Malls Have Everything But Humanity

Don’t you just love progress? Doesn’t it give you a warm, secure feeling to know you’re always within spitting distance of a shopping mall?

Yeah, me too.

What I like best about malls is there’s so little chance of becoming disoriented in one because no matter where you are, Atlanta or Albuquerque, they’re all the same.

Same stores - same stuff.

Same kids in Dallas hanging out, being COOL, buying the same jeans and hightops as the kids in Duluth - and from the same stores. Different is UNCOOL.

Same husbands waiting on the same benches while their wives return all the stuff they bought last week and buy something new so they can return that next week.

Why do we have so many malls, anyway? Why is shopping so important? Has it replaced baseball as the American pastime? Has it replaced conversation when friends get together?

My friend Gail says people shop because they have no life, because buying stuff is a form of gratification, a reassurance of their self-worth.

Maybe she’s right, but it doesn’t sound that way to me. I know some folks who shop all the time and their “self” isn’t worth much at all because their credit cards are eating them up.

While we’re on the subject, let’s not forget ugly.

No matter how they dress them up with waterfalls and flashing lights, with pseudo-outdoor cafes and coffee houses, malls are predictably less beautiful than the landscape they replace.

But are they necessary?

You tell me: Do we need a whole store that sells T-shirts with messages on them? I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much of a kick out of reading somebody’s chest.

Shopping used to be a lot more fun when it was taken in small doses. Where I grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Cleveland, shopping was not what we did for entertainment. When my mom sent me to Mr. Hodapp’s meat market for lamb chops, she meant business. I didn’t cruise the meat case looking for my friends.

“Four lamb chops, please,” I’d say as I screwed my foot around making patterns in the sawdust.

“Tell your mom she wants pork chops today,” Hodapp would advise, handing me a gratis slice of bologna to munch on. “Wait until tomorrow for the lamb.”

Now that was shopping.

A trip to Sudak’s bakery on Saturday morning for cream-filled horns was a delight unmatched in any mall. “Two horns and a loaf of white sliced,” I’d order as I waved to Tommy Sudak, who swept up for his dad on weekends. Tommy was in my class at school.

That was shopping!

Then there was always time on the way home to stop in at Bader’s Pharmacy for a small cherry Coke and a 10-cent (plus a penny tax) Wonder Woman comic book.

That was REALLY shopping.

Now I don’t shop anymore.

What’s the fun of fighting traffic just to get to a pile of plastic plunked down in the center of an asphalt lunarscape filled with frantic folk who don’t even know my name?

Where’s the wisdom in destroying the old and once-beautiful to replace it with prefabs with builtin, guaranteed, 10-year obsolescence?

And where’s the beauty in anonymity?

xxxx