Mall report

 I reneged on a vow I had made to my family on Thanksgiving Day: I set foot in a shopping mall today. 

I had said I would do all my Christmas shopping online this year.  But a week or two ago, I was watching television with my wife when one of those "every kiss begins with Kay" commercials came on.  She mentioned offhand that she wouldn't mind a little bling under the tree.  I was surprised, because we don't go anywhere these days which would seem to call for accessorizing, but I figured she is feeling bullish about the possibility of resuming social intercourse sometime in the next 6-9 months, now that the vaccines are trickling out.  So I added jewelry to her Christmas list.  I poked around on mall-chain-store websites a little bit to assess my comfort level of buying jewelry online, and decided it wasn't sufficiently high for me to to risk it.  

Presumably all of you are too organized to do Christmas shopping this late in the season, so you may not be aware that, in non-pandemic times, this week is the absolute most hellish time to Christmas shop.  The stores are jam-packed with people but not with merchandise (all the good stuff already having been sold to the more organized and forward-planning contingent back on Black Friday), and a mood of desperation hangs in the air like cheap cigar smoke because, ready or not, Christmas comes roaring up like a freight train this week.

The mall was crowded, but not as badly as it usually would be.  I had no trouble finding a place to park.  On the way inside, I had to step around a carryout drink container, complete with plastic lid and straw sticking out, which was lying in the middle of the walk.  That kind of thing is common at this particular mall, and it's one of the reasons that I loathe the mall experience.  What kind of a slob discards a carryout drink in the middle of the sidewalk?

 I observed all the things we've now seen many times when shopping for necessities: a sign on the doorway stating that masks are required; a large pump dispenser of hand disinfectant at the entrance; people trying, with varying levels of attentiveness, not to crowd one another.  I was inattentive myself at one point, stepping onto an escalator just a couple of steps behind a fellow pedestrian.  This was pre-pandemic habit on my part; I rode the distance considerably less than six feet away from him.  Fortunately, or not, I don't think he was aware I was that close - and I didn't figure it out, either, until the ride was virtually over.

I guess we all have read that retail stores are suffering because of the pandemic-driven economic slowdown, so I was more aware than usual of foot traffic inside the mall stores.  It hit me, in a way it hadn't previously, that malls have winner stores and loser stores.  That's not very insightful; but I had never seen such stark visual evidence before.  As I strolled along the corridor past the stores, many of them had no shoppers inside at all.  But a select few were shopper magnets.  And because they all restrict capacity inside their shops now, the popular ones had lines outside. The two longest lines were outside the LuluLemon store and the Apple Store.   We looked at LuluLemon once before; seems one can't overstate the appeal of comfortable pants.  As for the Apple Store, it always was packed, even before the coronavirus.  There also were lines outside Victoria's Secret Pink, Timberland, and a popcorn shop called Garrett's which sells bags of mixed cheese popcorn and caramel corn.  It is wildly popular, but I can't eat the stuff: I have an aversion to all salty snacks which are cheese-flavored and artificially orange.

This mall is one of the larger ones in this area, with some five anchor department stores, all of them national chains.  One of them, Lord and Taylor, is closing all its stores, including this one.  I walked past it and glanced inside.  It was eerie.  They are liquidating all their merchandise, and nearly all of it is now gone.  All I could see were rows of empty shelves, racks and similar display units.  From the mall corridor, I could look right through to the back wall, which is virtually impossible to do in a healthy department store.  It was like looking at the skeleton of a capybara after the piranhas had nearly finished with it.  I don't think I've ever bought a single item at Lord and Taylor's, but seeing it in its death throes made me feel sad.  We've looked before at the decline of department stores.  It seems the pandemic is hastening their demise.