I Don't Go to Malls Unless I Have to
Christmas Day seems the ideal time to address this recent addition to my varied experiences. Tis the season to "shop til you drop" after all.
I was born in Dallas, Texas but grew up in a small town well away from the city proper. When a nearer suburb got a new mall it was a fairly big deal as it would be one of the nearest (and certainly the newest) such mall to what was at the time a rather sparsely developed hick town. When I was old enough to drive the wonders were even greater as it became one of the stops when getting out of town.
My best friend and I spent many an hour there wandering through the all too familiar and largely never-changing shops. There was a favorite little Chinese food place away from the food court that had the best eggrolls and Corn Dog on a Stick still existed back then, so there were some edible reasons to make the journey. We both also enjoyed perusing the bookstores (Waldenbooks and B. Dalton were both at the height of their powers in the years before Barnes & Noble and Borders invaded Texas) where another friend had a habit of buying a random magazine of the same price as Playboy and then abandoning that on their magazine shelves while shoplifting a copy of the magazine he was too young to buy - a justified non-crime in his point of view as the store was paid full price for what he took and retained the other magazine for sale again.
A few other shops would hold our interest and did see our patronage so we were not precisely mallrats, a term that had not yet been coined. Generally, though, that mall was just a time killer while awaiting a show time at their movie theater that was part of the overall campus, but not attached to the structure of the mall itself. Perhaps it was the carefree nature of my high school days that lent the mall some appeal. That luster faded soon enough as more and more alternative options arose that were not directly linked to such a massive complex with generally inconvenient parking at any time of the year.
As I have grown older and perhaps a touch wiser, there is precious little that would drive me to the mall. Recently the acquisition of some things that could only be had at a mall store had me paying irregular visits for a brief period of a couple of months, but then only long enough to get in and out and on with life, paying little regard to all that surrounded me by way of shopping options and other distractions.
Part of my departure from mall culture may well be the advent of every square inch of these colossal shopping complexes becoming prime real estate. At some point in the last 20 years the once wide aisles between storefronts, often the home of planters, well placed benches of various levels of comfortable, statuary, and the like were regarded as untapped resources. Today the kiosk is king. Any given mall is littered with easily fifty or more tiny little pop-ups offering everything from perfumes and colognes to watches to cell phone service to hermit crabs and Siamese fighting fish! Depending on the present population of visitors to the mall, foot traffic is further encumbered by crowds having to thread the spaces between these tiny commercial outlets.
I suspect when this civilization finally crumbles, as history teaches us is inevitable, future archaeologists may regard the ruins of these malls as the temples of commerce to which the masses set upon pilgrimages to pay tribute to some great gods of shopping.
I was born in Dallas, Texas but grew up in a small town well away from the city proper. When a nearer suburb got a new mall it was a fairly big deal as it would be one of the nearest (and certainly the newest) such mall to what was at the time a rather sparsely developed hick town. When I was old enough to drive the wonders were even greater as it became one of the stops when getting out of town.
My best friend and I spent many an hour there wandering through the all too familiar and largely never-changing shops. There was a favorite little Chinese food place away from the food court that had the best eggrolls and Corn Dog on a Stick still existed back then, so there were some edible reasons to make the journey. We both also enjoyed perusing the bookstores (Waldenbooks and B. Dalton were both at the height of their powers in the years before Barnes & Noble and Borders invaded Texas) where another friend had a habit of buying a random magazine of the same price as Playboy and then abandoning that on their magazine shelves while shoplifting a copy of the magazine he was too young to buy - a justified non-crime in his point of view as the store was paid full price for what he took and retained the other magazine for sale again.
A few other shops would hold our interest and did see our patronage so we were not precisely mallrats, a term that had not yet been coined. Generally, though, that mall was just a time killer while awaiting a show time at their movie theater that was part of the overall campus, but not attached to the structure of the mall itself. Perhaps it was the carefree nature of my high school days that lent the mall some appeal. That luster faded soon enough as more and more alternative options arose that were not directly linked to such a massive complex with generally inconvenient parking at any time of the year.
As I have grown older and perhaps a touch wiser, there is precious little that would drive me to the mall. Recently the acquisition of some things that could only be had at a mall store had me paying irregular visits for a brief period of a couple of months, but then only long enough to get in and out and on with life, paying little regard to all that surrounded me by way of shopping options and other distractions.
Part of my departure from mall culture may well be the advent of every square inch of these colossal shopping complexes becoming prime real estate. At some point in the last 20 years the once wide aisles between storefronts, often the home of planters, well placed benches of various levels of comfortable, statuary, and the like were regarded as untapped resources. Today the kiosk is king. Any given mall is littered with easily fifty or more tiny little pop-ups offering everything from perfumes and colognes to watches to cell phone service to hermit crabs and Siamese fighting fish! Depending on the present population of visitors to the mall, foot traffic is further encumbered by crowds having to thread the spaces between these tiny commercial outlets.
I suspect when this civilization finally crumbles, as history teaches us is inevitable, future archaeologists may regard the ruins of these malls as the temples of commerce to which the masses set upon pilgrimages to pay tribute to some great gods of shopping.
56-60, M
