Mmmall Mmmemoirs

Today I was looking through news headlines and I was surprised to see a Toronto Star headline, "The Rise and Fall of the 90's Muffin." That intrigued me, because it combines two favourites of mine (the 90's and muffins, that is; not so keen on rise-and-falls.)

It turns out to be the story of the MMMuffins chain. If your personal journey through time and space hasn't taken you near that name, I'll tell you that they were a chain of muffin shops, predominantly in malls, in Canada, through the 80's and 90's. If you haven't heard of them, I'm sure you can think of a similar example of a chain that used to be ubiquitous but is now gone.

The chain is, surprisingly, not completely out of business: according to their website, they have precisely two locations left, one in Toronto, one in Montreal. Also strange about that: they have a website. It looks kind of weird to see an older name with "www." & ".com" around it. Just watch:

www.k-tel.com

www.fotomat.com

www.pan-am.com

www.americanmotors.com/gremlin

www.ptl.org

www.coleco.com/cabbagepatch

And that leads to my realization: stores can come and go without you even noticing. They're sort of like TV commercials. Sometimes I'll be watching something recorded a few months ago and I'll catch one of the commercials and be like, wow, where did you go? You were everywhere and then, boom, nothing. And I didn't even notice.

It's hard to believe, but entire store chains can disappear from consciousness, like MMMuffins. I'm pretty sure that at least once in the last twenty years, I asked myself, "hey, what ever happened to that MMMuffins place?" But on the other hand, I didn't even notice The It Store was gone until a few years back when I saw it on a Facebook meme of stores that have disappeared. They used to be a regular mall feature, now they're so forgotten they don't even have a Wikipedia entry.

So let's spare a thought for some of the chains that have disappeared unceremoniously from our malls:

Randy River

Northern Elements/Getaway

Big Steel Man

Bata

Thrifty's

Cotton Ginny

Coconut Joe

Lewiscraft

Leasure World

Direct Film

Smart Set

Like Mountains Beyond Mountains

I read about how builders are looking at North America's many dead or dying malls as a source of residential development. It makes sense; there's more of an appetite for denser cities, so developers and planners are pushing the idea of filling in underused land. And even relatively successful malls have leftover space from closed stores and the acres of parking they only need the week before Christmas. Here in Canada, a lot of malls will be looking to fill big gaps left by Target and Sears.

As a long time fan of malls, I love this idea. The only complaint I have is that they're talking about either knocking down the malls, or adding buildings on those sprawling parking lots. If it's the latter, it could help to save a dying mall by giving it a captive audience. And since malls are usually in places that have good transit, they make good places for apartment dwellers that may not want cars. That further adds to the idea that the stores will benefit.

But I think it would be great to actually keep it nice and mall-like. Each store becomes an apartment or condo. Larger stores like H&M could be the equivalent of the penthouse. And the counters in the food court could be bachelors once you take out all the kitchen equipment. You could even put a sign over the entrance to each living space with the occupant's name. Okay, that may be pushing it too far.

Alright, I wrote that thinking if would never happen, but it turns out it happened at the oldest mall in America. It looks pretty nice, though - this being a historic mall - it isn't nearly as campy as I'd hoped. Apparently, these developments are shying away from using the word "mall" in describing them, because they don't want to scare off young people who see them as part of a bygone age. But I figure that you could play up the mall angle to go after folks in my age group who will have fond memories of them. And I'm sure you'd get some young people attracted to the irony of it all.

In the past, I've discussed how today's housing doesn't really provide us with social engagement, but living in a mall could give people that semi-communal living that a lot of people would like. It's hard to get to know people around you when you just see them in the elevator occasionally. But you'd have far more chance for interaction when you're also shopping around them. And malls would also be more pleasant if the people weren't just rushing around in their own worlds, avoiding everyone but their immediate companions.

And imagine the apartments were built above the stores, overlooking the mall, like the offices in the Eaton Centre. That would give the mall a more impressive atmosphere, and the apartments would get a better view than just a panorama of suburbia. Just pray you don't get an apartment over a trendy clothing store with the music cranked to eleven.

But now I find that they did essentially this at the University of Alberta, where they put a residence over top of the student centre. That sounds like a great idea. Residences are often pushed off to the side of the campus, it would be more convenient to have an easy connection with everything. And it would give the students more opportunity to casually socialize.

