Here in Baltimore, the problem is the lack of any kind of retail shopping in the city. There are tourist traps at the water front (Inner Harbour & Fells Point) - but "real" retail shopping isn't here. I need to drive 1.8 miles to a grocery store and 7-14 miles to buy any other stuff.
Baltimore burbs are a nauseating case of sprawl and mall construction - new malls arre being build alsongside the old ones, the old ones decline and so on. The newest trend seem to be strip malls consisting of mega-stores such as Wall-Mart, Target, Dick's Service Merchandise etc. It is hard to imagine a more barren, alienating, and plain hideously ugly architectural landscape - they make Amerika really ugly, arguably the ugliest human settlement in the developed and semi-developed world. Stalinist "soc-realist" architecture of E. Europe seem picturesquely quaint in comparison. At least it had a style as opposed to utility-ueber-alles mall structures.
It seems that mall designers and people who call themselves the government do everything to discourage people from shopping in the city (e.g. lack of transportation, lack of retail space) and funnel them to the burbs. So much for capitalist "choice" -- one can choose whatever one wants as long as it suits the interest of corporations, land speculators and their lackeys in the government.
wojtek