January 25, 2013

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 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 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 forty years before Columbus discovered America. This covered structure houses over 4,000 shops. Since there was no motorcar five centuries back, there is no parking lot in the vicinity of this mall.

One is astonished 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 Storytellers’ 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 storyteller 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 language 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 19 th 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 streetlights 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.

arifsyedhussaini@Gmail.com