Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Shopping is a mind bender. | 73 comments (73 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: Shopping is a mind bender. (4.00 / 3)
I'm not sure if I entirely agree with the premise of your question here, in that I really have trouble imagining the situation being a whole lot better.

I like flourescent lighting.  I realize I may be the only person on Earth to say that, but it's true.  Incandescents are dim and annoying.  You can't see colors properly because they are usually too dim, they glare in the wrong ways, and they're hot.  Flourescents are also MUCH more energy efficient.  Of course, natural lighting is quite nice.  One of my favorite features about the Galleria, and a couple other malls in the Valley, was that the main galleries were naturally lit via atrium windows in the roof.  The Northridge Fashion Plaza even had trees and fountains.  Sadly, even in LA, natural lighting is not always available . . . for example, at night.

I never shop at anything BUT big department stores, or the occasional chain store, because the smaller the store, the more expensive the merchandise, and the less likely it is that they will have something that fits me.  Independent stores can't survive on a low-margin volume sale strategy, and I've never been in a position to afford much that's not sold on such a strategy.

My clothing purchases are routinely made from two or three brands, anyway.  The periodically cheap brands which are not terribly low-quality.  For some items I am willing to pay for better quality/fit.  I used to but custom-made shirts from Lands End, because I could never get dress shirts to fit me right.  I lost some weight recently, though, so no that's not a problem.  In stores, finding actual high-quality, built to last merchandise is almost impossible, because in my experience almost nobody is willing to pay for it.  There are a few items for which I am a real stickler on this point (shoes being the main example), yet nobody I know ever wants to listen to my advice because it would inevitably mean that they pay more.  They'd rather buy 5 pairs of crappy shoes rather than one nice one.  The culture of disposability is such that there is only a marginal, remnant market for anything that's not-disposable, it seems.  And so, chain stores carry goods with varying levels of disposability, because when presented with a choice, that's what most people buy.

It would be really, really nice if malls were better integrated into "community" settings, with walkable streets, nearby housing, etc.  There was actually a fair bit of housing next door to or across the street from the Galleria . . . low-rent apartment buildings.  A friend of mine lived in one.  We walked to the Galleria from his place a few times.  The thing you come to understand by doing that even once is just how utterly and completely pedestrian hostile the entire built environment is today.  Everything in the Valley was built with the car in mind.  The streets are car-sized (2-4 lanes each direction), the stores are surrounded by parking (5 minute walk to cross from the sidewalk, usually), the crosswalks are a quarter to a half mile separated from each other, etc.

Fixing that would require almost complete demolition and reconstruction.  Maybe if I was global overlord and had UNLIMITED POWER (MUAHAHAHAHAHA!) it could be accomplished (through the unceasing toil of my faithful minions!  MUAHAHAHAHA!).  The problem is that you would have to re-build on a truly massive scale,  with multi-year integrated plans costing in the billions.  To make them really viable, you'd have to link such re-constructed areas together with rail.  

For the record, nowadays I make almost all of my clothing purchases online, because I live in Japan and nobody reall stocks much of anything my size.  I'm tall.

by Zwackus on Sun Mar 25th, 2007 at 07:23:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Shopping is a mind bender. (4.00 / 3)
It would be really, really nice if malls were better integrated into "community" settings, with walkable streets, nearby housing, etc.  There was actually a fair bit of housing next door to or across the street from the Galleria . . . low-rent apartment buildings.  A friend of mine lived in one.  We walked to the Galleria from his place a few times.  The thing you come to understand by doing that even once is just how utterly and completely pedestrian hostile the entire built environment is today.  Everything in the Valley was built with the car in mind.  The streets are car-sized (2-4 lanes each direction), the stores are surrounded by parking (5 minute walk to cross from the sidewalk, usually), the crosswalks are a quarter to a half mile separated from each other, etc.

Yet the lights were rather long. I never had trouble getting around on foot in the Ventura Blvd area.

But you bring up something interesting. As much of a testament to consumerism as they were, malls like the Galleria, Northridge Fashion Center, and this big one out in Century City (can't remember the official name) were actually well-situated. All of them were surrounded by lots of housing and on major bus lines. There were often other shopping areas nearby, including "necessary" shopping such as grocery stores (Ventura, for example; it was ridiculously easy as a carless teenager for me to get from Tarzana to Studio City, either by foot or by bus [for those who've never been to LA, this is about 10 miles or 16 km]).

