Santa Claus was having a slow afternoon at the Neshaminy Mall in Pennsylvania, sitting alone on his velvet throne in a hallway of empty shops during the week before Christmas.
“So far I think I’ve had, like, three,” says the man behind the flowing white beard, a 74-year-old retired flooring installer named Frederick Spier. Guide ropes for the hoped-for lines of photo-seekers were not required.
Places such as Neshaminy, on the north-eastern outskirts of Philadelphia, are on the losing side of an end game playing out among US shopping malls, the air-conditioned palaces of consumerism that sprang up next to the highway off-ramps of America’s postwar suburbia.
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