Going to the Mall
Once upon a time, way back in the 1970s, a big suburban mall was THE place to be. Here, at big department stores and boutiques, we shopped for prom dresses, back to school clothes and we gawked at art shows and other attractions in the mall's air-conditioned heart. Downtowns were dying, with one venerated business after another in cities' cores imploding from lack of business. The malls were the future. Or so we thought.
Yesterday I learned otherwise. I hadn't been to our regional mall in years, preferring mail order, outlet stores, or my favorite mom and pop shops. But my husband needed a certain brand of clothing only available from a certain mall anchor store, and so away we went, swearing at the traffic and the heat. Everything in the store was 60% off, which makes one wonder about pricing schemes. Clothing—most of it cheap, thrown-together stuff—boasted clothes-du-jour countries of origin: Vietnam (we fought a war over this?), Honduras, Bangladesh, and on and on. What kind of money do those garment workers make if I can buy an outfit for $30? I was paying prices like these 30 years ago and meanwhile gas and housing prices go through the roof. Something was very wrong with this picture. Depressing thoughts, but things got worse.
We went to the cash register with a few questions on styles and sizes. We utterly flummoxed the young cashier, who probably would have trouble qualifying for a job at a fast food eatery. Several other purchases in the same store provoked similar reactions from the sales staff. I tried on an outfit, but had to wait 20 minutes to get into a changing room, which was a chaos of hangars and clothing piles. The attendant was there for a couple of minutes when I first arrived, then just disappeared. A fresh coat of paint at the entrance showed crooked lines at a wall corner, indicating that whoever did the job had never heard of masking tape.
Later, hungry, we stopped at a food court. We ordered Japanese food, hoping for a few vegetables. The meal was almost inedible. A woman wearing a security uniform wandered in a desultory fashion, parking chairs and wiping tables.
As we left, angry at our lackadaisical mall treatment, we wondered what had happened to this icon of suburbia. I tried to put myself in the shoes of department store management and realized that their challenges must be immense. With the giveaway prices in the department store, the company probably can only pay minimum wages. And what do you get in California these days for minimum wage? Not much. With luck, the store might be able to hire teenagers who may or may not have graduated from high school, and of course, high school these days is something of a joke as far as real learning goes as teachers and administrators battle the multiple challenges of No Child Left Behind, competition from TV and video games, gang warfare and absentee/dysfunctional parents. The other low-end workers consist of immigrants who work their hearts out and cram together in crowded quarters so they can make the rent. California in particular these days is a place of the working poor, folks who sometimes work two and even three jobs just to make ends meet. Housing (with median homes in even "affordable" areas beginning at $500,000) in most parts of California is unaffordable for these folks.
Even college graduates struggle; the high cost of tuition has forced many of them into massive loans that take years to pay off.
So where do we go from here? I have no easy answers or quick fixes. Education, the long-term fix, is in desperate straits. Meanwhile the rich get richer, the poor—like our department store cashiers and food service workers—fall desperately behind, and globalization changes the economic face of our planet. The talk these days is of losing in Iraq, but we are losing in our malls—and our economic heart—as well.
Yesterday I learned otherwise. I hadn't been to our regional mall in years, preferring mail order, outlet stores, or my favorite mom and pop shops. But my husband needed a certain brand of clothing only available from a certain mall anchor store, and so away we went, swearing at the traffic and the heat. Everything in the store was 60% off, which makes one wonder about pricing schemes. Clothing—most of it cheap, thrown-together stuff—boasted clothes-du-jour countries of origin: Vietnam (we fought a war over this?), Honduras, Bangladesh, and on and on. What kind of money do those garment workers make if I can buy an outfit for $30? I was paying prices like these 30 years ago and meanwhile gas and housing prices go through the roof. Something was very wrong with this picture. Depressing thoughts, but things got worse.
We went to the cash register with a few questions on styles and sizes. We utterly flummoxed the young cashier, who probably would have trouble qualifying for a job at a fast food eatery. Several other purchases in the same store provoked similar reactions from the sales staff. I tried on an outfit, but had to wait 20 minutes to get into a changing room, which was a chaos of hangars and clothing piles. The attendant was there for a couple of minutes when I first arrived, then just disappeared. A fresh coat of paint at the entrance showed crooked lines at a wall corner, indicating that whoever did the job had never heard of masking tape.
Later, hungry, we stopped at a food court. We ordered Japanese food, hoping for a few vegetables. The meal was almost inedible. A woman wearing a security uniform wandered in a desultory fashion, parking chairs and wiping tables.
As we left, angry at our lackadaisical mall treatment, we wondered what had happened to this icon of suburbia. I tried to put myself in the shoes of department store management and realized that their challenges must be immense. With the giveaway prices in the department store, the company probably can only pay minimum wages. And what do you get in California these days for minimum wage? Not much. With luck, the store might be able to hire teenagers who may or may not have graduated from high school, and of course, high school these days is something of a joke as far as real learning goes as teachers and administrators battle the multiple challenges of No Child Left Behind, competition from TV and video games, gang warfare and absentee/dysfunctional parents. The other low-end workers consist of immigrants who work their hearts out and cram together in crowded quarters so they can make the rent. California in particular these days is a place of the working poor, folks who sometimes work two and even three jobs just to make ends meet. Housing (with median homes in even "affordable" areas beginning at $500,000) in most parts of California is unaffordable for these folks.
Even college graduates struggle; the high cost of tuition has forced many of them into massive loans that take years to pay off.
So where do we go from here? I have no easy answers or quick fixes. Education, the long-term fix, is in desperate straits. Meanwhile the rich get richer, the poor—like our department store cashiers and food service workers—fall desperately behind, and globalization changes the economic face of our planet. The talk these days is of losing in Iraq, but we are losing in our malls—and our economic heart—as well.
posted by Betty at
7:16 PM
1 Comments
