jimsjournal
| Shopping the malls -- 11/28/04 |
jimsjournal |
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This seems to be the time of year when thoughts turn to shopping. It's the time of year when I try to avoid any store (other than local ones) and make a point of staying as far away from the main shopping venues as I possibly can. I hope to do as much of my Christmas shopping as possible on the Internet. I am not alone in this... Nancy had been talking about getting up early Friday morning and going off to a particular store she likes to take advantage of the big sale they were having... but instead she decided to stay in bed another half an hour or so... and then, after breakfast, sit down at a computer with a cup of coffee and do her shopping online. She reports that it was a mostly successful and satisfactory experience (their database routines were not quite up to snuff -- she had an item in her shopping card that was reported as being out-of-stock when she went to check out -- they should have had a lock on that item when it went into the cart -- and their Web server seemed to go to sleep when it came time to say thank you and provide an order confirmation number because their Web page was still deep in thought about that while a confirmation e-mail had already arrived in her mailbox). Shopping completed without the need to struggle with gridlock traffic, full parking lots, and aisle-blocking clots of shoppers. With this in mind, I did this week's Sunday Brunch questions: Malling. 1) Do you enjoy shopping at the mall? No. Well, at least not in the sense that I would ever go to a mall to go shopping, at least not in the sense that I think the word "shopping" is being used in this situation -- that is, to wander in and out of stores looking at stuff. I do go to malls when I need to purchase something, which is quite a different situation. For example, a few weeks ago Nancy and I went shopping and bought towels and curtains in Penny's. We had gone there deliberately for those two things; if Nancy had not found curtains she liked and if I had not found towels I liked on sale, we would have both considered it to be a wasted trip. I do enjoy wandering around the Providence Place Mall with Nancy if we do have a purpose in being there -- something that happens about twice a year. 2) What is your favorite mall food? Mall food? Isn't that an oxymoron? Oh, okay, there is a Pizza Uno/Chicago Grill in the Providence Mall where we have enjoyed eating, but that is a real street level restaurant, not one of those places in the food court selling imitation food. 3) What are your three favorite “mall” stores? Providence Place Mall has a couple of places that carry cooking-related items (knives, pots and pans, gadgets, spices, etc.) but I have no idea what their names might be. And, locally, the Wakefield Mall has a bookstore that I shop in sometimes (it's just one of those chain stores, but it's the closest thing to a real bookstore in town) and there's also a jewelry store there that I only visit once or twice a year but which has gotten a lot of my money. 4) What is your favorite mall? As you may have guessed, I'm not much of a mall fan. but I suppose that I like Providence Place Mall, a big in-town multi-level mall (and multi-hundreds of millions of dollars) with some interesting stores (as well as the usual boring identical places selling shoes and jeans and crap). The mall itself is well-designed and works well; their parking garage is so horrible it must have been designed by the same incompetents who designed many of Rhode Island's highways. Other than Providence Place Mall, the other malls in the state are in Cranston and Warwick and I dislike all of them. That shopping trip that I mentioned in answer to the first question was the first time I've been to those malls in at least two or three years. And then we have our local mall, the Wakefield Mall (which is so small that local teens call it the "Wakefield Hall") which has about a dozen stores sandwiched between a Staples and a Shaws Supermarket (but there is no direct entry to the mall from either of those two big stores). 5) Do you have one special person that you enjoy going to the mall with the most? Nancy and I seem to enjoy going to Providence Place Mall a couple of times a year. And I've gone to malls with my kids when they were in high school to buy back-to-school clothes and things like that. And then there's my brother -- we live almost four hours apart and so maybe once a year or so we meet at a mall about halfway between us, in the middle of Connecticut, where we wander in and out of stores, talking, hanging out together, grab lunch (in a real restaurant, not a food court) and have a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. |
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