I think this might be US-centric phenomena. While we have some Malls in the UK, I believe most shops never really left the high-streets here (until the rise of the internet).
OP mentioned a "no-name midwestern suburb" - in places like that, the main shopping street in the town often never existed in the first place. The land use goes straight from farms or ranch land to massive suburban housing developments with no functional town having ever existed in between.
Thats not how all of the US works thankfully, but in huge parts of the country which are still doing the suburban sprawl thing, its a pretty common pattern. The nearest city which existed before the 1950s might be an hour's drive away, everything is new and purpose-built by large scale commercial developers.
In much of Europe malls would have to be built on the outskirts of towns because city centers are obviously too densely populated and historically imported to raze things and build such a huge new structure. People could not get to those outskirts unless the city invested in new transportation connections, and this limited development.
Unfortunately, where I am in Eastern Europe, car ownership has risen high enough to make the creation of malls on the outskirts a viable business model. This has had the deleterious effect of now draining business from city centers (where, all these newly bourgeois car owners complain, there is insufficient parking), making once prosperous high streets into ghost towns. Basically we are going through the same historical period that many in Western Europe or North America now recognize as a big mistake.
