Mallified
Does expanded consumer consciousness signal the end of the traditional shopping mall?
source photo: © Roza | Dreamstime.com
editing: P. S. Bromley
by Geoff Olson
R
ecipe: “Take 100 acres of ideallyshaped, flat land. Surround it by 500,000 consumers who have no access whatever to any other shopping facilities. Prepare the land and cover the central portion with 1,000,000 square feet of buildings. Fill with first-rate merchandisers who will sell superior wares at alluringly low prices. Trim the whole on the outside with 10,000 parking spaces and be sure to make same accessible over first-rate under-used highways from all directions. Finish up by decorating with some potted plants, miscellaneous flower beds, a little sculpture and serve sizzling hot to the consumer.” – Commercial architect Victor Gruen. From Recipe for the Ideal Shopping Centre, 1963. When I was a kid in the sixties, my mother used to bundle my sisters and me into the Corvair and head from Trenton to the nearby shopping centre in Belleville, Ontario. During one such excursion, in preparation for my oldest sister’s birthday, she loaded the groceries into the car, but forgot one item on the roof. It wasn’t until we were well on the highway, when a box tied with string flew in through an open back window, into my oldest sister’s lap. Yelling with excitement, we untied the box and were amazed to discover a cake with “Happy Birthday Janice” written on it. I always found department store shopping fun as a kid, even without big box stores or megamalls. All my family had was the nearby “Rite-way” and the very occasional flying cake. My childlike delight in shopping didn’t last. Instead of developing sensi14 .
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OCTOBER 2009
tivity to peanuts or bee stings, I became allergic to malls. By my twenties, I avoided them as much as possible. This went deeper than a knee-jerk anti-consumerism of a young Chomsky convert. I had a visceral distaste for the places, which increased over time. To this day, every time I enter a mall, I feel my chain being yanked every which way. It’s always a chore, even the times when I can remember where I parked the car. Popular culture reflects our ambivalence about shopping malls. In George Romero’s 1978 horror film Dawn of the Dead, zombies head for the mall, lurching off escalators in pursuit of the living. In other horror films, a mall scene is invariably accompanied by ominous music and the impending death of some disposable character. Malls don’t fare much better in other genres. In Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the lead character is an overweight shmuck whose pratfalls accidentally immobilize criminals. In Seth Rogen’s Observe and Report, the head of security at the Forest Ridge Mall falls for the dim-witted girl at the makeup counter, who cannot cool her suitor’s desire, even after she vomits on his pillow. Yet mall-goers are often painted in serious mainstream media as Visa-wielding patriots. In the winter of 1999, Seattle television news anchors applauded shoppers for braving the city’s downtown core and its warren of underground malls, in spite of street protests against the WTO. Immediately after 9/11, the Bush administration encouraged shell-shocked Americans to keep on shopping, lest the terror-
ists win. South of the border, shopping is as American as Yankee stadium or the hydrogen bomb – and nowhere is the freedom to choose greater than at the mall. Ironically, the first shopping malls were not found in the American Midwest, but in the Muslim world. Isfahan’s Grand Bazaar dates to the 10th century. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, built in the 15th century, still stands as one of the largest covered markets in the world, with more than 58 streets and 4,000 shops. But these dusty retail Meccas lack the one thing that’s made middle-class shopping a singularly North American experience: air conditioning. Air conditioning, the marketers of the early twentieth century hoped, would be the pheromone that would entice WASPS and worker bees out of their stuffy homes and into the buzzing hives of commerce. “Let those who cry for fresh air through open windows from the out-of-doors be reminded that it doesn’t exist in the congested city,” proclaimed a 1926 issue of The Journal of Heating, Piping and Air Conditioning. “So air conditioning has come to make available every day the best in atmospheric comfort that nature offers so spasmodically.” All well and good, but it took the postwar years for someone to build a really cool joint for shoppers to inhale. That someone was Austrian-born architect and American immigrant Victor Gruen and his joint was his first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. His flagship creation was the Southdale Center, which opened in the Twin Cities suburb
of Edina, Minnesota, US, in 1956. Gruen did his homework. Deciding to “empirically” prove that air conditioning would liberate untapped consumer energy, he created a chart that listed the distance and time “which the average healthy human being is willing to walk, under varying environmental circumstances:” – In an unattractive environment (parking lot, garage, traffic-congested streets): 2 minutes or 600 feet. – In an attractive but not weather-protected area during periods of inclement weather: 5 minutes or 1,250 feet. – In a highly attractive environment in which the sidewalks are protected from sunshine and rain: 10 minutes or 2,500 feet. – In a highly attractive, completely weather protected and artificially climatized environment: 20 minutes or 5,000 feet. Mid-century American shoppers considered the first shopping malls to be beautiful places where they could escape their daily worries. They could aimlessly amble about, bathed in bright lights, brand names and cool, clean air. Marketers tried every trick in the book, and invented plenty of new ones, in an effort to draw in more enthusiastic consumers, more often. Retail architects developed “atmospherics,” an applied science of shopping psychology. They designed mall entrances so that shoppers had to make three turns upon entering from the parking lot, making it more likely they’d forget where they had left their cars. Harder materials were installed in the corridors than in the stores, subtly guiding the shoppers to the checkout tables. The Muzak firm researched which musical tracks made shoppers eat faster, try on more clothes, linger longer or move on more quickly. In his book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, Douglas Rushkoff notes how microscopic this research has become. A company called Envirosell examined videotapes of shoppers and discovered that bigger sales counters made buyers self conscious about buying one small item. Women, “butt-brushed” by another shopper while inspecting an item, won’t buy it. All the nuances of human shopping behaviour – a sublimated form of primate food-gathering – have been investigated and aimed back at the consumer. Soon after customers enter a mall, their expressions change, their eyes grow blank, their jaws drop and their path through the mall becomes more random. This zombified demeanour was coined “The Gruen Transfer,” in honour of the creator of the modern shopping mall. Rushkoff says it was defined as “the moment when a person changes from a customer with a par-
