Tag 1980s

Sarah Palin’s single-handed takedown of the Republican Party is not the only sign that the 1980s have finally died their long-lingering death:

The indoor shopping mall was actually born in the 1950s with the opening of the Southdale Mall in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, MN, but the mall came of age culturally and economically in the 1980s. People of my generation were the first real “mall rats” in our teenage years. Indeed, my high school cohort was even a little too old to really be “mall rats”; the mall in my hometown opened when I was already in high school and looking ahead to college, but many of my friends and classmates were the first disaffected teenage mall workers to sneer at and rudely ignore the scores of customers experiencing mall shopping for the first time.

This article from The Economist from December, 2007 talks about the death of the shopping mall in this first decade of the 21st century. Malls aren’t entirely dead yet, obviously, but there have been more and more of them closing in the last several years, and the economic downturn doesn’t look good for the retail sector as a whole. What will be interesting to see over the next couple of decades will be the repurposing of abandoned shopping malls, much the way old factories were rehabbed into housing, offices, and, yes, shopping malls in the 1980s. I wonder if malls will be turned into cheap housing for all the people who are losing their homes. One mall in our area, the Natick Mall (ooh, sorry, the Natick Collection), actually added a whole section of luxury condos attached right to the mall. They haven’t sold very well (after all, who WANTS to live in the mall?), but as times get tougher and tougher, maybe the dispossed will get them.

Via BoingBoing’s Gadgets sub-blog comes this link to an electronics industry news site that says JVC has stopped production of stand-alone VCRs. JVC was the last of the electronics manufacturers still making stand-alones, which were generally sold under a variety of nameplates. It’s still possible to by DVD/VCR combo units, but in all likelihood the end of production of the separate units will also result in the demise of the combos. We bought a combo several years ago to use expressly as a transitional product so that we could play videotapes we had for Charlotte when she was a baby, but even that usage went away in our household some time ago. I think the only videotapes we even still own are old recordings from television, like my Jeopardy! appearance in 1992 and a tape from my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary also in the early 1990s.

Over at RetroThing, James, the site’s author, offers some opinions about the loss of the VCR. I think he’s completely correct that it marks a significant transition in home use of video recording of television programming, and definitely not for the better. Though the VCR never entirely lived up to its promise for time-shifting and redefining how people consumed television programming, it definitely sowed seeds that are popping up from the soil now, for better AND for worse. The popularity of DVRs and the increasing ease of adding DVR technology to home PCs carries on the legacy of “rolling your own” television, but the efforts of the cable companies and content providers to lock that down may yet prevail. Plus the arrival of services like Hulu, which put control of access to the content squarely in the hands of the traditional providers, may be a boon to people who clamor for the programming, but will ultimately squelch alternative sources.

On a slighlty different track, last week the Miller Brewing Company announced that they would stop making the “alcopop” beverage Zima. Zima was actually introduced in 1993, but is unquestionably part of a wave of “alternative” alcoholic beverages that took the stage beginning in the 1980s with the sudden and huge success of wine coolers such as Bartles & Jaymes. Coming late in that initial wave, but before the more recent generation of “alcopops”, Zima was nearly universally scorned as a drink for poseurs and sissies, the sort of thing that a guy with popped collars and a Member’s Only jacket drank. How it survived all this long is a mystery; I didn’t even know they still made it.

Finally, here is a set of links about what will probably be the defining cultural transformation of the next decade: the long-overdue death of conspicuous consumption. First, a recent blog post by Rex Hammock noticing the arrival of mass media treatments of the newly-virtuous non-consumer. He seems to be implying that the meme which says “by the time the mass media cover a trend, it’s already passe” is what’s on order here, but I’m not so sure that’s true. Over at Dangerous Intersection, blogger Erich Vieth riffs on author Bill McKibben’s latest book, Deep Economy to imagine the upside to a no-growth economy. Erich also cites this Harper’s Magazine piece by Steven Stoll, which looks forward and back at consumerism. Then, to cap this all off, Michael Shermer, who also publishes Skeptic Magazine, writes in the latest Scientific American to refute the hallmark 1980s movie monologue by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street” that summed up the entire era with the phrase “Greed Is Good”