We live in a glorious age. What other period in history can boast of such a range of products with which to remove the slimy discharge of one’s nose? My local supermarket has about half an aisle dedicated to tissues. You would be forgiven for thinking there must have been a recent, plague-proportioned outbreak of flu when you look at the sheer quantity available. Of course we don’t really intend to USE all those tissues, but what we do expect these days is choice. I want to decide whether to wipe my nose on a double or triple ply tissue, with or without quilting, perhaps slightly scented, and of course if I am environmentally conscious it is important the tissue is recycled and bleach free. If, however, I’m on day three of a cold and my nose feels like it has been scraped along a cheese grater I probably couldn’t care less about the environment, and want something heavily laced with the soothing properties of aloe-vera.
In our house my wife does the grocery shopping, and it is always a point of excitement for me to see which colour / graphic / design will appear on the week’s tissues. We went through a phase of experimenting with toilet paper in this way, too, but I was worried too much excitement would be bad for my heart. We decided to stick with a regular pattern on the toilet paper, the little blue shells go just right with our tiles. Just when I thought I’d seen it all though (including one earlier this month with either French or Latin phrases floating across a background of oak leaves – very weird), last week she discovered a tissue brand on sale with the weirdest design I’ve seen. The box is covered in kiwi fruit. Now this week I have, incidentally, caught a pretty nasty cold. I’ve been visiting the tissue box quite regularly. Kiwi fruit is a fuzzy, spiky skinned little thing and it is off putting to have to think about such a furry fruit whenever I sneeze. I wipe my red, raw nose and all I can think of is kiwi fruit skin, which isn’t a soothing thought at all. I guess I should be thankful, at least the design isn’t matched on the toilet paper.
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
