Yep that's definetly the way it is in Suburban Kansas City.
We have Oak Park Mall, which has to be one of the best malls ever with a Nordstroms, 2 Dillards, JC Penny's, the Jones' Store, Eddie Bauer, 2 Abercrombies, Hollister, American Eagle, Disney Store, Gap, and a bunch of other good stores too. People here in Nebraska will ask me about it when I say where I'm from.
On the Yucky side however we have Metcalf South (but no Metcalf North...interesting) and also The Great Mall of The Great Plains. Metcalf South is absolutely vacant, it has a Sears, but the Jones' Store is leaving their location there for Oak Park. My dad said that MS Mall is going to be torn down by 2004 or something like that, but it's old and vacant so no big loss. The Great Mall is an entirely different story. It's in a town called Olathe (another suburb) and it was O-towns first mall, and it opened my HS Freshmen year to a load of fanfare. The gross intake for the mall in it's first two weekends was something ungodly like 75 million dollars or something just absolutly Huge. They said that every resident of Olathe went to the mall in those first two weeks, and with a town population nearing a hundred thou, that's pretty impressive. I think total number of visits was close to half a million in the first month, you could barely walk the halls of the place. This was huge news!!! Fast forward just two and half years later and it became the mall with the greatest number of shoe stores you could ever imagine! Now, you go there, even on a weekend and it's pretty empty. A couple of nice stores, like an OffSaks 5th Avenue, but the decor is horrible, and the rest of the stores suck. Go there on a weekday afternoon, and you find that the stay at home moms have discovered that the long straight halls are perfect for letting bands of 2 and 3 year olds just run away all their energy. I think the last time I was there I saw no less than 5 "gangs" of stroller moms...all with about 6 toddlers just running, and a couple of infants in the strollers. It was kinda amusing b/c there was always one little kid in each group who had fallen down or something yelling at the others to slow down
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