This is our walkthrough of The SoNo Collection mall in Norwalk, CT from May 7, 2021. This is a brand new high-end fashion mall, the second newest mall in the country technically. Opened on October 11, 2019, it missed the designation as newest by a week to American Dream Meadowlands. A very stylized 3 story mall that is trying very hard to be hip, with all the murals on closed storefronts and kitchy things like the neon conversation area or the scannable mixtapes on the wall.

Architecturally the mall is very nice, and evokes memories of other high end malls, like Natick Mall in Massachusetts. The sorts of stores in the mall are a bit of a mixed bag, with stores like Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Amazon 4-star, and Warby Parker taking up residence. All in all, a visit to The SoNo Collection makes for a relaxing and visually striking experience, and probably quite different than what you expect from a mall.

Unfortunately, it seems the developers were out of touch with what people in the Norwalk, CT area wanted for a shopping destination. One only has to look at their yelp.com entry to see some pretty bold hatred coming from people towards this mall. From complaints about having to pay for parking to the lack of anything interesting to do besides go to Bloomies or Nordstrom, this mall is not getting very good word of mouth press.


Songs used in this video (in order):

George Howard - Dream Ride
Alphonse Mouzon - To Mom With Love
David Sanborn - Let's Just Say Goodbye
David Marriott, Jr. - On the Seventh Day
Steve Gray - Wonder Groove
Steve Gray - Reach Out


Here is the brief wiki article for the bare-bones facts.

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And an article documenting the opening of the mall:

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I'd like to say a few words about being an ambassador to your local malls. We have been taking the time to visit all the malls within a reasonable driving distance to check up on them and see how they are doing. Also filming an updated video every year or so, regardless of the lack of many changes, just so there is a video record of the health over time. We think this is an important thing to keep tabs on, especially in these wildly turbulent times. The current health emergency has accelerated the impending Retail Apocalypse we've all been talking about these last several years. This was already a big problem, but the shutdowns and restrictions have made the issue 5x worse and likely hastened the death of the enclosed shopping mall.

I know we've all been on pins and needles wondering how bad the fallout is going to be from all of this.

There really is no way to know exactly unless we ALL go and do our small part to make it known how it turns out. I implore you, if you have the means to pick an area you would like to be an ambassador for, and go document your local malls. Whatever your medium, it doesn't matter, any and all documentation is necessary and vital in this day and age. Whether it be on Social Media, Flickr, Youtube, any platform gets it out there and preserves it for posterity. We can't paint this picture unless we all grab a brush...


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We utilize the value-for-value model here at RRR. Our product is free, and we're not asking you to pay for it. If you received value in any way from watching RRR, you can help us by donating, if you feel like it. Any little bit helps us to keep corporations and advertisers out of the decision making process. Your donation will keep us ad-free, and in turn, it will give us the opportunity to get to more far-flung locations to help tell this tale of retail instability.

This is a non-profit project and every penny will go back into the gas tank for future trips!

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