washingtonpost.com
A Pall on the Mall
Things Fall Apart: The Center of Our Consumer-Driven Universe Cannot Hold
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2008; C01
Shopocalypse now!
We're living at what may be the beginning of the end of mallworld as we know it: Certain Circuit City locations are marked for death here and there, and certain Ann Taylor Lofts are not responding to the corporate chemo, and the vacant Hecht's box is still a forlorn husk at Westfield Wheaton Shopping Centre, its parking lot filled with empty school buses. Across the land, it's heebie-jeebie vibes in the homogenous habitat. Bennigan's, Sharper Image, Bombay Co., Linens 'N Things, RIP. It's a series of harbingers. It's the end of things 'N things.
A Wilsons Leather store, a Disney Store, a Zales; a Gap here, a Home Depot there. Club Libby Lu is shutting down all its tween boutiques (farewell, belly-shirted glitter imps!) and, look, o'er yonder food court, it's the equivalent of a smash-and-grab at Whitehall Jewelers' going-out-of-business sale at the Westfield Montgomery (at all the locations). The sales people at Saks Fifth Avenue in Tysons Galleria (a little taste of Dubai on the Dulles) give you a knowing look, a look that says don't buy it today, come back and buy it in two days.
The Great American Fire Sale has finally taken its toll. The mall is a triage center. Hey, JCPenney, can you hear us, big guy? Blink twice, friend, give us a sign. Eddie Bauer? Buddy? How many fingers are we holding up? J. Jill, you with us, girl? Abercrombie, dude, you look a little peaked, the abs are going soft or something. And the shoe stores! The long faces therein, like refugees. With the T-Pain up as loud as it will go. Seeming as if there is no worse fate in the world than trying to sell a brand-new pair of Air Jordans.
* * *
We are a people who've felt everything you can feel in a mall: We have been teenagers in a mall, long enough to become grumpy adults in the mall. (It's been 26 years since Frank Zappa's daughter had that "Valley Girl" hit, which name-checked the Sherman Oaks Galleria, which was torn down so long ago nobody remembers it anymore. She's 41 now.) We fell in love in malls. We brought our babies to the mall, to play. We had soaring satisfaction and buyer's remorse in malls. We went deeply into debt in the mall. We went to the mall whenever there was nothing else to do.
Yet it's hard to feel sorry for mallworld, because it kept expanding until market forces intervened. By then there was a box-store feeling to life just about anywhere, everywhere.
We are a people who've grown accustomed to the dire warnings from retailers that Christmas -- in any year -- was going to be a tough one, and that instead of making hundreds of billions of dollars in sales, retailers would only make . . . hundreds of billions of dollars in sales.
Every year we spent more, and every year it never seemed to be good enough. We recognize now that this tended to be an abusive relationship, the dysfunctional family dynamic, like a Christmas comedy, only sad.
Economy: You never get me what I want.
Consumer: What? I buy you everything you ask for! Every year!
Economy: I still feel empty.
* * *
Now comes the strangest feeling of all: sympathy. (Sympathy? For the mall?)
Yes, in a way. It's a lousy feeling to shop and feel bad about all the people who can't, even if they (and the mall) brought it on themselves. It's a lousy feeling to shop while knowing that if nobody else shops, then pretty soon nobody will have any money to shop.
In the Old Navy at Tysons Corner Center a few days ago, on the surface everything seems right. (All the stores seem right, except for the sales tags that already scream January closeout, in November.)
The remixed hip-hoppy version of Nat King Cole is singing about chestnuts and the remixed hip-hoppy version of the cutely dour Charlie Brown kids is singing "Christmastime Is Here." Only everything seems wrong. The unease is just beneath the forced cheer. Employees are scurrying around as you would expect four days before the onslaught of Black Friday, that quasi high-holy dawn of the holiday season. They are folding clothes, moving clothes, stacking clothes. The store is engorged with fleece and wool blend, sweaters and vests, scarves and gloves. (Once again Al Gore has gone ignored about average global temperatures. What are we to Old Navy -- penguins?)
Mallworld overpampered us, and we went willingly, again and again. Sorry to pick on poor Old Navy (with all those minus signs quarter after quarter on its financial reports and those of its corporate siblings, Gap and Banana Republic), but standing in the middle of it right now you feel . . . ashamed of everyone involved, from the upper echelons of bailed-out Wall Street all the way down to your overextended, overstimulated consumer self. This is not exactly joyeux.
Old Navy has been decorated in hot Hannah Montanaesque hues of neon pink and green. There are bizarre, delusional slogans plastered all over the store:
"I want to get cozy by the fire," screams one sign.
"I want to give the best gifts," says another.
"I want a sparkly something."
"I want to laugh."
They're selling laughs now. They're trying to.
You acquire a daily familiarity for numbers you used to never pay attention to, such as the consumer confidence index. You listen to those "This American Life" podcasts that all your smart friends keep raving like lunatics about, in which Ira Glass and his nervous Nellies try to explain our global economic calamity. You learn about things like "consumer paper" loans. (So that's how Office Depot does it . . .) You finally read the Economist, after all these years of claiming to read the Economist. You figure out how many zeroes are in a trillion. (Twelve.)
You have dreams in which Paul Krugman and Michael Lewis make brief cameos. Neel Kashkari, who oversees the books on the federal bailout, is named one of People's Sexiest Men Alive. You start to see, at last, how it's all connected, like a game of Jenga. (Jenga: The Deflation Edition -- families everywhere will find hours of fun!) Remove one piece (i.e., Christmas shopping) and the entire structure collapses.
But what if you don't want to shop anymore?
That's life in the shopocalypse. (Not our word. "Shopocalypse" was coined by Reverend Billy, a New York performance artist who has evangelized across the nation's malls and power retail centers every Black Friday for years, which he proclaimed "Buy Nothing Day," preaching the message of the so-called Church of Stop Shopping. Happy now, Reverend?)
* * *
We soak up the doom. We also buy a sweater at Lord & Taylor, and we like it until we bring it home, and then see it as a sweater of doom. We go to Montgomery Mall, the Wheaton mall, the Springfield mall. We go high-end and low-end. We eat pizza and then we eat Chick-fil-A. We go to the malls with Apple stores, and we go to the malls where we try to remember if this was the mall where people get kidnapped from the parking lot.
In Tysons Galleria, the scene is so empty you could get a film crew and use it as a location for a science-fiction movie, maybe a zombie movie. In L'Occitane, looking over fancy soaps all by our lonesome, listening to even more remixed Christmas pop of yore, this time Eartha Kitt singing "Santa Baby," only really, really slow. It's a dirge now. (Santa. Baby. An outer. space. convert. ible. too. bright. blue.)
Over by the Ritz-Carlton hotel, Harold's is in its death throes. In its time, Harold's, with 42 stores in 19 states, was venerable prep-wear supplier, the kind of place for people who thought they lived in Connecticut but didn't. People who found Ralph Lauren to be too fashion-forward. Harold's employees got told the news Nov. 7.
We buy a couple of dress shirts. There's not much left. The vultures have come and gone.
It's a sympathy purchase, we suddenly realize -- the stuff you buy as a way of saying farewell? Lower prices are supposed to make you feel good. Now, lower prices make you feel worse.
"Sorry about the cheap bags," the clerk says, putting the shirts in a white plastic grocery bag, the kind you get at Korean delis, with red letters that say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.
You're welcome, welcome, welcome, and goodbye.
We stagger out feeling like lucky survivors, for who knows how long. |
