here is a kind of a weird one. So malls may be on the decline in the US, but the business is still booming in many Asian countries, particularly in China. The only problem is that a lot of the men there don't seem to enjoy shopping nearly as much as their wives do. So to get around this, some Chinese malls have begun offering complimentary lounges specifically for board husbands who would have rather stayed home. The name for these facilities literally translates to husband cloak room, which I kind of love. It sounds like they offer way more amenities than the average code check. I mean this varies from all the mall, but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like WiFi, snacks, big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs. I love that, And I love the idea of like a wife dropping off their husband and claiming a tag and then like, maybe we're getting to come get them at the end of the day exactly. So this is a pretty odd fact. Six malls in southern California now feature funeral home chios where shoppers can pick out coffins are earned and plan their own funerals. Apparently they even have a cremation earned with the l A Dodgers logo on it. So so far, the funeral industry seems to view this whole thing is a major win in terms of reaching the audience where they're at. There's this one director of International Cemetery Creation and Funeral Association who said, quote, nobody gets up on a Saturday morning and says, gee, it's a nice day. I wonder if I can go out and get myself a burial plot. But if they're surrounded by happy, lively people and maybe clutching a bag of Mrs Field's cookies, the thought is they'll feel differently. I'm not sure that I agree with that, but it is pretty interesting and I guess there's a reason they're doing it. But all right, with the risk of seeming obsessed here, I'm going to steer us back to the exciting world of mall parking lots, but for good reason. Here because I want to share a tip that I came across for how to easily find an open space. According to mathematician Joe Pagano, all you need to do is find in how close to the mall entrance, get about twenty full spaces in your sight, and then just stop and wait six minutes. I love the idea of just stopping like that's not gonna upset anyone behind you, But why six that's According to Joe, the average shopper spends a hundred and twenty minutes in the mall. So if you divide a hundred and twenty minutes by the twenties spaces, you've zeroed in on then you get six minutes, and that's how long it should take for a shopper to return to one of those spaces. So if you follow Joe's method, that should be the max amount of time you'll spend hunting for a spot. Well, I do like that one, and I'm gonna have to try it out the next time I'm craving and range. Julius, I I think you end up with the trophy for this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much. All Right, well, I think that does it for today's Part Time Genius from Gabe, Tristan Manguesh and me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The critic in the p

Welcome to Part Time Genius, the production of I Heart Radio. Guess what, Mengo, what's that? Well, all right, I know you love shopping malls, so I'm sure you've noticed these people, but you know the people who like to exercise by walking back and forth through the mall. Sure, mall walkers. It's like half the country's grandparents at least, and as you mentioned, it's especially popular with senior citizens. But they're actually not the only ones doing this. There was this two thousand fifteen report from the CDC that shows that shopping malls are now the second most popular place to go for a walk, just behind neighborhoods. How weird is this? It's weird, But why is the CDC doing reports on mall walking? Well, this isn't a small report either. It's actually fifty six pages long and I'm reading every word of it is just riveting. But to be fair, taking walks is a way to prevent certain diseases. And the CDC is actually the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. And I bet you forgot that silent p at the end of the CDC. There's one funny thing that I learned. It actually turns out that most mall walkers don't actually shop at the mall. At most they might buy a coffee at the food court or something like that. But according to the CDC report, they really just want the camaraderie, you know, to spend some time strolling and socializing. And that actually puts mall walkers right in line with the original idea for shopping malls. So the architect who designed the first mall in America's name is Victor Gruen. He actually envisioned the mall as a place to quote find opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment. That's interesting. So by that measure, despite not buying anything, mall walkers are really the only ones doing mall's right. Yeah. I don't know about from the mall manager's perspective, but definitely from Gruin's. And he clearly had more in mind for shopping malls than what they would ultimately become. But what exactly did he envision, why didn't it work out? And most importantly, is there still a chance that his high hopes for shopping malls could still be fulfilled? Those are just a few of the questions we'll try to answer today. So let's dive in a their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and it's always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketer and on the other side of that soundproof glass, just tucking into a feast of food Court staples. