Chambersburg Mall




The Chambersburg Mall was a shopping mall located in Scotland, PA (Just a few miles north of its namesake town, Chambersburg). The mall was opened on October 1982, and permanently shut down on June 30 2023. As of September 2024, the mall is currently owned by Namdar Realty Group, a real estate investment firm.

The failure of the Chambersburg Mall was blamed on many factors including, but not limited to, poor location, eCommerce, and lack of a proper Food Court.

My Own Memories

The Chambersburg Mall was my childhood mall. It was one of the closest shopping centers to my house, along with the Valley Mall in Hagerstown, MD. This mall was a very significant part of my childhood, and a single section of a webpage is not enough to record all the memories that I have of it. So instead, here's a few highlights:

The Sears at this mall was my go-to for Back to School clothing when I was in elementary and middle school. My grandma would always take me there to pick out brand new outfits for the upcoming school year. Needless to say, my family went in to full on panic mode when word got to us that Sears would be permanently closing, since that was THE place to get clothes before school started up (at least, that's how my grandma saw it). Our solution going forward: buying my Back to School clothes at K-Mart instead. You can imagine how long that lasted.

This mall used to have an arcade that I enjoyed going to. It was one of those generic mall arcades with a lot of machines that you could earn tickets on, and then redeem said tickets for prizes. My favorite arcade machine at this mall by far was the Marvel vs Capcom 2 machine. It was the only one of its kind in the area, and I miss being able to play on it.

During the mall's later years, there were these two generic stores (named Extreme Themes and As Seen on TV) owned by this one dude. Most of the time he had this whole "Buy something or get out" mentality, but one time my Mom was able to strike up a conversation with him. I forget what the conversation was, but it somehow lead to him telling a rather interesting story. The interesting story in question was about him driving from Pakistan all the way to Germany. At first, I didn't believe the guy, but then he showed us stamps in his old passport as proof of his journey. After that long story, me and my Mom ended up leaving wondering what the heck just happened.

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