It's Beginning To Look A Nice Tasteful Amount Like Christmas

This week I was in a mall, and as is now expected in late November, Christmas is in full swing. Halloween is gone, and some people respectfully hold back until after Remembrance day. In the U.S. they still have Thanksgiving, and of course the second most important date on the capitalist calendar, Black Friday. But for us, there's no holding back on the Christmas decorations.

The Santa enclosure was up, though it wasn't inhabited yet. I guess the Santas have a strong union if they're not forced onto the job until later. Or perhaps it's the amount of exposure to screaming kids, there's probably some sort of health regulations about that. So for now, there's just a strange Christmas labyrinth ending at an empty chair.

Of course, I'm not a fan of starting Christmas as early as possible. I'm not against Christmas, I just find that a month is more than enough of it for me. So I was surprised when I found that I wasn't annoyed at all the early signs of the holiday season. For once, I wasn't feeling like I was trying to survive an unregulated psychological experiment. It was actually kind of enjoyable.

I realized why when I was looking at some felt snowmen and it suddenly hit me how unusual it was to be seeing Christmas decorations without the accompanying music. Yes, the mall was still playing its usual non-threatening oldish pop soundtrack. Some might find it culturally confusing to be walking among random sprigs of holly to the sound of lesser Rick Astley tracks, but it came across as much less pushy to me.

Like I say, I don't mind Christmas, I just find it difficult to take such a long, uninterrupted period of not being able to get away from it. But this weakened, partial Christmas allowed me to genuinely enjoy it. To me, this is how a sane society would celebrate its biggest holiday: lots of celebration, but without losing sight of everything else in existence.

So I'm going to try to enjoy Christmas during this brief, early period. All too soon it will strengthen into a category-5 holiday, and I'll have to retreat into my curmudgeonliness. But for now, Merry Mid-November.

Eat Locally, Rant Globally

I have a long history of trying to recycle things. I sorted through the blue boxes in our early recycling program in high school, I tried to get my roommates to recycle in university. Living on my own, I've done everything I can to divert as much waste as possible from the landfill.

So I know just how hard it is to get people to understand what is and isn't recyclable. Many don’t consider that there has to be someone somewhere who sorts everything you put in the blue box. Or they just assume that putting other stuff in there will somehow make it magically become recyclable. Or they have bizarre reasoning, like assuming that if paper is recyclable, then wood is also recyclable.

But now I find myself on the other end of things whenever I eat at a food court in a shopping mall. In a commendable effort to be responsible, they’re introducing recycling. And they’re doing the best they can in an industry - fast food - that doesn’t try to hard to minimize waste.

Having said that, whenever I try to throw things out, I feel like I’m taking a test. There’ll be several categories, like paper and plastic, but then there’s also a “garbage” category. There are pictures to give examples of each category, but the pictures of the garbage also include plastic and paper things, so I’m still confused. What about a straw? I have no idea what kind of plastic that is. And you have cardboard in the paper section, but does that include waxy paper cups? So there I am looking back and forth at the different pictures, nervously grasping my Subway cup, while people line up behind me. I’m sure they’re quietly cursing me, with the final judgement coming when I make a decision and become a terrible person for either adding to the landfill unnecessarily, or for making life harder for some sorter.

The frustrating part of all this is that there’s only so many types of waste at a food court. Waxy drink cups, sandwiches and burgers in paper or foil, paper napkins, plastic cutlery, cardboard boxes, and the segmented plates from the chinese place. So you could just have a photo of everything people are going to throw out, and it will be nice and simple. And I’m sure whoever empties the recycling will be glad to take the photos for you.

Dyson's Fear

There's a classic book on making things usable called, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. It's a useful book for understanding how to make the devices around us easier to use.

One thing Norman rails against is arbitrarily changing standardized designs. There are a lot of things that aren't obvious, but don't cause problems because there are accepted layouts. You don't need instruction on how to drive a new car, because the controls are standard. This in spite of the fact that the standard steering wheel and pedals is not exactly obvious in its use.

Because of this principle, Norman doesn’t like faucets that have the one control that you turn to change the temperature and pull or push to control the amount of water. He figures the standard of two controls with the hot on the left is well known world-wide and should be maintained. I have to disagree with him here; the one-control kind is easier to use, since the two qualities of the water (temperature and volume) can easily be adjusted independently of one another. And that type of control has become popular enough that it is now a well-known standard of its own.

But there’s something we can all agree on: The new Dyson Tap design sucks. It is a sensor-driven, no-touch tap like many in today’s public washrooms, but being a Dyson product, it has to involve moving air. Sure enough, it has a built-in hand drier, so you can do all your hand-washing business without moving.