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I gotta be honest, I'm a little jealous of what I'm seeing over here. I know, Mrs Fields. There's a cinnamon bun from Cinnabon, a pretzel from Anti Ads, and a huge orange Julius to wash it all. Man, it's like a trip to the mall in food form. But from what it sounds like, that wasn't exactly Victor grew his vision of them all. No, I don't think so. But to understand what his vision did entail, we should first talk about who Gruin was and where he came from. So he was born in nineteen oh three in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in a middle class Jewish family, fell in love with the city's thriving art scene, and this was at a pretty young age. So in the nineteen twenties he spent many of his evenings performing satirical theater at various cafes, and then during the day he studied architecture and this was at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, so it was actually the same school that had rejected Adolf Hitler just a few years earlier. Just a little fun factor growing, I feel like too good for Hitler should be on all their t shirts. Well. Unfortunately, though, the Academy wasn't the only point of overlap between Victor Gruin's life and Adolf Hitler. So when Nazi Germany annexed Austria back in nineteen thirty eight, grew And knew it was time to leave his country behind, and weirdly, he left the same week as Sigmund Freud. I keep throwing in these little side facts about all these people that I like them. Well, leaving was easier said than done, so Grewin turned to one of his theater buddies for help with the escape, and it's actually kind of remarkable. His friend, dressed up as a Nazi stormtrooper, escorted Grewin and his wife to the airport and then made sure they were allowed to board a plane to Zurich. So from there the couple made their way to England, where they found passage on his ocean liner and traveled over to New York City. So Growin later looked back on this journey and he said that he had arrived quote with an architect's degree, eight dollars and no English. Pretty tough. Yeah, I mean, that's an incredible story. So how do you make it work? Well? He once again turned to the art scene. He joins up with some other German immigrants and together they formed what they called the Refugee Artist Group, where Grewin did set design. So the group caught the attention of some big names in the music business. This included Al Jolson Irving Berlin, and they ended up helping them with their songs and all of that help actually paid off. So the next summer the group was a the Stage, an original Broadway show, and this actually ran for eleven weeks straight, which is just remarkable to think about this guy arriving with eight dollars and howevery much longer later, the guy's putting on a Broadway show that's running for eleven weeks. It's not bad, you know. So so things were going well for Grwin, but his architecture career had you know, suffered since coming to America. Then one afternoon in midtown, grew In bumped into an old friend of his from Vienna, was this guy named Ludwig Letterer. So Ludwig wanted to open this leather good store on Fifth Avenue, and he asked Grewing to help him design it, and so Grewin agreed, and what he ultimately came up with with something of a game changer for American store design. So rather than build the entrance flush, you know, with the street like all the other shops in the area, Grewin actually made this recess like arcade style entryway with the tall glass cases on either side to sort of draw in the customers. So once they came inside, these guests were just dazzled by these faux marble floors, a green glass ceiling, a slew of bright spotlights that sort of reflected these display cases, and you know, the result was a store that felt decidedly modern and unlike anything else on Fifth Avenue or really American retail in general. So it's kind of hard to imagine now, but customers and critics ate up this new design, and as a result of this, Gruin was swamped with job offers. I mean he was going to these upscale design stores all around the city and beyond getting these offers. So obviously designing these high end boutiques and then going to big, boxy shopping malls seems like quite a leap, and not exactly an upward one. Maybe so, But keep in mind that Gruin was commissioned to design the country's first indoor shopping mall in nineteen fifty two and it opened in nineteen fifty six. So prior to that, malls as we know them really didn't exist, so there wasn't any stigma that we might associate with them today. So tell me about the revolutionary part about what Grewing came up with. Like, what was the shopping scene like in America pre mall? Well, it was, you know, mainly mail order catalogs and department stores for the most part. Outdoor shopping centers started to catch on in the nineteen twenties, but they were basically just strip malls as we think of them now, like a bunch of different stores stuck together and just happened to share a parking lot. So Gruen's big idea was to put all of these stores and walkways under one roof, and then you'd have the addition of central air and heating to make this complex sustainable year round. And that last part was especially important given the location of Gruen's first mall. This was the Southdale Shopping Center and Adena, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, where the winters are obviously frigid. Exactly, I don't think people would want to be walking around in those parking lots in the cold of winter, and so the project grew unsigned on for was meant to address the residents demand for a temperate place to be able to shop, and one where they wouldn't have to brave the cold if they wanted to visit a different store after they've gone to the first one. