h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Discussing Great Shopping Centres is a futile task, when to most of the world's population they are out of reach and life is a struggle for food and water, and for those of us "lucky" enough to have access to shops, a large number of us detest them. They are nasty, commercialised places, full of subliminal advertising and eye boggling yellow lights. Boo to the lot of them.

Where do you buy your clothes?

196450 isn't wearing any clothes - sie's not given hirself a name yet...

I would imagine that the U.S. would have
many more shopping malls than England,
but you wouldn't guess this from the article.

Trouble is, a lot of malls are so similar
to other malls (in the U.S. at least) that
you'd be hard-pressed to figure out even
what store you were in (let alone which mall)
if you were blindfolded and plunked down in
the middle of an average shopping mall depart-
ment store.

Leaving alone strip malls (which, to an American,
at least, denotes a strip of between two and ten
small stores located right along the road, rather
than set off from it and reached by an access road),
the typical shopping mall is formed around at least
one anchor store, which might be Sears, Macy's,
K-Mart, Bloomingdale's, J.C. Penney's, or some regional
powerhouse like Rich's or Nordstrom's. Some of the
larger malls have more than one anchor store.

There is a sameness about many malls that saddens
the soul even as it helps to make them use-friendly.
Okay, you need something from CVS or The Bombay
Company, or even a bite to eat at a food court.
You're on the highway a million miles from home,
and you see signs for a large mall. There's a safe
chance you can get what you want at the mall.
If the exact store you want isn't there, there's
probably something quite similar.

If you go back about ten years, one thing that
all malls above a certain size had was lots of
shoe stores (most of them devoted to women or
children). This has changed. There are far fewer
mall shoe stores now. Thom McCann closed all its
independent stores (it still peddles its wares
at K-Mart, though). Florsheim is going out of
business. Payless Shoe Source has filled some
of the slack, but there are still far fewer
shoe stores than in days of yore.

Some stores that are frequently found in malls
of intermediate to large size: The Gap, Banana
Republic, Sears, Macy's, CVS, Borders, Lord and
Taylor, Crate & Barrell, Williams-Sonoma,
Abercronbie and Fitch, Aunt Annie's Pretzels,
Pottery Barn, Payless Shoe Source, Friendly's,
Au Bon Pain, The Shoe Locker, The Limited,
Brooks Brothers, and many more than I can't
think of at the moment.

I live about 8 miles away from the nearest shop and that shop is really only a petrol station. The nearest shopping mall is 77 miles away. So I probably don't qualify to join this dicussion

i live in a country where shopping in a mall is a status symbol and most stores sell at prices which would promptly dissuade any 'commoner' who might have strayed into one. while the novelty is very appealing to many people, they soon miss the comfort of their grocer who knows what they like buying, who suggests new things for them to try, who sends his delivery boy every month to their houses to pick the list of monthly groceries and delivers to them. however, malls are beginning to creep into the scenery like mutated ivy, and like it or not, they are here to stay. there are perpetual debates on whether they are going the kill the breed of local green grocers whom we have grown up seeing almost every day of our lives, but a species like my local grocer's is a lot hardier than we think. they have survived all these decades and are still working on the same principle of personalised service. only, instead of staying in villages, they are creating little 'villages' in the big cities by staying in tune with the natural tendency of human beings to find a comfort zone, be it in terms of people they interact with or the geography that they operate in.