Saving by Attrition

Did the annual holiday shopping mission today.  1 day, 4 malls, and 4 thousand people between me and where I wanted to be at any given moment.  All in all the day wasn’t too bad, my wife let me catch the last quarter of the hockey game at the bar in the mall and we got most of what we needed to do done.  When it comes to malls I like to treat them like band aids, and think the best way is fast in and fast out. 

Throughout the day the cashier would ring up the purchase, then proudly look at the receipt and tell me how much money I saved.  The savvy guys would use my name “ you saved 25 dollars by shopping with us today Jim.”  Wow on a first name basis already.  This wouldn’t bother me so much in a local store where you know the proprietor and staff because you’re a regular.  This however is not the case in the mall, I’m not a regular and the cashier will not be there after school starts up again. At one point I asked the cashier after he so proudly told me how much I saved, why it was that although I saved those 25 dollars, I had to spend 200 dollars to do it. “That’s some bad accounting,” I said…..the kid just looked at me puzzled and waited for me to leave.  Which I did of course but not before I thanked him….so maybe I just gave him the positive reinforcement he needed to continue telling people how much they saved although they lost money.

Malls must be opium for sociologists.  You can study every segment of the lower middle to upper middle class by just sitting on a bench.  Today I found myself wondering who has studied traffic patterns in malls, turns out there is a company call ShopperTrak who does just that. I’m sure there are scads of companies who do similar work.  Seems to me though that they have all failed.  People still stop in the middle of crowded passage ways, gather in groups hindering flow, and walk looking over a shoulder so they swerve about…..those are the worst the un-passables.

So although I’m head and shoulders above the masses, I’m still looking up at the sunlight as if underwater, through the glass of the malls skylight.