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what about this bigger idea he had of them all being kind of the social hub. Well, a lot of that was just in how he arranged the interior. So just as an example, most shopping centers of the era were on a single level. So you know, you think about the number of stores in Southdale, it was actually meant to house seventy two stores plus these two big anchor department stores. So making your way from one end to the other would have felt, you know, like forever just to get there, so instead Grewing opted for this two story design. They were linked by escalators, of course, and now we're all envisioning kind of the modern shopping center. So not only did this break up that monotony and make for a much easier trip back to the car, but it also ensured that people would circulate better, have more opportunities to socialize. But probably the most prominent example of his people first design is what he put in the middle of it. It was kind of an indoor garden court, I guess they called it, complete with the skylight, a goldfish pond, towering live trees, balconies, hanging plants, like all of this other stuff, including a bustling cafe. There was even a twenty one ft tall cage filled with brightly colored exotic birds. And so it was basically Gruin's ode to the European piazzas that he had grown up within Vienna, and he wanted to bring some of that old world European charm to the American shopping scene, which he kind of saws characterized by urban sprawl and tacky design. So you fast forward a few years later where in nineteen sixty at this point, and Gruen wrote a book in which he outlined his hope and belief that the malls could really be more like a town square. And you know Greek Agora's of the Past, which is not exactly what we think of malls today, right, definitely not so. When Southdale opened in October of nineteen fifty six, it was met with this glowing praise from shoppers, as well as dram list from every publication from Newsweek to the New York Times, the Women's Wear Daily. In fact, my favorite review though, comes from Time, which heralded Gruin's mall as quote, the pleasure dome with parking. You know, it's just it's such a great quote. But with all that said, there was at least one person who absolutely detested the Southdale Shopping Mall, and that was none other than the legendary architect Frank Lloyd. Right. So, a month after the mall opened, and you know, it's gotten all this national press, right made the pilgrimage to Minnesota to see it for himself, and he was not impressed at all. So after his visit, right Penn the scathing article for the Star Tribune writing, quote, what is this a railroad station or a bus station? You've got a garden court that has all the evils of the village street and none of its charm. I love that the way he really criticized it was by calling it a railroad station. You really really burned them with that. So I'm guessing even in the minorities, since you know, every mall seems to have cred most of his design from Gruin's, I mean, somebody must have liked these, right, oh absolutely. I mean the design was such a success that it became really the de facto blueprint for indoor malls throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And Gruin embraced all the love at first, and for about a decade after the south Dale Mall opened, he gave speeches, he wrote books about his creation, and really kind of pondered what he hoped it would do for American society. But sadly though Gruin's view of his work soured in the nineties, sixties and in the seventies, is more malls began to dominate the landscape. I mean they popped up everywhere, and worst of all, these copycat malls were built with tweak designs aimed at maximizing profit rather than, you know, more fostering that sense of community. So he even started to see malls that he designed himself in a new light. So when he visited some later in life, he wrote of the quote severe emotional old shock, heat experience, and the ugliness and discomfort of the land wasting parking lot that sprang up around me. So it definitely changed the way he thought about them, and it was a bit disillusioned, and he decided to move home to Vienna. But when he got there, he was actually heartbroken to discover that the new shopping mall had been built just south of the old Vienna and that it was driving independent shops out of business. And as Malcolm Gladwell put it in a piece for The New York Or, quote Victor Gruin invented the shopping mall in order to make America more like Vienna. He ended up making Vienna more like America. That's awful, But you know, I'm a little confused it. It It sounds like Grewin really hated those giant mall parking lots, so were though something