Shopping Malls

Shopping malls are not my favorite, however I have been walking through Downtown Sacramento's Westfield Plaza quite often lately. I often park my car in the garage below the mall and get my ticket validated with a cup of coffee or tea.

Malls are tricky places, and by that I mean they convince you that they are something more than they are and lull you into staying a while. For example, they are privately owned companies, but they feel quite public. When is the last time you wandered throughout a bank building and 'window shopped'. Banks are private, we go to them to do business and then leave. We go to malls sometimes just to enjoy the experience, meet a friend, or have lunch; all uses which are associated with public spaces. However, try handing out controversial fliers at a mall, or staging a rally as one might on the city street and you will likely soon find out that there are business people who can and will ask you to cease and desist.

They are even more tricky in that they lull you into a fantasy world, where realities such as budgets and stress don't exist. Jon Goss in his article The "Magic of the Mall" talks about the mall developer's strategy to "assuage...collective guilt over conspicuous consumption by designing into the retail built environment the means for a fantasized dissociation from the act of shopping." This is what I experience in the morning as I purchase my coffee and stroll through the mall...except I'm not really shopping because nothing is open yet.

I find the experience really quite enjoyable when the shops are closed. Window cleaners are sometimes busy preparing the shop fronts for the day, business people are coming in and out of coffee shops, and occasionally people meander by mumbling unquoteable things as they go. Of course all of this does sound like normal morning street life, but all the while a sound system is playing music from the forties and half of the store fronts look more like they are out of a movie set than reality. The effect ends up being that I feel like I'm wandering through an old movie and any minute I'm going to spot my husband wearing a fedora and trench coat, leaning on a long black umbrella waiting to sweep me off my feet. That is what malls do, they make you forget that you need to save money for your car payment, they ease the guilt that your buying a fancy red dress that you really don't need. But then again you do need that dress because maybe Cary Grant is about to sweep you off your feet and take you out to dinner. Who wouldn't want to spend a few hours hanging out in an old movie, as long as it isn't "The Birds" by Alfred Hitchcock.

Whatever fantasy a mall portrays (Think of Horton Plaza in San Diego), it quickly vanishes as you walk out onto the street.

It is a very abrupt transition as I leave the mall and step out onto J Street where cars are backed up, sirens may be blaring and plenty of people are heading into their offices for a day of harsh reality. I like the city better than the mall though. Who needs a sound track and fantasy when you can hear real people, look at real buildings and move forward in the reality of life.