Spent 3 hours in a dead mall in Erie and the food court told me more than the empty stores did

Adam Lewis · 2026-10-10T10:55:03.833413+00:00

I walked into the Erie mall on a Tuesday afternoon last month expecting to just snap some pics of the dark anchor stores, but the food court is what got me. Only two spots were open, a pretzel place and a Chinese counter, and both had the same handwritten sign about cash only because the card readers went down months ago. I sat there for about 3 hours watching maybe 11 people come through the whole time, and every single one of them walked past the empty storefronts without even glancing at them. What hit me is that the mall did not die because the big stores left, it died because the small stuff that made you stay got picked off one by one first. The last thing to go is always the food, because people will still come for a cheap lunch long after they quit coming to buy a shirt. Has anyone else noticed the food court hangs on way longer than the rest of the place, or is that just the spots I have been to?

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Spent 3 hours in a dead mall in Erie and the food court told me more than the empty stores did | Dead Mall Pics - Opinions Matter