that was added later and and not a part of his original design. Yeah, that's actually pretty right. I mean, Gruin's mall designs included a much more modest parking lot than the endless stretches of asphalt that we're used to associating with malls today. And in fact, when Gruin first drew the plans for Southdale, he placed it in the center of this four hundred and sixty three acre plot, and to fill all that surrounding space, he drew up designs for apartment buildings and schools and a park and actually even a man made lake. But unfortunately none of that ever came to pass, and instead the space was used to make this massive parking lot. And of course future malls followed suit, and very few of them ever adapted Gruen's multi use approach to these developments. That that is a shame. You know. The whole story kind of reminds me of what happened with the inventor of the TV file of Farnsworth. You know, he was another guy who saw his invention grow up in a way he wasn't expecting and grew to kind of hate it over time. Yeah, it is weird to kind of resent the thing that's held up as the biggest achievement of your life right for both these and in Gruen's case, he actually took his distaste even further than Farnsworth by completely disowning his creation. So, two years before his death, which was in nineteen eighty, grew And gave a speech in London and he washed his hands of malls entirely. Here's what he told the crowd. I'm often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our city. Okay, well, and now that we've unspoiled the long and sad history behind the birth of shopping malls, where do you say we stepped inside of one and take a closer look at some of the behind the scenes tricks that developers used to keep the customer shopping. Sounds good, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about all the sort of devious design tricks that shopping malls used to empty our wallets. But to be clear, none of the stuff we're about to talk about came from Victor Gruin, as you can probably guess by now, he was fundamentally opposed to any design always aimed at manipulating customers into spending more money. I think he would have felt like he was betraying that sense of community that he was hoping to instill in these malls. Yeah, but there's another dark layer to the story because despite his principled approach to design, Grown still wound up having a shady mall tactic named after him. So, you know, sometimes you get disoriented in a mall or a big store, like you're just walking through this giant maze and you kind of lose track of where you are in the building or how long you've been there. That's known as Gruin transfer, and Grown would have hated the name, but the effect is a real thing, and stores actually put a lot of effort and thought into how to best trigger this reaction in their customers. So Victor Gruen might have wanted malls that we're easy to navigate, but future designers learned that confused shoppers actually spend more money, and that's why so many malls have these maze like layouts with difficult to find exits, and while you're wandering around. Other carefully designed, coordinated features kind of do their part to keep you feeling up, eat and engage. You can think about things like music that's relaxing and played through the pipe speakers or um eye catching entrance displays. And the more time you spend in this mall days, the more likely you are to make impulse buyes. Right, Like, an article on New Scientists describes it as being quote confused into a state of unplanned consumption. I call this the Ikea effect. I think, and and and all. This makes sense, And I get why they called it after Gruin, but you know, because he helped build these malls. But actually help me out with that last part, the word transfer. Yeah, so what's actually being transferred is the desire to have a specific item. So you go to the mall to buy a sweater, and it's only a sweater that you're looking for, But if the designers play their cards right, you will be so dazzled by the time you get to the store that your desire for a sweater will already have been transferred to a bunch of different items that you never planned on buying. Okay, that makes sense, but I mean I'm still curious if grew and didn't come up with the different sales tricks that we find in malls now than who is responsible for that? Like it was just mall architects who followed him or what I mean, that's where some of the ideas came from and new methods were added over the years, certainly, but a lot of the common features and malls actually originated with one of Gruen's contemporaries, This Fellows storefront designer. His name was A. Alfred Todman, and he goes on to be a huge mall mogul. In the late nineteen fifties, Todman followed Gruen's lead by building his own indoor shopping mall in California, and over the next fifty years or so, he just kept on building. So he actually passes away in two thousand fifteen at the age of but his company is still going strong with twenty four malls spread across eleven different states plus Puerto Rico, South Korea, and China, and each of them incorporate special designs, all developed by Todman over the years. Alright, so can can you give me some examples of what these designs are? Yeah? I mean this is gonna sound a little hyperbolic, which I guess the kind of is. But a