Tesla Stores Solely to Blame for Collapse of American Malls

Once you could buy a Model 3 between a Wetzel’s Pretzels and a Sunglass Hut, society had already given up.

PLANO—Useless Technicals Institute conducted a retrospective analysis that confirmed what everyone should have known all along: the downfall of the American mall didn’t begin with online shopping, fast fashion, or teenagers just growing up. No, the musky rot set in the moment someone said, “You know what this mall needs? A Tesla store.”'

It started innocently enough. One harmless tech bro. One store. A single Model 3 sitting where the seasonal Halloween store used to be. People thought it was futuristic, or at least better than the phone case kiosk. But like all great collapses, it began quietly, with the soft hum of poor build quality and the promise that you, too, could order a car from a guy in a Tesla-branded Old Navy fleece vest, holding an iPad.

“It was the beginning of the end,” said mall historian Craig Mullins, who has been documenting the slow death of retail since the last Orange Julius closed. “Once Tesla moved in, foot traffic dropped. People stopped going to the food court. The escalator started making weird noises no one would fix. It was like the soul of America just left.”

At first, mall management welcomed the Tesla store. “We thought it added prestige,” said Janice McKinley, former leasing manager at the Galleria Center. “We didn’t know it was a Trojan Horse filled with crypto bros that were going to take us down from the inside.”

Data backs up the theory. Within a year of Tesla’s arrival, nearly 40 percent of shoppers said they felt “palpable evil coming from that weird Apple Store for cars next to a Claire’s.” Another 25 percent stopped coming altogether after mistakenly purchasing one of those cars.

And that was before the Elon Musk of it all.

“Oh, this was pre-supervillain Musk,” clarified Mullins. “Even before he bought Twitter, picked fights with cave divers, or tweeted through multiple international incidents. The evil was already present. Elon just kept getting away with it.”

Today, those same mall stores sit empty, their former staff now selling solar panels door to door. In their place? Storage for Elon’s Nazi memorabilia.

Societies debate on whether the mall can be saved is starting to fade, Once you could impulse-buy a whole-ass car in the same corridor where you once panicked over which scented candle to buy your aunt, America had already lost to the neurotic billionaire.