Random Thoughts – Randocity!

I like shopping, for the most part.  But, I shop only for the things I need and I like to feel I’m getting my items at a good price.  However, more and more when shopping locally, I find myself visiting shops that are independant of malls.  Frankly, I don’t really like shopping in malls for several reasons.  The first reason is parking. In the ‘better’ malls, it can be difficult to find parking on the weekends or during other busy times (e.g., holiday shopping).  Rarely, however, do I find this difficulty when visiting stores in smaller venues or independent stores like Best Buy or Ikea.  The second reason I don’t like malls is that the retailers have to pad their prices to cover their overhead of being in a mall.  For me, I don’t need to buy their items bad enough to help them cover their mall rent.

Cookie Cutter

More and more, we have become a society of cookie cutter items.  Items that you can find at thousands of other stores.  This goes for just about every item imaginable… from clothing, to appliances, to food, to electronics, to computers.  There’s really very little made these days that is one-of-a-kind unique… with the exception of art.  Even music and movies are cookie-cutter items.  They may be unique to the content producer, but they want that material disseminated widely, so there are potentially millions of copies produced.

Gone are the days of items that are produced in small quantities.  Yes, occasionally items will be produced in limited editions.  But, the reality is, even these items while numbered and limited may not actually be limited.  The reason, the producer will turn around and repackage the item in a mass produced package that’s sold to millions.  So, the limited edition package is limited, the actual product isn’t.

Digital World

In our up-and-coming digital world, uniqueness will be a thing of the past.  Because digital items can be produced in mass quantities easily, there is effectively no way to produce a limited edition digital item.  Even if there were, how could you guarantee the authenticity or genuine uniqueness of the item?  You can’t. So our digital economy will move us more and more away from unique individual hand produced items.

Arts and Crafts

On the other hand, arts and crafts including individual tailored fashions will be where the unique one-of-a-kind items will be created.  You will need to commission an artist and pay the price in order to get unique items.  I mean, items that no one else has.  Fine artists also produce these items and will continue.  By fine art, I do not refer to such boilerplate artists like Thomas Kinkade.  I refer to actual artists who paint their own works, knit their own clothes or create their own pottery.  These are the unique items that make shopping unique and fun.  It means you have something that no one else in the world has.

Malls

Malls are frustrating, at best, to walk around in.  They are big and, at times, crowded.  As you walk around, the kiosk staff bombard you with silly offers of cleansing your face with goopy mixtures to dropping RC helicopters on your head to AT&T staff hawking their phones while you walk by.  And. these are in the ‘high class’ malls.  Is there any decorum left in these malls?  I’d rather go to a store like Target where the staff actually has shopping interferance rules.  For example, when was the last time you went to Target or Wal-Mart only to be harrassed by an employee to clean your face with some goop or hawking some latest thing?  It never happens.

On top of the markup overhead of a mall, the mall experience is simply annoying at best and frustrating at worst.  The stores do not provide unique items, yet charge high dollars for their non-unique items.  And yet, considering the cookie-cutter nature of a mall, it can still be difficult to find the right item, size or style.  Usually because what you want is not in vogue for that year, so no one actually has it.  Yet, last year they were everywhere.

Worse, the costs for a retailer to inhabit a mall is so high that you only find the most expensive chains in these malls. It’s rare that a smaller mom-and-pop sized store can afford to be in these malls just due to the square footage costs.  So, Malls themselves end up being cookie cutter by the stores they can afford to attract.  So, when you walk into the mall, you can pretty well expect only the most solvent and biggest chains will be there.  Gone are the smaller retailers and independants from these cookie-cutter outlets.

Shopping Experience

Over the years, the shopping experience has changed.  Malls used to be a reasonable fun place to visit.  There was a good mix of big chains and small mom-and-pops.  Today, it’s more about the Abercrombie and Fitchs’ of the world.  It’s less about unique items and more about bigger retailers and staying in business.  With the economy the way that it is, the mall is not the place to shop.  Yet, one visit to a mall and you will still see people there shopping and spending money getting their cookie-cutter items.  Frankly, I’d rather not deal with this hassle and, instead go to a smaller strip mall or an independent retailer and avoid that hassle.