lot of Todman's innovations were sort of like perversions of what Gruin had designed. So, you know, we talked about grew and wanting this two level mall. It was so that people could circulate easier and bump into more people. But Tobman kind of took that trick and moved the escalators to the ends of the buildings, so you wouldn't meet up in the center, but rather you'd have to make the full loop around the mall and buy more as a result, And Tobin's mall has also applied the circulation theory to the exteriors. He was actually the first to put a circular road around them all and add a bunch of extra entrances so that shoppers could easily get to any part of the building. Oh, it's interesting. And that bit about the moving of the escalators, I mean, it's such a good example of how a simple tweak can change the focus from you know, customer comfort to something that really more benefits the sellers. And I'm curious, did you find any other cases like that? Yeah? So another good example is what Tobman did with the lighting. So he kept all the skylights from Gruen's design, but he made them recess so the sunlight would never directly affect the storefronts. And he also added these tiny lights around the skylights so that when the sun started to go down, customers wouldn't take the shift in lighting as this queue that it was time to leave. And uh, speaking of visibility, Topman insisted on using transparent handrails in his malls so that you could always see the stores around you, regardless of what level you were at. I mean, apparently it was he was trying to battle something called threshold resistance, which I guess refers to both the physical and psychological barriers that might prevent a customer from entering a store, Like they could block your view and keep you from seeing a store in the upper level that you might otherwise go inside. I guess that that's part of it. Well, I mean, speaking of psychology, we were talking about music earlier, and I have to mention this weird fact that came across this week. So, according to a two thousand eleven report from Stanford, all the malls in America put together consume more than a gig a lot of electricity every month just from playing that awful background music that's supposed to make you shop more. And when you do the math on this, that energy usage comes out to three thousand metric tons of C O two added to the atmosphere each year just from this open music. Yeah, I mean, I guess not only as an annoying and manipulative it's also contributing to climate change. Well. To be fair, human society admits around thirty giga tons of greenhouse gases per year, so it's not like three thousand tons from the mall is doing that much damage. But I just thought that that was interesting. And you know, of course, once you factor in all the energy that malls used to heat, cool and light these massive interiors around the clock, their contribution actually starts to look a bit more significant when you put it in, you know, as a whole. I guess, yeah, I'm sure. I Actually, Gabe was telling me about this one mall he was in Kentucky where there were only like two or three actual stores, and the entire complex still open like every other one had been shuttered. But the A C. The lights, the escalators, the music, you know, all of that was still going on throughout the building. And that's actually not a one off thing. There are hundreds of malls like that across the country. I feel like you see them on YouTube a lot, like Urban Explorers will will go and take videos of them. But a lot of these dead malls, as they're called, are actually just limping along kind of on life support, like the one he saw in Kentucky. Yeah, I feel like we should probably talk a little bit about why that is in the state of malls you know today, But let's take one more quick break and then we'll get back to that. Welcome back to part time genius. Okay, So it's been sixty three years since the country got its first indoor shopping mall, and during that time as many as hundred more malls have been built in the US, sometimes growing up more than twice the raid of the population. And you can tell by those numbers that America's malls have actually had a great run. But I want to ask, how are they holding up in the digital age? Like, do the next sixty years look as promising as the first? Oh? Not even close. I mean it's it's not. Yeah. I was gonna say, thanks for that tough question. I mean, those fifteen hundred malls you mentioned, we're now down to about and you know, if you ask a lot of analysts, they project that hundreds more will close over the next decade alone. So what do you think is behind that decline? Is it just, you know, something predictable like online shopping or what is it? Alright, Well, maybe cover your ears, because predictable or not, the rise of online shopping has definitely done some serious damage to the mall industry. And that said, the demise of brick and mortar retail has been greatly exaggerated though, because according to the Atlantic, it's actually growing at a rate of three percent per year. Even e commerce space companies like Amazon and Apple, they've doubled down on the physical retail game, which is something they definitely wouldn't be doing if brick and mortar retail was truly on its way out. So why are malls closing then? Why is it so desperate? Well, to