The Mall

It’s the place where you go to spend time with friends. It’s where you frequent to have fun. It’s the space that has become part of the ether in America, and possibly the whole world, to spend money and shop: the mall.

They exist anywhere and everywhere. More and more are popping up quite frequently because developers know the massive potential malls have, mostly in terms of capital and profit.

I’ve worked in several over the years and each one is very different. Whether it’s a shopping mall, strip mall or outlet center, each are intrinsically based on increasing their bottom line as much as possible, and performing to the high standard of both companies and consumers.

When I first started in retail, I was still in high school. Of course this is now going back over a decade, but the purpose of this blog isn’t for stories to be told in chronological order. 

Rather different groups of stories that are tied together through common threads. Those threads being experiences with customers, colleagues, retail trends or location.

I was working at a pharmacy in a strip mall and it was one of my very first jobs. The traffic was pretty steady, especially since it was summer when I started working there. Retail employees who work in strip malls tend to grow tired of the choices for food quickly, and even other places to spend on their break.

It was a relatively short-lived job working at the store, but it was a starting point when you need to start working and earning a living, even while you is still in high school. Nowadays that concept is largely lost on most youth out there, but fortunately for me, I was not one of those.

After I returned to the industry full-time in 2009, I was working in a shopping mall and that was an entirely different beast. At the time I started, the mall was very profitable, which was rare considering the financial and economic collapse that started the previous year. The high-volume store experienced heavy traffic for years, and was still a part of a mall, which served as a big attraction for consumers.

It wouldn’t be until years later that the mall was bleeding money, management changed, and ultimately the store would have to move in order to be successful again.

As I started working in “The Monkey Business,” I was doing double-duty in retail, which I still can’t believe happened. It was a lot of work, and I don’t recommend anyone following suit (“The Juggling”). The mall that store was in was much, much bigger. It ranks as part of the top 10 malls for the country, though the boutique-type business was located in a slower part of the mall, traffic-wise.

That mall was its own monster, one I didn’t really enjoy navigating around. Although our jobs weren’t necessarily difficult while working there, just being in the type of mall gave ma anxiety since it was always so crowded all the time.

When I started to branch out and begin working at the last retail job of my career, I experienced working in a big store at an outlet center. It wasn’t a particularly hard job, although I knew it would probably be my last (“The Vacation”). The center itself was located within 20 minutes of my home, and it was all outdoors. When the winter came, no one wanted to step foot there. That was probably the biggest design flaw of that shopping center; however traffic steadily increased as the warmer weather came.

Having had so many different experiences working in the retail industry at various types of mall, it was simple to discover what kind of culture malls bred. It was one in which routines are common, people become complacent, and you will even start to recognize many of your customers. However, it is not a place to spend your entire life, or even a fraction of it. You’re essentially trapped inside and even though you’re working, you need to eventually escape and discover what it feels like to be on the outside.