Want To Run For President? Become a Brand.

If there is one innovation in American life which came about during my lifetime and now seems to be on its way out, it’s not the fast-food chain or the touch-button phone, neither of which existed in the 1950’s when I was a kid. Nor did we have what we call the convenience store, the very first time I walked into such an establishment was 1985.

What I’m talking about is the shopping mall, which began sprouting all over the country in the 1960’s when for the first time the percentage of Americans living in suburbs was the same as the percentage of Americans still living in urban zones.

Big cities had long been locations for large stores, like Hudson’s in Detroit, Marshall Field in Chicago, and Macy’s in New York. But what we used to call ‘department stores’ were so named because everything in the store was being sold by one vendor, even if the store had different sections or ‘departments’ for clothes, furniture, toys and so forth.

The whole point of a shopping mall was that everything was still under one roof, but inside the building there were stores owned by different vendors who not only sold a specific type of product, but more important, sold a product with a specific brand name.

And this is how retailing has changed over the past fifty years from selling consumer products not by price or by…