The great irony being that Sears and Roebuck started as a mail order business, quickly becoming the Amazon of its day, with Montgomery Ward following suit.
In the mid to late sixties, when the enclosed shopping malls became the model, mall developers wooed the big department stores as the anchors, counting on that customer draw to feed the smaller. retail tenants. At one time the A&E firm I worked for designed these anchor store shells and cores. Base line time frame was ninety days or less from signing of contract to core and shell construction completion. By the early seventies the market saturation point had been reached and our company of four hundred was history. I had seen it coming and left six months before the collapse. The Macy’s, Gimbels, Sears, and Federated Stores were all over extended at that time and had been limping along since. A herd of aging and weakened elephants on a slow trek to oblivion.
I think your timeline is off. Shopping malls were being built at a frenetic pace all the way through the 1980s. They were popping up everywhere. During that decade, teen culture revolved around the shopping mall. In those pre-Internet days, teens would congregate there to socialize. And none of them had cell phones to text with!
I remember when you could go to the Sears Roebuck catalog and buy almost anything from a house to live in to traps for trapping your own fur animals to frames to cure the hides on to guns to shoot anything from sparrows to elephants, the list is endless. You could almost have said that if they didn’t have it you didn’t need it.