When I was in Arizona a few weeks back, visiting and playing
golf with my old buddy Dick, we talked about exercise, and about
how important it is to do it consistently. I’m just beginning to
pull level after some four years of a physical decline. “I should
walk,” I told Dick, “but the weather’s so lousy, I just can’t seem
to do it.”
“Go mall walking,” Dick suggested.
In terms of how I thought about myself, Dick might as well have
said, “Take up skateboarding.”
But as in so many other things — dress, deportment, golf —
Dick influences me for the better, so when I got back to
Massachusetts, I went for a walk in our nearest mall. It’s real
walking, I can report. You feel it in the legs. Because the floors
are slick, you swing along with a different action in the feet and
ankles than you do outdoors. It’s been a good thing. Some days I
can do 30 minutes at a fast clip, and feel like I could do more.
Some days, my legs turn to stumps after 20 minutes, and then I’m
thankful for the food court, where I can get a cup of crushed ice
to soothe my dry throat.
See, I’m an old guy now, no more the windy boy and a bit who
used to lope from Columbia University to Washington Square Park on
a lark. I’ve been walking in the mall for a month. Here’s what it’s
like.
ON THE OLD SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, they used to have a repeating skit
set in The Mall, usually in The Scotch Tape Store. Nothing much
ever happened, and outside the people who worked in the stores,
nobody was there. It suggested that mall stores were so narrowly
focused on products of a single use that they couldn’t pull in any
customers.
In fact, malls offer up just about exactly the opposite. They
sell products of such a total superfluousness, you wonder that the
stores can make a business out of such nothing. And the customers
pour in.
Look, here’s my mall, The Mall at Rockingham Park in Salem, New
Hampshire. It’s shaped like an elongated V, with Sears and Filene’s
(now going out of business) anchoring either end, and J.C. Penney’s
and Macy’s in the middle. It has two stories, with a food court at
the point of the V on the second floor. I can do a lap of one level
in 10 minutes.
The mall map lists 138 businesses on the map in its directory,
including the food court concessionaires, not including the four
big department stores. The map also does not include the
kiosk-based businesses that rent “open-air” booths, so to speak,
mostly on the first floor. These include five for cell phone
providers, three for T-Mobile and two for Cingular. They are
staffed by aggressive young men who call out to you as you pass,
like carnie barkers, “Sir! Sir! You have a cell phone? How you
doin’ this morning, sir?” I find this disturbing, not at all in the
passive, gorgeously feminine spirit of mall marketing (occasional
obnoxious music excepted): I think of the mall as a lush movie star
reclining in a vast silken bed, richly piled with fabric and
scent.
One of these kiosks purveys salt-base cosmetics and therapies
from the Dead Sea. Two others offer piercings and the jewelry to go
with it. At another, you can sign up for laser plastic surgery —
undesirably wrinkled or distorted body parts pictured aplenty.
Three more sell framed pictures of figures in sport, music, or show
business: Jerry Garcia, Teddy Bruschi, Manny Ramirez, Bob Marley,
Kanye West, dozens and dozens more.
A popular theme, pictures are featured in several of the formal
numbered stores along the mall’s corridors, too. Many of us must
have an impulse toward pop culture iconography in our homes. I have
been tempted to stop and ask for the photo of Payne Stewart
cradling the trophy for the 1999 U.S. Open, on one wrist his WWJD
bracelet. One store displays two life-size cutouts, Paris Hilton
looking the total skank next to George W. Bush smiling stiffly in a
suit.
CONCEDE THAT SOME USE MAY BE found for clothing — though vendors
like Pink stretch the idea of utility till it screams. Allow that
everybody needs to prepare food, thus cookware — though surely
three specialty kitchenware shops overdo it. And accept that
everyone eats — though stores specializing in giant pretzels,
cookies, sweet buns, and candy abound. Of the 142 businesses,
including the four giant department stores, which simply sell the
same things the mall shops sell all over again, at least 40 sell
something for which there is no real life utility at all.
Imagine selling Nordic Traks in Uganda. Or Build-a-Bears in
Afghanistan. Or opening a Brookstone store in Haiti. These are the
products of insane prosperity, simply flexing its muscle. On the
other hand, Urban Made Impressions appears to sell totems, and its
products might appeal in primitive societies indeed.
Of all mall businesses, one stands out as the archetype.
Yankee Candle, a 50-year-old publicly traded
company (and one of the stars of the 2003 growth market), sells
candles. Nothing but. Just that. Colored, scented, fancy, plain.
Candles, just like you can find in drugstores, hardware stores,
department stores, and grocery stores. Yankee Candle has made a
specialty out of an ordinary item, something like the way bottled
water became a hot product in the 1980s.
About the time I left California, in 1990, the anti-smoking
movement had become a 900-pound gorilla, and, looking around for
what might be next, I figured scents and fragrances would make the
hit list. Yankee Candle, with its stores full of perfumed product,
proved that prognostication wrong.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN, as I tramp four or five times a week through
my mall, a small one as malls go? In American society, commerce has
achieved such a hyperbolic apogee that we engage in flourish and
decoration for its own sake. We are in a new age of rococo. We
create, we sell, we buy just for the sheer heck of it. Television
sprawls out into stores: The Disney Store, The Discovery Channel
Store. We invent language: Gap Body advertises “Sexy Tops for
Spring.” (N.B. I used the word “tops” in that way in a piece of
fiction in 1973, and no one in my writer’s workshop knew what it
meant.) We support enthusiasms that mean absolutely nothing. Our
welfare recipients buy luxury goods.
So when I take my mall walks, I’m walking through a kind of
museum. And I imagine what the museum would look like to a resident
of Mexico City, where 4 million people get running water only for
an hour a day. Or to a young Muslim man with his brain on fire who
who has never known a woman.
