If retail outlets that like to band together in malls really want to protect their profits from online competition, they need to do two or three things:
1. Do something about the mall rat problem. No adult (i.e., customer with money to spend) wants to spend time in an area packed with uncivilized barbarians that care nothing for anything beyond their own entertainment.
2. Campaign to remove sales tax, rather than add it to online purchases (which are often plagued with shipping and handling costs).
3. Refuse to tolerate high rents without actual security offered by the "security officers" at the mall--if they have to pay the shakedown fees, the various mall security needs to, I don't know, actually chase down and detain shoplifters, and prevent known shoplifters from entering the malls.
Beyond that, they need to do something about all of the malls that post that they're safe workplaces for violent criminals by posting anti-gun signs.
Unless the various stores don't mind going out of business, that is.
10 minutes ago
Howdy Lady,
ReplyDeleteOff topic, but wanted you to see this. Relevant to arthritis issues, take a gander.
http://www.naturalnews.com/038915_inflammation_foods_healing.html
Hope it helps.
Winston
Thanks. I knew about some of that, but not all of it. Were you aware that tumeric is a natural anti-inflammatory? And curry powder does a good job of it, too (partially because tumeric is part of it, partially because of the other spices)?
DeleteIndeed I am. Curry is on the menu often.
DeleteWinston
Try putting spicy curry powder into lentils and rice made with olive oil. Really good.
DeleteYup to all you suggested.
ReplyDeleteSome of us don't have a "mall" nearby (I don't). The nearest mall to me (an hour's round trip) is fairly moribund, most of the anchor stores having moved out to a strip-type development (whatever they call the newer upscaley incarnation of a strip mall). But one of my big complaints with the place even when it had places I wanted to shop were the rude teenagers EVERYWHERE.
Also, I will note for the edification of people in my town: Wal-Mart =/= a mall. People call it that. It isn't. Although our local one DOES seem to be developing a mall rat problem, as there's really nowhere for teens to hang out.
It's not going to be long before Penney's blocks off it's mall access. Because when the tornado came through, the best solution that the school district could think of was to put 11th and 12th grades into what used to be Montgomery Ward's building in the mall. Since that happened, the mall rat problem quadrupled (and so did the shoplifting problem), and business for them has halved, at best. All of the other stores geared toward grown-ups are in mall annex strips.
DeleteWhen I was a young kid my father often instructed me "It never hurts you, what you know"...I can still hear him, LOL, now 60 years later. As a consequence I know how to do many many things after a lifetime of doing and learning. By the time I was the age of the usual mall rats I had been apprenticed as a carpenter. Now when I have been to our local mall and seen the mall rats I have had to simply shake my head.
DeleteOnce while sitting in the mall and watching them I asked a few of them if they knew how to use their hands for anything except twiddling their electronic gizmos. After some exploration I concluded the answer was an emphatic NO! Most of them had no clue what a hammer is used for, sawing a board utterly unknown, sweating copper pipes together is a lost art. Electrical wiring requires an "expert." And on forever.
I have also talked with others in the mall about this issue and their conclusions were no different than mine. Frankly, they (mall rats) offer me not a hint of a possibility of being useful in this lifetime. Useful to someone else or even themselves.
Amazing, I find it, how common knowledge can simply vanish from a large sector of the population.
Winston
Amen to that. I'm going to do my best to prevent my kids from being that useless to themselves. I'm pretty sure that the pixie is going to be knitting by the time she's fifteen or sixteen.
Delete