Half Off At The Mall

Last night I drove down to a mall. (I hate malls. Always enjoyed walking down Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive or downtown Grand Rapids when I was a kid. Going store to store on an actual street seemed an adventure to me. Malls take the art of the artificial to a transcendent level.) But I did.
I was looking for a new pair of boots. (My old faithful pair has given up after twelve or more years.) The thing I noticed about walking into one store after another is how empty of shoppers they were. And, a full two weeks before Christmas, the desperate nature of the pricing.
Gift wrapping paper was 55% off—and, boy, was there lots of it! Rack after rack of clothing was advertised at 50% off. If that’s a true markdown, we’re talking about selling stuff at cost two weeks before the holiday.
Some racks were only 40% off; a few said 25%. But everything was marked down. The boots I finally bought were priced at $80 and I bought them for $35. For years and years, that wouldn’t have been true until the week after Christmas—if there were any left.
How much better could the sales on Black Friday possibly have been?
It seems to me we have been climbing this mountain toward bigger and more inclusive malls since some time in the 1950s. I remember they opened the first mall in Grand Rapids late that decade. I saw my first mall in suburban Detroit in 1954. It was considered quite a phenomenon at the time.
Back in that ancient time, “downtown” had a meaning. I’m not a big shopper—most men aren’t—but there was something truly enjoyable about traipsing up Monroe Avenue, going in and out of standalone stores, just looking.
There was a Planter’s Peanut store across the street from the old Pantlind Hotel (now the Amway Grand Plaza—but they’ll still let you walk from today’s glass and steel entrance back into the elegant 1913 lobby no longer used). To begin my shopping day, I’d buy a huge bag of hot, roasted red peanuts, half a pound for 50 cents, and munch my way up the Avenue for some serious shopping. That became my private Christmas ritual.
In the space of six or eight blocks there were three locally owned department stores, a Sears and a JC Penney store—plus a raft of smaller, independent stores. (My mother had a relationship with the hat buyer at Jacobsen’s—when a new shipment of hats came in, she’d set aside a few that my mom would like and give her a call.
I had a similar relationship with a small men’s store in New York once. My friend could buy my Christmas present by going in and asking Charlie what would go with my wardrobe.) I miss having the same stores there, year after year—greeting them like old friends.
Stores weren’t open each and every night. As a concession, they were open Monday nights only. Sales stayed where they belonged, after the holidays. As you entered a store, there were real Christmas carols playing—not the secular holiday tunes of today.
On the occasion when you can force me into a mall, like last night, I look at the row on row of characterless “shops” with their entire fronts open to the mall concourse. Dress shop after dress shop; shoe shop after shoe shop; none with anything to distinguish them. I wonder if there really is a dress shop for every three women in the United States? Can we afford them all?
Will this finally be the year when we weed out some of those “boutique” shops? Will we lose some of the department stores (with much less variety than the real ones used to have—the ones the malls drove out business) that seem to spring up like dandelions?
Fifty and forty and fifty-five percent off weeks before Christmas seems to give hope for that to happen. Maybe in some of the empty spaces they’ll bring back my old Planter’s store—with its hobbit sized peanut man beating out a tattoo on a fifty cent piece taped to the glass front window (a proper store ought to have a glass front windows). You could hear the tapping a block or two away.
It’s really not Christmas without it. Perhaps the economic reality that seems to be descending upon us will bring back something about shopping that I really enjoyed. Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap … . And a Merrie Christmas to us all—at 50% off.