put it simply, our country devotes way way too much space to retail stores. So forty eight square feet per person, to be exact, that is twice as much retail space per capita than any other country in the world. And a lot more than that in some cases, four times more than Japan and France, six times more than England, nine times more than Italy, eleven times more than Germany. I'm just gonna keep going. I've got fifty seven more of these. But a retail analyst told CNBC that America is quote the most overstored place in the world, and when you look at the numbers, it's hard to disagree with us. So obviously this isn't a new development. We've been hearing about urban sprawl for years now, and it was a big part of why I grewin turned his back on malls entirely in the seventies. So why is the rug being pulled out now? Like, did it just take a while for the effects of all that retail expansion to manifest? Yeah, I mean again, the arrival of online shopping was kind of the tipping point in in all of this, and being able to shop at home really shine a spotlight on just how out of control retail construction had grown. So suddenly you had all these empty stores, malls without customers. So we may have just started seeing the effects recently, but the so called retail upon elipse has actually been a long time coming. I mean, the big question now is what to do with all the unneeded malls that we already have. And in most cases, tearing down a failed mall is considered too expensive to be a real option. But leaving them there to just decay, like that's not an appealing strategy either, Right, Well, it's not like all the remaining malls are going to close. From what I've read this week, the three hundred or so of the top earning malls like they're gonna be fine in long term. And those are the fanciest, top tier malls that sit in wealthy areas and still bring in a lot of money. But the other eight hundred or so lower tier malls, you know, you might have to get creative with, like if if they want to avoid being those sort of YouTube spectacles that that that we were talking about earlier. Yeah, and you know, from what I've seen, that's exactly what a lot of them are doing. Some of them is just being straight up repurposed, either as apartment complexes, churches, or schools. I even read about one old mall that's been transformed into this enormous indoor paintball park, which that could kind of sound, yeah, but plenty of other malls are being inverted into what are called lifestyle centers, So that's kind of a more hip or more upscale take on a mall, with specialty stores like Creighton Barrel or Pottery Barn in place of the more traditional department store anchors like a Sears or a Macy's. So they also focus more on entertainment options than regular malls do. So in addition to stores and restaurants, you might find life music venues, a bowling alley, fine art galleries. Sometimes it built in movie theater, and a lot of these lifestyle centers are open air too, with like these facades that make stores look like row houses, so you get some of that main street field to them. Yeah, I mean I've been to a few of those before that. There was one being built in Dirham years ago, and I remember thinking, like, you don't have to build a mall that looks like an old tobacco warehouse when you've got these old tobacco warehouses just around the corner. But exactly what I do like about this Manufacturer downtown field is that it's kind of a throwback to what Victor Gruen wanted for malls. In the fifties, like he wanted to bring a touch of culture and character to the suburbs by just giving people a nice place to gather and socialize and of course shop as well. Yeah. I think that's right, And actually in the book I quoted earlier, grew and wrote that quote. By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected, potestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. That's while the classed up look of a lifestyle center might seem like the first time malls have come close to delivering on that promise, I'd actually argue that even the crasses most commercial malls still did manage to fill an important void for a lot of people. So what do you mean by that, Well, think back to when malls were at their peak of the nineteen eighties and even the early nineties. So back then there was really some social benefit to going to the mall. You think about rural and suburban areas, there just weren't enough people to have the kind of daily interactions that you know so commonplace in cities. So in that sense, malls were a way to get people into close for proximity to one another really more prompted this meaningful chance encounters for people who might not have met otherwise. And you know, aside from accessibility to humans, there's also accessibility to products that malls provided. If you think back in the dark days before the internet, just so scared to even think about, you know, someone in a place like Minnesota, they would have very limited selection of clothing and books and music to choose from, and and any kind of international products would have been next to impossible. But with these malls coming along, you know, suddenly products from all over the country and all over the world really were available under one gigantic roof, which is a good point. And speaking of mall on nostalgia and how different it