Who decided shopping malls needed to be the size of a small suburb?

In Adelaide we have some shopping centres that are larger than many airports. These are not pleasant places to be, yet they seem to pop up at the rate of mushrooms across the urban landscape.

Sailors in years gone by would navigate by the stars. Stars were fixed objects that could be seen from anywhere. The same can now be done during the day by tringulating your position between the nearest three Westfield and Centro monoliths. The advantage of navigating by these structures is that you can do it in the daytime when navigating by the stars is slightly less reliable.

It isn’t just the sheer size of these places that makes a minor shopping expedition akin to hunting down a rare species of mosquito in the jungles of Africa. The real reason these places are so horrible to visit is the simultanous bombardment of evey single one of your body’s senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste and hearing are all working overtime as you try to find your purchase. The mind becomes overstimulated within about seven minutes, causing parts of the brain to begin shutting down. This is actually part of the management’s cunning plan. They realize enough of your brain will be overwhelmed with noise, advertsing banners and food smells that it will no longer be capable of rational thought. This is the point at which you are in danger of buying an automated egg whisk at 3% off, convinced you’ve found the bargain of the decade.

While I understand these methods are obviously working well, I believe more customers could be attracted if they considered some new approaches. I submit these here for your consideration, and suggest if you like them you forward them to the management of whatever super-shopping mega-plex you live closest to.

1. Make it mandatory for every shop to play the same music. I don’t even care how bad the music is, just so long as it is all the same. Listening to Billy Ray Cirus croon out “Achey Brakey Heart” is still better than having to listen to five rubbish songs all at once. I would also take this one step further and suggest that whichever politician promised to legislate single-stream listening material as mandatory for all shopping centres would be guaranteed the majority vote in any election.

2. GPS. These things are pretty advanced now. I want to arrive at the entrance, write “electric frying pan (stainless steel)” into the GPS navigator, and see which stores have them and where these stores are. A zoom function could then show you the exact location within the store so you don’t have to wander through the ladies underwear department looking like a bewildered pervert. Incidentally, why is it that whenever you get lost in a department store you end up in the ladies underware section?

3. Voice recognition boom gates on the carpark. You tell the gate what you want to buy. If your purchase is obviously cumbersome and heavy, such as a bed, you get assigned a car park close to the door. If you’re only buying sunglasses it won’t kill you to park in the spots that are a fifteen minute walk from the door, so long as the management also install drinking fountains along the way.

4. Marked lanes in all walkways. If you are a slow walker or pushing a pram or trolley you could then keep to the left, allowing quicker foot traffic to easily overtake on the right. On my calculations this would reduce the average length of time spent on any shopping mall visit by at least 13 minutes.
Posted by A.Ready at 3:58 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, January 2, 2008