Shopping malls are a thing of the past. It’s time we closed them all down.

A couple of years ago, CBS's How I Met Your Mother needed a way to make fun of the cheesed-out era of the '80s. Their vehicle: a music video called "Let's Go to the Mall" by Robin Sparkles (the NKOTB-era pseudonym of one of the show's characters). Its main target is the horrible fashion sense of that lost decade, but it critiques something else, too. Because the song is set in and about the mall, it subsequently rips teenybop culture and the North American impulse toward consumer escapism. It's a powerful testament to why, today, the mall industry is dying a slow death.

Really, it's a must-watch. Click play on the YouTube video below.

Watching that video, it's hard to figure out what's changed about malls over the last 20 to 30 years. When Robin Sparkles whines, "Everybody come and play/Throw every last care away/Let's go to the mall/Today!" it's a jab at the buy-now, worry-later mentality that has been with us at least since the '80s. Malls are a testament to the kind of consumer thinking that got us into this recessionary mess. And that's why we need to close every single one of them.

Already, malls are in a considerable amount of trouble. Shopping centers on the block are selling for 25 percent to 35 percent less than they did just a year ago. Retail vacancies are on the rise; nationally, 6.6 percent of stores were empty in the third quarter of 2008, a 20 percent increase from the same quarter last year and the highest mark since 2002. Much of the pain is interwoven with the retail sector, where analysts estimate 148,000 stores will have been closed in 2008.

And it will only get worse. Mall stalwarts like KB Toys, Steve & Barry's, and Linens 'n Things are all closing shop. The recession is expected to rage on through 2009, and retail chains will probably be looking at dismal holiday numbers. A mall's chief purpose these days is to be there come the holidays. Now that we're beyond that season, many stores will need to shutter in the new year.

At the risk of getting Gladwellian, every store that closes has an impact on the shops left behind. Walking through a half-empty mall is an unsettling experience; it feels as dreadful as Dawn of the Dead, just without the zombies. Remember, malls are about escaping from the world and reveling in consumer fun. Spending money during the recession already requires a suspension of disbelief. Confronting an empty storefront is like walking right into a slap of harsh reality. Being reminded of that recessionary reality means you're less likely to spend money at the surviving stores.

Of course, there are business implications, as well. As Kevin Smith showed in his so-bad-only-teenagers-like-it filmMallrats, malls are a delicate ecosystem with their own dynamics and personalities. Most important, though, is that all of the stores feed off one another. Fewer stores means less foot traffic; less foot traffic means less window shopping; less window shopping means fewer impulse buys. It's a positive-feedback loop that, for malls, is actually negative.

Thus, several of the biggest American mall owners are fighting to stave off bankruptcy, as bad bets in real estate have weighed down their ledgers. But, just like cash-starved families looking to sell their homes, buyers will now only purchase malls for a lowered price, since the industry's outlook is so bleak. This would entail huge losses for the mall owners, so they continue to balk. At some point, though, something has to give.

And when it does, there's going to be major consolidation in the industry. Our current economic state is simply not able to sustain so many meccas of merchandise. Some malls will likely close as fewer and fewer chains are willing to spread themselves so thin. Because, really, if Starbucks isn't expanding, then nobody else is, either.

But why just consolidate? Let's close them all. I'm not saying that all of their tenants should close. Instead, the stores that once filled the malls should go and fill other empty storefronts dispersed across the city. Call it the great chain-store diaspora.

To realize just how outdated malls are, let's think of the few benefits they offered in the first place.

One-stop shopping

Before Wal-Mart and Amazon, malls were the place to maximize shopping efficiency. Besides a grocery market, they had almost every consumer good you could ask for, and usually at reasonable prices. But now Wal-Mart and Amazon do exist, and they're even better than malls. Wal-Mart offers groceries along with the rest of the bric-a-brac and does it at a cheaper price than any other physical location. Amazon, meanwhile, has a selection far wider than a mall could ever hope to match and pro-consumer prices because the company's overhead is so much lower than a department store's.

Lower overhead

From a retail perspective, malls were once handy because they freed stores from the hassles of managing their property. Essentially, the mall serves as the landlord and the shops are its tenants. But that relationship has become increasingly strained as the rent has stayed relatively flat after years of incremental increases. There's less money to go around now, and chains could be thinking twice about having a landlord; especially when commercial real estate is so cheap because of the depressed real estate market. Smart business may mean a store moves out and gets its own place, free from those security guards nagging them all the time. Plus, it would help lift sagging commercial real estate prices out of its artificially depressed bubble.

Blue- and pimple-collar jobs

The retail sector, of course, is a key piece of the American work force. Remember those 148,000 store closings we talked about earlier? That translated to 625,000 lost jobs, many of them to people who could least afford to lose them-working-class and young Americans. But to repeat, closing the mall does not mean closing the stores. The mall itself does not have that many jobs to offer the community. After you cycle through administrative and security duties, there isn't much left. Closing the mall would leave an unfortunate but ultimately negligible wake.

Perhaps the greatest impact would be on teen culture, a risk of which I am acutely aware. I spent many weekend afternoons gazing at the bracketed racks of video game stores, wondering how to stretch my birthday money into as many games as possible. Afterward, I'd meet friends at the food court and order a four-cheese slice at Sbarro, masochistically counting down the minutes until the inevitable stomachache. Yes, the mall was a place where I could go to dream big and, as Robin Sparkles suggests, forget that I hadn't yet done my homework.

But if this economic disaster has taught us anything, it's that folks need to pay a little more attention and stop throwing all their cares away. For that to happen, we need to make sure that no one can ever again scream, "Let's go to the mall!"

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)