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Memo: The Gruen Transfer
A new note. His ideas have become popular once again, as indoor-outdoor malls, multi-use retail communities, and experiential retail have become top of mind.
The Gruen Transfer is the generalized desire to shop. It’s the effect of feeling lost in a mall, amplifying the likelihood of impulse purchase. In the macro, the concept is synonymous with a consumer’s desire to spend time in a mall or walk a street of storefronts. It’s shopping for the sake of shopping. Except, Gruen didn’t want it this way at all.
This mind-trick, this consumerism for consumerism’s sake, was the brain child of an architect named Victor Gruen. He’s the one who turned American day-to-day life into something that could be parodied in a zombie film. The entire trick bears his name, after all. [Gizmodo, 2013]
The original mall concept that bears his name is a perversion of what he’d really intended. What got in the way? American sociology. Gruen has reentered the American conscious after decades of being forgotten by everyone outside of architectural pockets. This 2019 essay explained how our own cultural woes contributed to the over-retail of American and the zombie-fication of retail.
While largely ignored, what you will read below remains my favorite work at 2PM. The retail industrial complex’s decision to do away with Gruen’s original vision and multiply the concept of indoor acreage of retail haunts the American retail industry today. You will be able to better infer as to why that decision was made below.
This is where retail meets sociology, economics, and American politics.