By Diana's blog | August 08, 2010 at 04:25 PM EDT | No Comments
Todays thoughts are going to be about the American mall experience. Yesterday I took my daughter shopping for some clothes. Sounds like a simple task, but it is analogous to saying "I just went into Iraq to pick up Osama Bin Laden." Only, its more exhausting than that. Because it involves hundreds of teenagers and even more anxious, overwhelmed and throughly exhausted parents.
First, we went to a shoe store. Now, these shoe stores are very very clever. They use a rouse to trick you into thinking that it is normal to pay $60 for sneakers. How do they do this? By telling you that if you buy one pair, the second pair is half off. Of course the prices have been jacked up at least 400%, so you end up "saving" -350% If I remember correctly from my finance classes, when I was getting my MBA, that is bad. In order to overspend on the shoes, I first had to endure 80 minutes of watching my daughter try on shoes. She has been blessed with my size 10 foot size, which means finding the shoe of your dreams, then looking for 10 minutes at the boxes of shoes on the shelf underneath, eagerly awaiting the box that contains your pair. Keep looking, and looking, but wait, there are no more boxes? Why don't any of the sizes in this pretty shoe reach the dreaded double digits? Because life as a size 10 foot is a bitch.
So, you keep going and going until you finally find that size 10. But it is ugly, so you go to the clearance rack to see what they have there in the size 10 section. Worse, being a size 10, you are relegated to the "Size 10 and up" section. You have to be in an infinite category of Sasquatch foot. Well, they must have a lot of trannies that shop at the Foot Locker, because all the shoes in that section look like either tranny wear or hooker shoe. Which of course is the same thing. The only other selections are the "butch wear" items of birkenstock-like fakes and what may or may not be a scandinavian sandal, but looks suspiciously like a rubber mat with straps.
We finally left the store with only one pair of shoes and entered one of those teen clothing stores. First, I was assaulted by the blaring music sounding like one of those cars whose back seat was replaced with speakers was following me around. Then, there were thousands of teenage girls and their mothers attacking hundreds of racks of crappy-made clothes. After about an hour of circling the store, we headed into the dressing room with 14 items. Wait, there is a six item limit. So I stood outside the dressing rooms waiting for my daughter to come out after trying on each outfit.
I am not very patient to begin with, so this was excruciating. Plus, in a cruel joke, there was no phone reception in the store, so I had no distraction other than people watching. Yes, I got to feel superior and judgemental to overweight 15 year olds. I'm sure there is a special hell waiting for me, other than the inside of my minivan. These girls were trying on clothes that put an emphasis on parts that should be hidden. There is no shame in pretending to be Bohemian because you are really wearing flowing garments to cover fat. Maude was a fashion queen who was not recognized in her time.
Keeping a poker face as these girls trapsed out of the dressing room with ill fitting garments and too-short skirts, I waited for my daughter to spend 15 minutes in front of a mirror deciding on a tank top. I tried not to scream "Its a friggin' tank top dammit. It doesn't take this long to build an actual tank". Eventually, after several more trips in and out of the dressing room, exchanging tried-on clothes for new ones, never to violate the six garment limit, she decided on two items.
So, I went to pay for them. For all the money the store puts into merchandise, lighting, music and posters, they only managed to hire two cashiers. I waited on the line, behind someone who was about 12 buying one item that somehow took 5 full minutes. Eventually, we were permitted to leave the store, bag in hand.
"Where are we going next?" asked my daughter. Before I could reply that I would be going to the morgue if I didn't sit down and have a large coffee and perhaps a Cinnebonn, the only real reason for visiting a mall, she was already heading into another store that was almost the same as the one we just left.
By the end of the day, when we finally found my car in the poorly marked mall parking lot space, I could barely summon the energy to look at her and say "I had so much fun spending time with you today".