Come for the roller coaster, stay for the shops: Can malls be fun again?

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Mall of America’s amusement park is one of the ways the shopping center lures tourists and locals to make a day of their visit. Jenn Ackerman for NPR hide caption

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Jenn Ackerman for NPR

In the bleary predawn hours, it’s hard to tell Mall of America from any other high-end shopping center. Workers wield mops, hammers and forklifts. Under dim lights, Cinnabon bakers stretch and roll buttery dough. Around 7 o’clock, mall walkers silently swarm the building, meticulously tracing every nook of the perimeter.

But then, you grasp the scale.

Mall walkers count in the dozens, speed-stepping past towering unlit Christmas trees and 11-foot nutcracker statues. One lap around the mall is just over a mile. Local shopping malls vary in size, of course, but Mall of America is at least three of them stuck together. Maybe seven. Arriving in Minneapolis by plane, you first see it from the sky.

At 10 a.m. — opening time — a caravan of yellow buses releases a horde of middle-schoolers on a field trip. Like a shock wave, they push to the center of Mall of America, where roller coasters loop around a carousel, a zip line, a SpongeBob-themed jumping gym. The amusement park, Nickelodeon Universe, is a top reason locals visit.

“I feel like most of the time, we just go on rides,” says Sarah Matteen, whose 6-year-old daughter, Maeve, just went on her first big-kid ride: the soar-then-plunge Splat-O-Sphere. Now, Maeve is clinging behind her mom’s leg. “She said she had lots of butterflies.”

And now that’s over, what will they do?

The exterior of Mall of America in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Jenn Ackerman for NPR hide caption

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Jenn Ackerman for NPR

Shoppers stroll inside Mall of America on a catwalk-like bridge connecting stores, food spots and the amusement park. Jenn Ackerman for NPR hide caption

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Jenn Ackerman for NPR

“Probably go to a couple of different stores,” Matteen says. Will she buy something? “Probably.”

This was exactly the goal when Mall of America developers, back in 1989, decided to stick five football fields’ worth of roller coasters and playgrounds in the middle — with stores … Read More