Once Upon a Mall

I am fairly positive that when they said that the world is coming to an end, they referred to the annihilation of brick-and-mortar retail stores.  The last decade or so, in-person retail shopping has been swiftly outmoded by e-commerce.  The 'Retail Apocalypse', they call it.  The dilapidation of shopping malls is almost eschatological and certainly symbolic of the speed of evolution (or devolution) of things in this Ghor Kaliyuga.  ऐसे में  one can only muse over the glory days of the JCPenneys and the Macy'ses.

Chapel Hill Mall

When I was a graduate student, a visit to a shopping mall was one of the most glamorous getaways for my roommates and me.  On selected Saturdays, the four of us would hop onto Akron Metro bus no. 10 that would painstakingly traverse the 4.5 mi distance from Downtown Akron to Chapel Hill Mall in about an hour.  We would then trek the entire square footage of the mall and snoop around JCPenney and Sears in search of that one elusive $4 t-shirt and that one $8 jeans.  Shiny clearance boards at Aeropostale and American Eagle would lure us in to buy apparel that we would then save to take back to India during the next vacation as gifts.  We would also sometimes splurge on an expensive $13 haircut at one of the swanky hair outlets in the mall instead of our usual $7 barbershop grandpa near campus.  A Saturday mall visit was also an opportunity to treat ourselves to a veggie burger lunch at the Burger King next to the mall (this humble meal has been since expunged from BK's menu and replaced with a monstrosity called the impossible whopper).  We would also religiously partake in the annual lunacy that is Black Friday by hitching a car ride to the mall to contribute to the enormity of the 3AM line outside BestBuy so that we could get our hands on that cheap USB stick or some other such inutile entity.  We share many a mall memoir, including that one somewhat snowy November evening when we missed the last bus back and had to stand in the cold outside the closed mall doors waiting for a car-धारी student to come and rescue us!  Eventually when I graduated, divorced this group of friends, and moved to Youngstown (read about it here), the Boardman mall became a big part of life for me and Pavana.  Since we lived practically down the street from the mall, we would spend many evenings shopping at the mall.

It is a different world today with online shopping literally eating away at the remains of whatever is left of shopping malls.  As a consumer, while I certainly feel for the stores going out of business, I honestly have no problem with the online shopping experience.  My take is that as long as you can keep track of your weekly waistline trends, you can effectively e-shop for pants without stepping out from your home.  The trouble I have with online shopping is when the item you receive fails to meet your expectations, and you rather ironically have to step out from your home and go to UPS armed with a malodorous cardboard box and return label!