is from a world where we're getting marketed to from our phones and our computers and just non stuff. I have a quote here that I wanted to share from an author named Ian bo Ghost and and he wrote a great article for The Atlantic that kind of served as an elegy for shopping mall culture. And this is what he writes, quote, America, days of hating them all are numbered? When it gets replaced by Apple town squares, Walmart, supercenters and the online offline slurry of an ever rising Amazon. We will miss those zoos of capitalism, those prisons of commerce where consumerism roared and swelled but inevitably remained contained. I guess you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Well, we can't do it on the past forever. So what do you say we head into the fact off and share a few of the crazier mall stories we found this week. All right, let's do it. All right, I'll get us started. Let's see. Well, remember how I said that America has twice as much retail space per person compared to the rest of the world. Well, our record is even worse when it comes to parking spaces. In total, the United States has roughly two billion parking spots and only about two hundred and fifty million cars to park in them. That evens out to eight parking spots for every car in the country. And one of the biggest contributors to this over supply of parking is, of course, the giant parking lot that circles the thousand plus shopping malls that we have been talking about today. In fact, there are more than twelve and a half thousand at the Mall of America alone, which is so weird. Anyway, there's one person who always comes out ahead at malls, no matter what the circumstances, and that is Santa Claus. So according to a magazine you might be familiar with mental floss. Being a mall Santa is a salaried position and can net first timers around ten thousand dollars per six weeks season, and if you're a Santa with a little bit more experience under your belt, you might actually be able to earn closer to thirty thousand dollars per season. Of course, any would be Santa's listening should keep in mind most malls typically required their Santa's to have natural beards, so no false is allowed. Okay, all right, well here is a kind of a weird one. So malls may be on the decline in the US, but the business is still booming in many Asian countries, particularly in China. The only problem is that a lot of the men there don't seem to enjoy shopping nearly as much as their wives do. So to get around this, some Chinese malls have begun offering complimentary lounges specifically for board husbands who would have rather stayed home. The name for these facilities literally translates to husband cloak room, which I kind of love. It sounds like they offer way more amenities than the average code check. I mean this varies from all the mall, but the lounges typically include you know, these comforts like WiFi, snacks, big TVs, and of course comfortable chairs. I love that, And I love the idea of like a wife dropping off their husband and claiming a tag and then like, maybe we're getting to come get them at the end of the day exactly. So this is a pretty odd fact. Six malls in southern California now feature funeral home chios where shoppers can pick out coffins are earned and plan their own funerals. Apparently they even have a cremation earned with the l A Dodgers logo on it. So so far, the funeral industry seems to view this whole thing is a major win in terms of reaching the audience where they're at. There's this one director of International Cemetery Creation and Funeral Association who said, quote, nobody gets up on a Saturday morning and says, gee, it's a nice day. I wonder if I can go out and get myself a burial plot. But if they're surrounded by happy, lively people and maybe clutching a bag of Mrs Field's cookies, the thought is they'll feel differently. I'm not sure that I agree with that, but it is pretty interesting and I guess there's a reason they're doing it. But all right, with the risk of seeming obsessed here, I'm going to steer us back to the exciting world of mall parking lots, but for good reason. Here because I want to share a tip that I came across for how to easily find an open space. According to mathematician Joe Pagano, all you need to do is find in how close to the mall entrance, get about twenty full spaces in your sight, and then just stop and wait six minutes. I love the idea of just stopping like that's not gonna upset anyone behind you, But why six that's According to Joe, the average shopper spends a hundred and twenty minutes in the mall. So if you divide a hundred and twenty minutes by the twenties spaces, you've zeroed in on then you get six minutes, and that's how long it should take for a shopper to return to one of those spaces. So if you follow Joe's method, that should be the max amount of time you'll spend hunting for a spot. Well, I do like that one, and I'm gonna have to try it out the next time I'm craving and range. Julius, I I think you end up with the trophy for this round. Nicely done, well, thank you so much. All Right, well, I think that does it for today's Part Time Genius from Gabe, Tristan Manguesh and me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back soon with another episode. Part Time Genius is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The critic in the p