Our Love Affair With Shopping Malls Is on the Rocks
DEARLY beloved. We are gathered here today, in the midst of economic calamity, to ask if we really should be gathered here today, in a funhouse of merchandise designed to send us deeper into debt.
Specifically, we are gathered in the Chapel of Love, sandwiched between a LensCrafters and a Bloomingdale’s and tucked into a relatively quiet corner of the vast prairie of retail and amusements that is the Mall of America.
It’s a convenient starting point for rethinking the 50-year marriage between the American shopper and the American mall. Because we’ve been married to the mall for so long that some of us are now getting married inthe mall — 5,000 couples in this chapel since it opened 10 years ago.
And one recent Sunday afternoon, Brianna and Jesse Bergmann are standing here under a white wedding arch, beside an ordained minister, having promised to cherish each other in sickness and in health. There was a homily about forgiveness, an exchange of vows and finally a kiss and some applause.
Before everyone heads past the Foot Locker and down the escalator to the Rainforest Cafe, the bride — a cherubic 19-year-old — leans against a wall in her billowy white dress and explains why she chose this spot for her big day.
“I love shopping,” she says, giggling. “Mostly clothing. I love Macy’s, Aero’s, American Eagle, Maurice’s.”
“I come with her when she shops,” says her husband, a 21-year-old who loads pallets in a food warehouse, “so she doesn’t spend too much.”
Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the crux of the problem: We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent of the American economy. So if we don’t spend, we don’t recover. Fiscal health isn’t possible until money is again sloshing into cash registers, including those at this mall and every other retailer.
In other words, shopping was part of the problem and now it’s part of the cure. And once we’re cured, economists report, we really need to learn how to save, which suggests that we will need to quit shopping again………..
To read the complete story go to the New York Times web site.
