Over 15 hours on Saturday, two longtime friends and self-professed mall rats rented a car and drove a total of 256 miles to visit 16 shopping malls in the Philadelphia area, South Jersey and Delaware.

Mike Fenn and Jon Slosser, both 45, grew up in Delaware County during the golden age of malls. In the '80s and '90s, Fenn and Slosser viewed these social hubs as formative temples of commercialist bliss in an era before U.S. monoculture was fragmented by the dawn of the internet.

"I like to say that the '80s nostalgia seems to have lasted longer than the actual '80s decade did at this point," Fenn said before Saturday's adventure. "We were video game dorks growing up. We just hung out at the mall. That's what we did. We were used to malls bustling. We'd hang around and go to the old Electro

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