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| Pictured Above: Merritt Square Mall, Merritt Island, Florida |
It doesn’t take a recently laid-off rocket scientist from United Space Alliance to figure out that local malls have been collapsing in on themselves over the last three years.
Merritt Square Mall is quickly beginning to look the way Titusville’s Miracle City Mall did in the 1980s after the end of the Apollo program and the Challenger disaster.
Merritt Square Mall has lost decades-old tenants such as Picadilly, a cafeteria-style restaurant that had actually survived prior Brevard County boom-bust cycles such as the Challenger disaster, 9/11, and the Columbia disaster.
While the widespread use of online shopping through the internet could make malls go the way of Blockbuster and Borders over the long term, the double hit of a world-wide recession due to U.S. financial and political corruption coupled with the end of the shuttle program has caused storefronts throughout Brevard County to close.
