Pour one out for Tacoma’s Orange Julius, closed as malls move on | Opinion
Orange juice and milk should not go together. And yet, Orange Julius blended them for decades in a drink that brought a pop of citrus to food courts like the one at Tacoma Mall.
The little stand was an oasis in a sea of department stores, specialty retailers and sunglass kiosks. As someone who gets cranky while shopping, I always seemed to need one of those sweet, frothy smoothies if I wanted to spend more than an hour in the place.
With the energy and optimism of youth restored, I’d press on.
Those days are over. The Tacoma Mall Orange Julius and Dairy Queen closed its counter earlier this month. It’s hard not to see it as a metaphor. The weird alchemy that made citrus and dairy work at Orange Julius is just like the magic that has disappeared from in-person shopping.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t ordered an Orange Julius at the mall in years. That was partly because I was nervous about what was in them. I’m one of the seemingly millions of people who reached adulthood and decided to put a lid on the ingredients that were making life harder.
But mostly, it’s that I almost never go into a mall to shop.
Of course, Orange Juliuses (Julii?) didn’t lose profitability because they used to be everyone’s favorite shopping fuel, and now we don’t shop in malls. Did we cast them aside for the all the kombucha and La Croix we drank while shopping from our phones during our 2010s mall-killing spree? Maybe.
But brands fade, and eventually the Orange Julius separates and curdles. You have to enjoy it while it lasts.
That’s still the story of the mall in this country. It’s not that they’re dead. The stats aren’t really moving in that direction, and instead show a shift toward a different purpose for the mall. A different flavor.
A shopathon at a department store is no longer core to a trip to the mall in the US, except at luxury-oriented shopping centers. Instead of a haul, people are going for experiences. That looks like dinner at a restaurant, a playzone birthday party or a game of laser tag. The kids are hanging out at the mall these days, too.
There are still stores, and it’s still handy to make sure new clothes fit and take them home that day. Leaving the house also has its perks. But it’s clear the business model doesn’t support the same across-the-board quality that used to greet shoppers when they walked into mid-tier stores.
You’ve probably seen the disorganized clothing racks, struggled to get help finding the right size or just felt the general emptiness of it all in a store over the past decade. The pandemic certainly didn’t help, but things were headed this way before. Going to a store and succeeding in getting the thing you need is a minor life victory.
You can still have a version of the Orange Julius while you shop online in your PJs. I whipped up a homemade Julius (free of lactose and high-fructose corn syrup) this week in honor of the store.
The first pull on the straw rang a note of nostalgia. I was shot back in time like I was a restaurant reviewer in Ratatouille tasting my childhood again. It was like I was sitting among the giant columns outside the Bon Marche before it was Macy’s, thinking about Nordstroms’ absurdly generous return policy and wondering if I could talk my parents into letting me shop at Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle.
Then I winced at how sweet the drink was. I’d overshot the mark on the sugar and created a treacly version of what once was.
If that’s not nostalgia, I don’t know what is.
