People do depend on malls as part of their area's social fabric. That's more true today than when Mall Rats was filmed, even though it's less cool now. It's the social fabric itself, not just the malls, which is disintegrating. Suburbia was never economically sustainable.
This has been discussed here before, and seems to be a bit of a blind spot for HN. Imagine you live in a place where there's only one "mall" nearby: that's most of America (geographically speaking).
