Malls: It's Personal

 

For a third of my professional and pre-professional life, I worked in shopping malls. At one time, these gleaming mausoleums to the American Dream have dissipated into fortresses seemingly short-staffed guarding against the e-commerce hordes. This past weekend, my wife and I succumbed to cabin fever and we made the trek to one of the last-remaining-healthy-shopping-malls in our part of Iowa to shop for an area rug and some books. As a former retail worker, what we witnessed reminds me why I still have PSMSD (Post-shopping Mall Stress Disorder). Even stepping foot in a mall these days makes me anxious because of the noise and traffic.

In the so-called glory days of shopping malls, the huddled masses yearning to buy stuff were always a challenge. As a shoe store manager, I often would have to grin and bear it as an unhappy customer wanted a refund on a beaten up pair of sandals that clearly she'd gotten when she boarded the ark with Noah or being screamed at by a customer who was being inconvenienced by the line of customers that was ahead of him. Yes, the marketplace of America brought out the good, the bad, and the very ugly. And while I attribute a lot of the ugly to the idiot who said, "the customer is always right" (I recently learned it was credited to the Chicago retailer Marshall Field),  I also blame greedy and desperate people who both had their reasons for wanting to hoodwink store employees and/or outright steal from our companies. In fairness, these companies, in their ways, were complicit in creating the environment that brought "Black Friday" and lobbied to have states with "Blue Laws" open up for business on Sundays and eventually brought on the era of non-stop, 24/7 shopping.

However, these same malls served as places for teens to hang out, people to meet with or run into their friends and neighbors, even as places for persons with disabilities to be seen and older folks to get in some exercise. I remember a young man named Eddie who would spend his entire day at the mall because his mother was a cashier at Woolworth's. Eddie would push his wheelchair in reverse with his  one good leg through the mall and many of the regular customers came to know him by name and to be a friend to him and help him when he needed a hand. Sadly, when his mom got ill and died, Eddie's community shrunk as he became a ward of the state and stopped coming to the mall.

On this particular Saturday, we visited four different stores and experienced the following. Huge stores with various policies about masking. From Tuesday Morning that "Recommend Highly" the wearing of masks to Homestore that had no posted policy and was crowded with people in both masks and many more without. The Barnes and Noble bookstore had plenty of masked customers and masked employees, but the feel of the place was perhaps like a Marakesh outdoor market, kind of desperate and super-crowded. Many of the customers were typical Iowa folks some of whom were in town for a state-wide wrestling meet and others were likely local new Iowans who speak in Spanish, Arabic, Russian and other dialects I am not familiar with. Blending together in this retail soup are likely political extremes joined together in that most American of all pursuits--shopping and spending!

The commingling of adrenalized expectation and exercise of freedom was palpable in the pushing and shoving of people eying potential purchases that other people had a front-row seat to viewing first. The mass of cars and trucks in the parking lot (quite visible from the highway) indicated that this was a place to still be. The shopping mall as a destination may be on the ropes in many areas, but in the flyover zone, it is a reminder of a "simpler time" when you could meet at the mall and shop or hang or catch a flick or just walk--no matter who you were, you were a part of the melting pot grabbing at
the brass ring.*

*Unless you were a person of color and the store or mall security followed you around, like you were a criminal.

As my wife and I left the center with a purchase of three books and deflated expectations, we mourned what we had known as veterans of the retailing profession. We also realized that people are desperate, but not for connection with each other, so much as to possess more and more stuff. The one thing that has changed over the years is that malls are no longer "community centers" as they historically have been and are now solely transactional resource centers soon to be of a bygone era.

It is personal to me, that I spent many of my formative years in that environment. I learned a lot about helping people in distress through my work which I regularly use in my career today. I genuinely loved helping people, as a salesperson my paycheck depended on being as helpful as I could be, but also encouraging people to part with their money--I am not proud of that or the shortcuts that I and my fellow salespeople took to make our commissions. However, I was knowledgeable about what we sold and did much more good than profited from customers, many of whom I was quite friendly. Most of my understanding of people came from the wide swath of customers I assisted. If I am open-minded about most people, it is because I served them in my job. If I am critical of people, it is also because of what I observed. I used to think that every generation is better than the previous one because we know more. However, I think that either willful ignorance has taken over this generation or merely a lack of social skills and we will likely suffer mightily for it. 

Kris Kristofferson probably was right when he wrote "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." More on point, freedom is just a word that people use to say "Fuck you/ya'll. I'm going to do what I want." It is hard to imagine a future for "united states" if that is the sentiment of its people. From me to you, we are losing it. Not our freedom but our ever-loving minds. No amount of shopping is going to fill the void of being an empty, self-centered society. Shopping malls may be thought of as a canary in a coal mine, a harbinger of things to come.