The Seattle-based internet book seller Amazon just announced plans to open an enormous fulfillment center in the North Randall, Ohio. This is a big deal for the small community which has suffered greatly since the Randall Park Mall, once the largest in America, shut down due to retail sales moving online. Amazon is actually building its new warehouse on the same land where the mall once stood. 

The irony of this is lost on no one.

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Like the mall before it, the new warehouse will be huge at 855,000 square feet. Amazon says workers there “will pick, pack and ship smaller customer items such as electronics, toys and books.” Put differently, the new pickers will be filling Amazon-branded boxes with the exact same sorts of goods that were once sold at the Randall Park Mall. The mall closed in 2009, after over three decades of success, and a demolition crew finally destroyed what remained of the cavernous structure in 2014. A piece of North Randall’s identity was lost along with the structure. 

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