We’re driving toward the mall.

Call of the Mall

I spend a lot of time in malls. Too much, I think. I daydream of life on a ranch out west where I’d go to Wal-Mart every two weeks for groceries, and that would be it for me and shopping. It will never happen. You are riding with a tall, bald, stuttering research wonk on the cusp of his fifty-third year. I am called a retail anthropologist, which makes me uncomfortable, especially around my colleagues still in academia who have many more degrees than I do. For whatever combination of reasons, I’ve spent my adult life studying people shopping. I watch how they move through stores and other commercial environments – restaurants, banks, fast-food joints, movie theaters, car dealerships, the post office, concert halls.

It is an odd skill, not one I would have thought. Yet I am good at it, and it pays the bills. I can’t imagine not doing it.

I am definitely not a shopper. I don’t own lots of stuff. When I do buy, in spite of whatever professional knowledge I have, I perform like an ordinary guy.

I own a research and consulting business called Envirosell.

Our specialty is looking at the interaction between people and products, and people and spaces.

A mall is a huge commercial entity, but it tends to appeal strictly to the local shopper, the one who is already familiar with it and what it has to offer.

It’s our mall. Maybe you have a mall, too.

You see a lot of community life in its mall. Families especially tend not to be on display in very many public spaces nowadays. Increasingly cities are becoming the province of the rich, the childless, or the poor. I love cities. But America hasn’t lived there for a long time. The retail arena is still the best place I know for seeing what people wear and eat and look like, how they interact with their parents and friends and lovers and kids. If you really want to observe entire middle-class multigenerational American families, you have to go to the mall.

It’s also not a bad place to shop. Every mall has its own face.

Our mall reeks of money – inside we’ll see acres of marble, in tasteful shades of tan, brown, and white. The flooring is tile. There‘s a glassed-in elevator. There are 144 stores. Befitting its middle- to upper-middle-class market, there’s a Versace and Ralph Lauren, a Cartier and a Tiffany, a Nordstrom and a Saks. There’s also a Gap, an Abercrombie &Fitch, a Victoria’s Secret, but no Spencer Gifts. The biggest single category is women’s apparel, which is also the mainstay of every other mall in the world. There’s a record store, a toy store, a video game store and nine stores selling sneakers. There must be close to twenty places to buy cosmetics, if you include the department stores and the boutiques that sell it as a sideline. There’s a beauty parlor with big, old-fashioned hair dryers that look like something out of science-fiction movie.

There’s also fourteen-screen cinema at which, this weekend, two screens are devoted to the new Jackie Chan movie. (I can’t wait) There’s a video arcade. There’s a rock-climbing wall. There’s an Aqua Massage. There are three national chain sit-down restaurants, all civilized affairs, serving food that’s utterly acceptable. There’s a food court, a vast, high-ceilinged arena offering no fewer than forty different outlets, mostly fast food. There’s a funny little 1950s-style hamburger joint, Jonny Rockets, in which the wait staff, a bunch of listless teenagers in dingy uniforms, are required to perform a line dace several times an hour. It’s hilarious and distressing, and I recommend it highly. There’s a Cinnabon stand, four cookie stands, three pretzel stands, three ice-cream stands, and no place wheresoever to buy an apple.

Usually, malls this size draw shoppers from between five and twenty –five miles away. According to one survey, 30 percent of the adults living in this county have been here at least once during the past three months

Mall is more than just a place to shop. This is a sound thought. If you’ve managed to attract people here for one purpose, you ought to see if there are other desires you can fulfill. It’s fine if they come to shop, even better if they shop and eat, better than that if they shop, eat, play, socialize, and so on.

It’s been proven that the more time someone spends in a mall, the more stores they visit and the more things they buy.

(Abridged from “Call of the Mall” by Paco Underhill)

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30