¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Sun, October 24

How To Make A Purchase At The Mall

My AlchemyTV DVR arrived last week and despite slightly crappy software, it is Good.  Why buy another appliance when I have almost everything I need sitting in front of me at this very moment?  All was good and well until I went to attach my GameCube via the input ports on the card.  Mini-stereo only?  No prob, I’ve got an RCA to Mini-stereo cable.  Wait, male plugs?  But the GameCube also has male plugs!

In this time of need, the blinding light of RadioShack shone upon my connection disjunction.  But that meant a trip to The Mall and The Mall is not a happy place.

I lost any and all desire to set foot in that godawful expanse of a building a decade ago.  Funny that this just so happens to roughly correspond with the disappearance of KBToys.  Go figure.  Since then, set foot in it I have, each time with thoughts turned squarely on getting out in hasty fashion.  Today’s trip was a good exercise in tactics developed for this goal.

Please note though, this is no guide for shopping at the mall.  For me, that’s near blasphemy.  That said, how to.

Obviously, you must know what’s in your mall and where in there it is.  If you’re going to get in and out as quickly as you can, you need to know where the closest door to your targeted store is and you need to park as close as you can to that door.  If your local mall has a site, they very likely have an online map, such as this handy one at my local consumer quagmire.  RadioShack.  Next to Sears.  Door located nearby.  Good, good, good.

In choosing the store though, you must know for sure that they have it.  You might want to call them in order to verify you’re going there for a good reason.  Knowing that I just needed two male-to-male RCA converters, RadioShack was the guaranteed store.  They have converters for everything, I doubt it’s even possible to name two devices that can’t be connected with the wonderful toys they have in that fantastic store.  Good techies go to the RadioShack in the sky when they die.

In getting to the mall, you must find the little known entrance.  The one where there are no cars and no traffic jams ever.  For Briarwood, there’s a small street off of State called Mall Drive, and – despite the name – no one takes it.  This is the entrance of choice.  Find your door and park.  Do not purposefully drive the wrong way down the parking lot aisles.  This labels you an Idiot Excelsius.  If you must turn 135° to get into the parking spot, you’ve already failed.

My largest beef with the mall is simply getting around within it.  By and large, the people in the barely ambulating crowds seem wholly unable to propel themselves forward in a line at a pace faster than a foot-dragging kid, cranky off the come-down of a sugar high.  This says nothing of the sudden stop-and-turn-fullcirlce motion many enjoy, nor of the immediate decision to turn-45°-and-plow,-people-on-the-sides-be-damned.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, now there are those evil kiosks in the middle.

Never make eye contact with kiosk workers.  They will feed on your soul.

In a store, you have safety in numbers.  If you don’t make a purchase, chances are the person next to you will, so the employees won’t hound you to make the sale.  At a kiosk, you are all of the customers at once.  If they don’t make the sale to you, they don’t make the sale to anyone.  You are their everything and they will get you.  Never make eye contact with kiosk workers.  They will feed on your soul.

If by this point you have made it through this gauntlet of consumer horror and arrived at your store, you have a moment to breath.  Find what it is you’re looking for and buy it, all the while relishing in your relative safety.  Then, deep breathe, jump back out there and battle back to the car and then again, out the safe exit and you’re scott-free.  Congratulations, you made it once again and are now ahead two male-to-male RCA adapters!

Of course, though, if said mall has one of these in it, well, then everything is entirely different.

+ viewing

You are reading How To Make A Purchase At The Mall from October 2004, filed under Daily Musings.

→ Read the 7 comments
→ Read the 0 trackbacks

← From A Basement
→ Them White Music Things

Feeds: RSS 2.0 (What's that?)

Complete Archives

+ months

→ April 2005
→ March 2005
→ February 2005
→ January 2005
→ December 2004
→ November 2004
→ October 2004
→ September 2004
→ August 2004
→ July 2004

+ categories

→ Apple
→ Concerts
→ Daily Musings
→ Humorous
→ Nerdery
→ Oblong Rants
→ Politics
→ Site News
→ Songs + Albums
→ The Art Of The Mix
→ TV + Movies
→ UMich
→ Web Design

+ trackbacks

Ping

: http://jetless.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/29

The links below are pages on other sites that reference the current post you're reading here.  They make for good further reading.

copyright © phil dokas, 1999–2005
we do it valid: xhtml, css, 508