Caitlin Kelly, freelance journalist and author of Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail, talks about how she went from the Daily News to North Face and what she learned about the service economy along the way.

Last Thanksgiving, a crowd of thousands crushed into a Wal-Mart store in search of holiday sales, killing a 34-year old man.  That incident has made stores around the country look at ways to keep customers and staff safe this shopping season.  Takeaway Correspondent Femi Oke goes back to the Green Acres Mall - the scene of last year's accident - to check in with shoppers and the mall's new safety measures.

It may not be that easy to find a mall to go hang out and shop anymore. General Growth Properties, one of the biggest mall operators in the country, filed for bankruptcy yesterday. And we are seeing more and more malls die out. In fact as our next guest wrote in The New York Times earlier this month, no new malls have been built in the U.S. since 2006. So what is happening to the mall? And what should happen to the near empty malls now littering the American landscape? To help answer that question, The Takeaway is joined by Ellen Dunham-Jones, Director of the Architecture Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.

Read the New York Times article, 101 Uses for a Deserted Mall, including a contribution from our guest Ellen Dunham-Jones.

How I Met Your Mother's Robin Sparkles knows how to love a mall: