So last weekend I spent some time walking through a very quaint outside mall. (When I say oxy, you say Moron...Oxy...Moron,Oxy...Moron) That's right I used quaint and mall in the same sentence. The people who build malls have co-opted quaintness. The secret? Apparently it's small trees with white lights on them, soft street lights, brick paved streets, throw in some alabaster colored store fronts and voilà, you've got publicly traded mega stores with the quaint feel..
SHOPPER1: Take a picture of me in front of the Sunglass Hut.
SHOPPER2: let's eat with the locals...look, a Cheesecake factory!
SHOPPER1: Really? This mall is a hidden treasure off the beaten path.
This realization hit me while at the Funny Bone in the Green Mall in Dayton Ohio. Blog World, I was duped for 3.6 seconds. As we drove up to the club I thought “This is such a quaint town in the middle of this...sub-division?....what a minute!”
Someone went to a real sleepy quaint beach town or a ski town, took a few pictures, went back into a lab and developed instant quaintness.
I guess if Urban outfitter can sell new clothes that look used for double the price, then builders can make throw up “quaint” cities in three weeks and put in a Cold Stone's. Too easy.
Next up? Third World parks. Why go to South America or Africa when you can experience all the third World charm and despair just 1 hour north of Downtown Los Angeles. Kids get in for free.
Actually, you may not have to leave downtown Los Angeles.
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2 comments:
Ugh. Right there with you on the faux-quaint.
I recently had to do some last-minute Christmas shopping on one of these pseudo-Main-Streets (it was near my job). The whole thing seemed to be designed with an eye towards making basic navigation as difficult as possible.
Lots of winding streets and wrought iron. And the whole thing was planted in what was basically a cow pasture halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth.
Unfortunately, Third World Parks are now a reality considering luxury cruise liners are unabashedly coasting through Haiti. It's a little like that stretch of the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland where those tour dudes are up a tree with a rhino poised to gore a posterior or two. A little like that, but worlds worse.
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