Let's Go to the Mall!
06 Jul 2019Today’s prompt: “Explain to the historians of 2150 what it’s like to go to a shopping mall. Remember that they may not have malls in 2150. Or escalators, food courts, or cash.”
Okay, so, malls, y’all. So malls were like a huge thing in the ’80s and ’90s – the 1980s and 1990s, I mean. They were like these big, two- or three-story buildings usually, with a bunch of stores where you could go shopping.
Shooooppiiiing. Like, you know, buying stuff. Trading currency for goods and services.
So, yeah, there’s all these stores in like, rows. Lots of clothing stores, typically. There’s almost always a Claire’s, where people would sell little sparkly baubles for girls to wear in their ears or their hair or around their necks. And there’d be, like, a Gap or something where all the cool kids got their clothes. In the ’90s it totally would’ve been, like, light wash high-rise jeans and bodysuits and khakis and denim jackets.
What’s a bodysuit? Oh man, where do I begin – so, it’s basically a shirt with kind of a flap in the front and the back, and the flaps have snaps on them, and it snaps under your crotch so the shirt was super form-fitting and, like, always stayed perfectly tucked in without poofing out over the top of your jeans, but then you’d have to unsnap it every time you had to go pee.
So yeah, so the clothing stores like the Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch would have all these mannequins in them – mannequins, they’re like, life-size, faceless dolls that you can dress up in the store’s clothes and pose so people would know what it looked like if you wore the clothes. And also didn’t have a face.
Anyway, so these stores would be all in rows and there’d be open spaces between the rows, including openings in the middle of the second floor where you could stare down and people-watch. And the escalators would connect the two levels. Escalators. They’re like stairs, but they move.
What else. So, around Christmas – what do you mean, “what’s Christmas?” You know what, y’all, we do not have time to get into Christmas. So around December, in the middle of the mall, they’d set up this spot where kids could get their picture taken with Santa. They’d put a bunch of fake snow on the ground, and maybe decorate a tree or have some fake gifts or something, and there’d be a big chair where an old guy with white hair and a big white beard would sit. He was called Santa, and he wore a red kind of velvety suit with white fluffy trim on the cuffs, and a red hat with white fluff around the edge and on the tip – it was kind of a floppy, triangular hat. And he’d go Ho Ho Ho and kids would sit on his lap and they were supposed to tell him what they wanted for Christmas and get their picture taken, but usually they just cried.
Sometimes there’d be like a fountain in the middle of the mall, or something like that. And there’d always be a food court. That’s where you’d have a bunch of fast food places. Like, there’s usually a fast food Mexican place, and a fast food Chinese place, and a fast food sandwich place, and a soft pretzel place, and an Orange Julius. Oh, Orange Julius made drinks with orange juice and milk and ice that all got blended together. And sometimes a raw egg, I think, but you had to ask for it. Yeah, I don’t know why people would do that. Anyway, you’d get your fast food on trays and sit down and eat it on tables in the middle of the food court.
Besides the clothing stores and the food court, there could be all kinds of stores. Department stores were pretty common, where they had clothes but also kitchenwares and various appliances. You might run into a Waldenbooks, or a KB Toys, or a Yankee Candle – they had scented candles – or a Bath and Body Works – scented lotions – or a Build-A-Bear, where they had a bunch of stuffed animals and clothes you could dress them up in. I don’t know what to tell you, it was a thing.
Some malls were absolutely enormous. The Mall of America in Minnesota had more than 500 stores. I think it had a LegoLand in it.
And if you were really, really lucky, you could visit a mall without getting torn apart by a mob of the living dead. The mall in my hometown got torn down decades ago, but the memorial’s still here from the big zombie attack in 2019. [The narrator runs her fingers across a large granite memorial with names carved into it, including your own.] They say it started in the Hot Topic.