MARCH 16, SATURDAY

GREENVILLE MALL

Friday afternoon Todd, Susie and I drove down to Greenville to the Apple Store. I had signed up for a demonstration of the Vision Pro and Todd and Susie wanted to buy a replacement for their 10 year old iMac which was barely functioning. Todd needs it to look at videos of small engine repair and both of them use it to look at streaming movies. In their tiny house it is as big a screen as they can fit in. Even though they live in a remote valley in the mountains, through some program to bring the Internet to rural areas, they have very good Internet.

I will write about the demonstration of the Vision Pro tomorrow. What surprised us was the Heywood Mall, itself, in Greenville, SC. Unlike the Asheville Mall which is dying, the Heywood Mall is full of people and seems to be thriving.

At the Asheville Mall the huge Sears wing is closed and I think it is going to be turned into condominiums. And within the mall there are not only many empty store fronts but the quality of the stores has declined. Even the anchor stores, Belks in particular, which used to be a high class department store, is now an outlet store with very few personnel and everything on sale. There are a great number of little kiosks with rooty tootie items. And there are very few customers.

The Biltmore Square Mall outside of Asheville, which opened with fanfare 20 years ago is also suffering while around it is now the Asheville Outlet Mall.

In my mind this decline of the mall was mostly because of the big box stores like Best Buy and Discount Shoes and TJ Maxx and Walmart and Kohls with low overhead and few personnel and even more because of Amazon and the Amazon Prime trucks which come down our street every day (and is my source of most everything). Amazon has much wider choice, can be visited easily on line, and if you pay the Prime subscription price, has free delivery, usually overnight. It seems to me that the failing Asheville Mall is part of the huge cultural shift to online shopping.

So why is the Heywood Mall in Greenville full of glittering, expensive shops such as the Apple Store, and a thriving Belks and so many brand name stores, and why are so many people shopping there on a Friday afternoon? I really don’t know.

The Asheville Mall used to be a place where you could go where there were crowds of people, where you could see and be seen. It was a way to spend an interesting afternoon. Now, for some reason, it isn’t. Is it as a social scene that the Heywood Mall is still thriving?

Another reason could be that the Greenville/Spartenburg urban area is larger than the Asheville urban area.

But I’m guessing that the Greenville/Spartanburg area is a more successful industrial area with a big German automobile plant. Asheville is a flourishing tourist town with a vibrant downtown with all kinds of shops full of shoppers year around but particularly on weekends. Few of these visiting tourists would spend their time in Asheville in the mall. They visit the Biltmore House and stay in luxury hotels and eat at one of Asheville’s many fine restaurants. Asheville is also a tech town whose tech workers are not interested in the mall. Asheville is also an college town whose students don’t spend much time at the mall.

So the reason that the Heywood Mall is thriving seems to me to be that a different sort of people live in Greenville, a MAGA town, than in Asheville, a liberal un MAGA town. But this judgment may just be based on my liberal bias.