American Shopping Malls
I have often marveled at the ingenuity of the entrepreneurs,
visionaries and builders who have produced the mix
of convenience, business and pleasure known now
as the mall. There are some 2,000 of such shopping
centers spread all over America with new ones coming
up all the time.
But at the end of World War II, the country had
less than a dozen of such complexes and even these
were without the trappings of today.
Canada had not a single shopping mall during the
six years -1950-56- that I spent in Ottawa on my
first foreign posting. Now, the West Edmonton Mall
in Alberta is the largest mall in the world, according
to the Guinness Book. It has 800 shops, 11 department
stores, and over a hundred restaurants and fast-food
outlets.
Baltimore’s Roland Park Shopping Centre built
in 1896 is generally accepted as the first mall
in North America.
Market places that lease spaces to traders have
existed since ancient times. A mall as a collection
of stores exclusively for pedestrians has three
antecedents: the bazaars of the Middle East, the
department stores, and the downtown shopping centers.
The Great Covered Bazaar of Istanbul, built soon
after the conquest of that capital of that capital
of Byzantine empire by the Ottomans in 1454, is
undoubtedly the largest and the oldest covered market
of the world. Surprisingly enough, it is still standing
and thriving as a business center despite the fact
that it was built over 540 years back, that is thirty
years before Columbus discovered America. This covered
structure houses over 4,000 shops. Since there was
no motor car five centuries back, there is no parking
lot in the vicinity of this mall.
I was astonished, on a recent visit, to see its
planning and its structural durability. It stands
as a monument to the building genius of the Turks.
The bazaars were organized to provide primarily
central locations for buying and selling. But, they
also served as gathering spots where people could
meet, exchange gossip and learn news from faraway
places.
The Quissa-khawni Bazaar –the Story-tellers’
Market- in Peshawar, Pakistan, figures often in
the accounts of the travelers of the days gone by.
The bazaar still exists and bears the same name
but I could not find any story-teller even in 1960
when I first visited that market. But, for the past
quarter of a century, Peshawar has been abuzz with
stories and gossips about the wars in Afghanistan,
facts mixed heavily with fantasies about Osama,
Mulla Umar, warlords, and Tora Bora.
The present day glittering malls of America too
have their share of gossiping old ladies. You find
some times gray-haired ladies sitting on benches
in the mall, recalling the jokes and escapades of
their youth and exchanging gossips about their unsavory
relations. They provide a vivid picture of the Chinese
character for gossip -two women sitting in a square.
The mall serves now more as the rendezvous for teenagers.
Some shops thus cater specifically to the teenagers
and their fads. Ear and nose piercing facilities
are offered along with all sorts of trinkets.
The teenagers frequent malls seeking pleasure. Their
quest sometimes lands them into trouble worse than
trouble itself. They seem to subscribe to Oscar
Wilde’s dictum: ‘Pleasure is the only
thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.’
Ask the twins of President Bush; but then they have
already graduated from the mall to the bar. And,
this piece is about the mall.
The present day mall is the product of the unprecedented
prosperity of the decades immediately after WWII.
This prosperity led masses of people to leave the
dense cities and move to suburbs. A burgeoning of
car ownership took place and the car facilitated
shopping outside the central city. At about the
same time, TV generated enormous demand for material
goods. These developments set the tempo for the
building of new malls, both open and covered.
The enclosed malls have usually one or two major
stores as anchors, such as the Wall-Mart, around
which smaller shops are located. Such enclosed malls
put every thing under one roof. Once customers park
their cars and enter the mall, they need not go
outside again till they are ready to go home. Vast
parking spaces thus became a pre-requisite and an
essential feature of a mall.
A shopping mall strikes one as a place where a suburban
housewife can become a connoisseur of luxury in
an air-conditioned, neon-lit, ‘through-the-looking-glass’
world where literally millions of dollars worth
of goods lie spread before her –the princely
buffet of the consumer society.
Malls generally have more shops catering specifically
to women. For, she does most of the shopping for
the family. Men seem allergic to this chore. Or,
they are wary of putting up with the faults found
by their wives with their shopping. An ideal husband,
wrote Mencken, is surely not a man of active and
daring mind; he is the man of placid and conforming
mind.
Women are choosy and frugal. Some will spend the
whole day in a mall moving from store to store,
handling a variety of items on the counters, and
leaving for home without buying any thing. One salesman
called such a woman a “counter-irritant”.
Another lady tried a whole lot of black dresses
without buying any. She was exercising her foresight:
her husband was old but not dead yet.
Some bargain hunting ladies would buy anything –say,
a burial casket -that the store is losing money
on. Some have to be convinced that even a bargain
costs money.
In most of the malls you will find a shop called
Victoria’s Secret that sells ladies’
intimate garments. I do not know which Victoria
the owners have in mind -surely it can’t be
the 19th century British queen. And which secret?
The only secret a woman can keep is the one she
doesn’t know. Or, as Voltaire said she can
keep only one secret -the secret of her age. Perhaps
that is the secret the owners of the shop are hinting
at and offering to keep it covered by their products.
The mile-long “Strip” of Las Vegas,
Nevada, with humongous hotels built around gambling
rooms, is undoubtedly the brightest mall of the
world. More light bulb and neon tubes adorn the
Strip than are used for street lights in an entire
town.
Thrill, in all its forms, is the main commodity
traded in this man-made oasis amid a vast desert.
No wonder it is the favorite haunt of the oil-rich,
desert-living sheikhs to relieve themselves of the
ennui of enormous unearned wealth.
The casinos lining both sides of the Strip can for
sure strip you of your money. If you are still left
with any, the strippers can relieve you of that
luring you to their stage and private shows.
A good segment of any society may be divided into
the shearers and the shorn. You notice a concentration
of both at the Strip.
The malls have gradually become so crowded that
the convenience they afforded earlier has noticeably
tapered off. Their ubiquitous presence in all cities
and towns and the similarities in their looks and
layouts have also eroded their charm and novelty.
What next? Wait for the American ingenuity to respond
to this challenge.
arifhussaini@hotmail.com
(714)-921-9634
