Even in small and medium-sized local cities, several large shopping malls have been built.
When they were first built, the size of the buildings, the abundance of merchandise, and the variety of stores in them were as surprising and exciting to men and women of all ages as a new amusement park.
However, by now the number of visitors to the shopping mall has decreased.
Even if I am not a repeat visitor to the mall, I feel lonely at the sight of them.
I guess people are getting tired of it.
After all, it is just an American imitation.
Most of the stores in the malls are national chain stores and mass merchandisers.
Customers don't even want to spend their holidays at the mall anymore, because no matter which mall they go to, it's all the same, both in terms of the construction and the contents.
It's easy to predict that people will soon get bored.
I wonder if the management had thought about how to deal with that?
It's the nature of business people to be discerning, but they are not discerning at all.
Have they become bureaucratic?
Outlet parks are the upscale version of shopping malls, and although there are fewer of them than shopping malls, the situation is the same.
The brand stores are deserted and the staff always looks bored.
Once a brand has achieved the status of a well-known brand, the greed of the managers is always on the rise.
When Coco Chanel and her colleagues were alive, brand-name goods would have been handmade by craftsmen with solid skills and hearts.
Nowadays, it is all about earning huge profits, so famous brand vendors mass-produce their products by machine, open stores all over the world, and can be found even in outlet parks in rural Japan.
The production volume must be carefully controlled so that the brand value does not decline, but young people in 2025 are not crazy about ridiculously expensive brand-name goods.
First of all, they have never even heard of the bubble era.
In the end, both the shopping mall and the outlet park will soon become like a desolate hot spring resort.
The sites may become places where young people can try out their courage.
What is worrisome is that the hard-working Japanese people's savings will be used to pay for both the construction and demolition of these big-box stores.
Banks are lending like hot water to big-name retailers.
Now is the time for the shuttered shopping streets to take revenge!