Bah Mallbug - Retail Therapy

I have established that I don't get out much.  Here is yet another amusing casualty of my in-ness.

Back before we owned a house, we used to dash here and there on the weekends, on Manic Mall Trips.  After a while we realized we were spending way too much money and had little to show for it.  This was dubbed Retail Therapy<tm>.

One definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.  We realized that Retail Therapy was a failed therapy.  This didn't get a chance to become a problem of momentous proportions, as we purchased a house, thus taking every single cent of disposable income and sending it into some sort of black hole, never to be seen again.

So yeah, I don't get out much these days.

However, I also noticed that working a pair of jobs and never going anywhere was not exactly a recipe for a an interesting life.  So every now and then we leave the house.  Surprisingly enough, we generally wind up regretting it almost immediately, throwing us right back into Stupid.

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We decided on a mall thirty minutes away, as it had the magnet store which required visiting.  My wife is one of those people stores love; they send her something close to her weight in coupons.

We managed to park in the same county as the store, which I'm told is a good thing.  In we went, to the store I won't name but rhymes with KC Denneys.  BANG, we hit a store full of Christmas Cheer<tm>.  I like to say we celebrate Christmas, but only in the most crassly commercial sense of the holiday.   And there we were, in the most crassly commercial sense of retail.  Holiday jingles, decorations, and outfits.  Santa.  And lines almost as long as unemployment lines.

All this as I'm still finishing up my Halloween candy.  I'm told the decorations were up before Halloween this year.

I loudly observed that I was completely full of holiday cheer (or something), which pleased my wife to no end.  I further suggested that they start putting up Valentine's Day decorations, since they were already doing Christmas.  It pays to be prepared, you know.  The wife shot me one of those concrete cracking looks.

There were lines everywhere, presumably including the rest rooms.  I was informed that this was about normal for a Sunday.  I certainly don't remember the mall like this on any Sunday during which I had left the house.  I suggested turning around immediately but unfortunately there were things we had to purchase.

After six lines and two floors, we somehow managed to procure our things.  In spite of the lines, I have to give credit to the lady behind the counter, who went all out to make our coupons apply all over the place.  It seemed we wound up getting things for free.

We were, however, down one thing.  When I inquired, I was told never mind, we'd shop online.  Why, I asked, couldn't we have just shopped online, as opposed to finding ourselves in this morass of a mall?  Because you wanted to go to the mall.

You certainly can't argue with her logic.

AND THEN THE MALL

Wow.

I've heard all sorts of news about the economy, unemployment, stores closing, and malls becoming ghost towns.   Apparently the economy wasn't all that horrible, at least by the volume of people walking around.  I can't imagine them walking around because they enjoyed the place or for their general health.

So the mall appeared to be on its way to ghost town.  One anchor store had closed.  Most of the stores I remembered had gone away.  I was almost surprised to find a Starbucks.  Merchants must be worried, between the vacancies and the horrid stores that fill some of the spaces.

Even with two floors of stores, I had an incredibly difficult time finding anything of interest.  This did not seem to bother the hundreds of twelve to sixteen year old females flooding the aisles.

Good God, where will they go when the malls close?  There will be an epidemic of displaced young women, presumably with disposable income.  Perhaps we need to forestall this eventuality and open Bieber stores near all malls.

We were stunned.  That's about the only term I can pull up.  We reached immediate consensus that we were never coming back again.


Not even a trip to the adult store would console me - it was that bad.