I Fucking Love the {Mall}

I am here to sing the praises of the mall. That’s right, I, Dennis William, old Dee Willy (please, support my nickname campaign) unironically enjoy going to malls. I know that my other writings in the Promptsphere would lead you to believe that I’m a young crank who takes only bitterness and snark from the world. But that’s not true.

I fucking love the mall.

I even like dead malls. Shout out to White Flint.

And do you know what I didn’t get to do this year, because of the pandemic and every porridge head who wouldn’t cut back on social gatherings and wear their mask correctly if at all? Well, a lot of things. And one of them was going to a mall!

Goddammit, Joe. Get your shit together.

Christmastime is typically my prime mall going season.

When I buy presents, I go for a consumerist carpet bombing. A shotgun of spending; I need a good spread. It allows me to cross the most people off my list by going to one 1.6 million square foot location. The mall gives me peace of mind that, even if I strike out at every other store, I can at least go to Barnes & Noble to take care of everyone who asked for a book and then head to Eddie Bauer and get my dad some granola dad attire. Is your dad’s “fun” car an old Volkswagen? Eddie Bauer’s got some nice socks to go with his Birkenstocks.

However, in an effort to be a good citizen I forwent my annual pilgrimage to the Midwest (NOT the Great Plains, Jillian!). This meant online shopping and no trip to the Oak Park Mall or The Plaza (which some may call a high-end shopping district, but I know an outdoor mall when I see it). And that means no Cinnabon while looking at all of the stuff at Hot Topic I would buy if I didn’t have such phenomenal impulse control.

I should provide context for my affinity: I did not grow up with access to a mall.

The closest things were an outlet mall and downtown. Going downtown was objectively cooler than a mall, because you could go upstairs of the hippie store and look at “tobacco smoking accessories” and pretend that you had easy access to weed. But it still wasn’t the same.

The Mall looms large in pop culture. Movies and TV shows depict a temple of teenage freedom and self-determination, and the closest one to me was 30 miles away, so going there was always an exciting event. And I still haven’t lost that loving feeling. Malls never became commonplace or mundane to me. That allure still exists somewhere inside of me, like Lord Voldemort clinging to life in the Forbidden Forest (J.K. Rowling is a TERF and a bad person).

Even now, I like going to malls even though I understand that they are not cool places.

They represent a lot that is wrong with American society. I don’t care. I like strolling through them aimlessly. When you walk into a mall you enter an altered reality. No matter what outside world you were leaving—winter, summer, West Coast, Rust Belt—the mall is the mall. It’s climate controlled with a Sears and Yankee Candle. It’s the comfortable familiarity that CEOs believe will encourage us to buy. So sue me if I submit to their mind tricks.

Do I go into all three sports apparel stores? No, not athletic gear, like Foot Locker. I’m talking about The Fan Zone, which sells hats, jerseys, shirts, and decorative Carolina Panthers street signs for your mancave. Every mall has three of those stores somehow not driving each other out of business, and I will go into all of them as if they are somehow distinct in any way. I will go into the calendar and puzzle store. I will slow down and strain the limits of my peripheral vision as I walk past Victoria’s Secret. I will inhale deeply as I walk past Abercrombie & Fitch. And I will wonder how Swarovski is still in business.

When meandering the mall it’s important to have at least one shopping comrade.

When going into a store where you would never buy anything, you need someone to whom you can show all the weird shit. Your classic “Get a load of this thing” situation. For the stores you would buy something at but can’t afford, you need someone to commiserate with on things you could pull off. And you need someone to encourage you to buy the cool things you can afford.

Even if you don’t purchase anything, the mall is a magical place that 80s movies and capitalism have conditioned me to enjoy. You can meander around and marvel at all of the useless stuff humans produce and all of the weird bedazzled sweaters that suburban grandmas wear. Seriously, are those supposed to be fancy?