The trouble is, it’s far from obvious how it should be used. It looks like handlebars, so I assumed you have to do something with the bits sticking out the side. But no, you just hold your hands under them. More or less - the sensors seemed to be misaligned on the one I used. There are instructions etched on the tap itself, but the vague pictures of hands and arrows didn’t explain much.

I could have taken a picture of it, but you can just look that up at the link. Instead, I’ll include a picture of the instructions they had to print out to explain the new taps.

But there's one more problem.  I couldn't find the soap.  There were no soap containers in the washroom where I found these taps, and soap is not mentioned at the Dyson site, or any of the news stories I found about the tap.  So credit to Britain's Daily Mail, the only people who noticed the lack of soap.  This makes me wonder if people have really been washing their hands all these years.  Forgive me if I don't shake your hand.

Mall Pall

We've seen plenty of stories in recent years about how shopping malls are dying. But yesterday I saw one from The Guardian, and figured that if even the mall-challenged British are noticing, then it must be a big story.

The article attributes the end of malls to a renascence of urban retail, and the growth of online shopping. Those trends may be real, but it misses the biggest competitor: big box stores. They also claim that young people are rejecting older generations' mall culture. But a look around a mall today shows they make up a big part of the clientèle. Attributing cultural changes to young people being simply different is lazy journalism.  Also, they keep citing examples of dead and dying malls that just happen to be in rust belt communities where pretty much everything is decaying.  But whatever the reasons, shopping malls have hit a wall - many still do a lot of business, but no one is building them. 

Judging by my other tastes and values, I should hate malls. They're ugly temples of conformity, promoting mindless consumption and car-centric cities. But really, I've always had an affection for these retail behemoths. Maybe it's the pseudo-social atmosphere that lets you be private and public at the same time. Maybe it's the weird way it shows-off a community's aspirations. Or it's the fact that for all the external ugliness and internal blandness, it's still the grandest architecture we regularly experience. No matter the reason for my love of malls, it has helped that I came of age after they had become the dominant retail format. Earlier generations watched the mall eat away at beloved civic institutions and never forgave them for it.

Their complaint was that malls replaced downtown shops, as well as town squares. But what they didn't realize was that while malls destroyed those institutions, they also replaced them. The town square may no longer be the meeting place for the city, but at least the mall provided a new meeting place. And that's why I now lament the disappearance of malls. Big box stores have all the same negatives as malls, but without that positive of being a meeting place.  Hopefully something will replace the social function of the meeting place.  Otherwise, the Walmart greeters are going to get really tired of throwing loiterers out of the store. 

Gregorian Rhapsody

Percent of people who use full-size wall calendars:

I'm thinking about 25%

Minus people who get free calendars from charities, companies, the milk marketing board etc.:

Knock it down to about 10%

Multiply by the population of the city:

That's about 400,000, so it comes to maybe 40,000 calendars to sell in the city per year.

But!

Number of calendars on sale at kiosks in local malls:

3,000,000 (approx.)

Browse Globally, Shop Locally

I often find myself bouncing from one Wikipedia page to another.  There ought to be a name for that - it's like what people first meant when they talked about web "surfing."  In one recent jaunt, I came across a weird fact: there is a shopping mall in Greenland.  Yes, the Nuuk Centre (in the capital, Nuuk) only has twenty stores, but it is an enclosed shopping area with stores of multiple brands.  Not any stores you'll have heard of, mind you.

I thought of that today as I walked around the Stanley Park Mall here in KW.  I love that place because it's so small for a mostly-occupied mall, and it happens to be about the size of the Nuuk Centre.  And like the Nuuk Centre, it's filled with local stores you've never heard of.  Of course, that's part of the charm: there's no place else you can find the Transylvania Bakery or Ted's Smokes.  And of course there's the tiny underground parking lot, complete with escalator ramps to let people get their grocery carts to and from Zehr's.  (I still can't believe that made financial sense.)  All the place needs is an adorable little food court consisting of a couple of tables in front of a vending machine.

I hope the mall can keep going tough.  Today I noticed that the jewellery-and-paintings-of-Jesus store had a sign outside that read, "Going Out For Business" [sic].  So does that mean they'll be shutting down, or they're making an extra push for customers?  The fact that it's shortly after the Walmart around the corner just opened, that could mean they are taking advantage of the extra traffic, of they're just giving up.  So they're either announcing their demise in broken English - which is just heartbreaking - or doing the sort of awkward pun that only ad writers could like.

Waterloo Is Not A Normal City

Exhibit A: There is a museum in the food court