Yeah! Sure! I was there for some Black Friday shopping, and while it was crowded, it was not more crowded than my usual shopping mall, which is probably 20 miles from downtown Chicago. There’s a really good selection of stores. Maybe not an amazing selection, but a lot better than I predicted. Here’s the website:
http://www.marketplacemall.com/en.html
It appeared that there were a lot of high school and college kids working there.
There’s also movie theatres, free-standing stores, strip malls, etc. The downtown is very cute, but I didn’t have much time to walk around. I just drove through it a few times. There’s a lot to do off campus, but the town basically survives off of UIUC. I think there’s like 300K people in the twin cities, not including the 40K on campus. It’s definitely the biggest town within 50 miles of there.