I finally went to the mall yesterday.
I guess that makes me part of 2 trends. I am one of those last-minute shoppers that finally went out and got done yesterday while Tina bought EVERYTHING on-line this year and I don’t even think she’s waiting for any more shipments at this point. If you get used to cyber-shopping, it’s easy to see why the trend is growing by on-line retail is still nothing more than a speck (5%) on overall retail sales and that’s AFTER being up more than 20% this year.
So I went to the trenches on Saturday, where the real people shop (well, the real, upper-middle class people, anyway) at the Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey – one of America’s larger and busier malls made even more so on a Saturday because Bergen County has blue laws and retail is closed on Sundays so yesterday was do or die in Paramus with just 3 more shopping days until Christmas.
I took the kids at about 10 am and the first sign of trouble was that we got a pretty good parking spot. On a normal Saturday at the Garden State Plaza, you can’t get a good spot anyway and on a normal Christmas you can expect a half-mile hike from your car to the mall. When I got inside, it was even stranger, there were so few children in the mall that the carousel was empty so my kids jumped right on that as we spend our first dollar of the day. Riding around the carousel I saw something that didn’t cost anything – there was a MSFT XBox demo station set up with very cool driving set-ups with seats and wheels and big screens and full band set-ups for playing Guitar Hero on a little stage and about 6 other game demo areas – right in the middle of that part of the mall AND IT WAS EMPTY.
If nothing else had worried me about Christmas before, that would have been it because who doesn’t want to play free video games on big-screen high-def TVs with all the coolest attachments (they had sports-car seats and a wheel/pedals combo that they said cost $100 (not the seat) and was sold out at Game Stop)? Something was very wrong. Leggo land was also empty so maybe people just didn’t want to bring kids to the mall this weekend but that begs the question why? …