Compare that to the shopping centers built in newer developments, and you often can't just walk a few blocks to get to it (at least in SoCal) -- even if you live nearby, you have to walk out of the housing development (condo complex, planned community, whatever), onto a manicured street that holds nothing but views of the sides of housing and maybe a noise-reduction wall, stay on it for a loooong time, and then go around the housing development and into the massive parking lot. All to reach a grocery store that you could see two blocks from your small patio. The distance may still be manageable, but you feel completely cut off.

But to get back to Metavision's question, "fixing" the whole mall experience may involve a regression. Used to be that you could go into a store, chain or not (and I agree with you, chains are mostly where I shop too, for the same reasons), and the people who worked there knew their product. Not just as salespeople; as an example, I used to work in a bookstore that was part of a chain. Dress code was "nothing ripped," and we were considered by the managers to be co-workers there to earn money for rent or school (in other words, like people). It wasn't unusual for the district manager to come in and chat with everyone for a couple of hours about general stuff. When we were done stocking the shelves, we could sit behind the counter and read if there were no customers. This meant that we knew what books might suit which customers looking for recommendations, and our customers would freely tell us which books they had liked or disliked and we could pass that on to other customers.

A few years later, the chain changed its policies. We could no longer read behind the counter; we had to look busy, sweeping the floor, cleaning counters, straightening shelves. Conversations were more of a "stockroom" occurrence, and suddenly we were representatives of the company. Much more impersonal, and our fun place to work summer after summer became just another retail hell job. And it showed in how the customers treated us.

My point is that we were taken away from the "neighborhood store" concept and placed in this Muzak-drenched (yes, we had Muzak) "experience." This seems to have happened at most stores I go to. I think being a "regular" somewhere attracts a lot of people, and the relationship that forms between them and the workers can really change stores for the better. There's more communication about what works (in retail, you'll always have jackass customers and bored employees, but you can at least try to have less of both), and that in turn can improve the quality of the products. The customers are more wiling to speak up, and the stores more willing to listen.

And by the way, Land's End clothing is really good.

And if any of you need a book to read: The Eight, by Katharine Neville. We recommended this one so many times that after a few years, people would tell us we'd already recommended it to them and they needed another one. ^-^

by lychee on Sun Mar 25th, 2007 at 09:32:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Shopping is a mind bender. (4.00 / 2)
Reminds me of a relative. 'X' used to work in a record store, then rose into management, then when the company was ruined a few years after the regime change, had to return behind the counter -- but X was conent with it, having a great knowledge of classical music and available records and faithful customers remembering X after years. A few years later, the store was remodeled, and X was relocated into the classical music section of another music store in a mall. (X can be considered working poor, lives in a plattenbau.)

Early this year, the owner started a new project: a record store next to a cinema in another mall. So X's store was to be closed with almost all workers fired, and only those to be kept who take on mixed shifts: some days music store by day, some days cinema until after midnight. X is retirement age, this would have been hell.

However, then an article appeared in a literature weekly, bemoaning the closure of the music store in the first mall, in particular the classical music section, and named X by name, as someone who can guess what kind of record a customer is looking for the moment s/he enters the shop. Probably as effect of this, a few days later X got a new, personalised offer, that not only no more demanded work in the cinema, but the same pay for 6 instead of 8 hours work a day!

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Mon Mar 26th, 2007 at 10:11:41 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Shopping is a mind bender. (none / 1)
Yeah, Land's End really is wonderful.  Of late, I've become particularly fond of their Clearance/Outlet section, where I can find sometimes rather bizarre looking sport coats or shirst for next to nothing.  A solid lambswool blazer for $60?  Sure, it's something like sky blue, with a strange reddish/browninsh plaid pattern.  Who cares.  I'm in Japan, where everything goes and pretty much any Western style, no matter how tacky or outdated, is new and interesting.

And, their clothes really are wonderfully made.

by Zwackus on Mon Mar 26th, 2007 at 10:49:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: Shopping is a mind bender. (none / 0)
I´m also a Land´s End believer, plus LLBean, Gaiam and many other ´buy green´/´buy blue´ places for home and garden.  Now there are starting to be more choices in ´natural´ cotton and hemp (rawganique?)clothing, too.  

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.
by metavision on Tue Mar 27th, 2007 at 07:54:06 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Shopping is a mind bender. | 73 comments (73 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
Display: