How Men Do Shopping Malls
15th December 2007


For the last thousand years or so our urban landscape has been dominated by cathedrals. Today our dominant architectural form is the shopping mall.

There are many similarities between the mall and the cathedral. Both capture the prevailing values of their age – religion or consumerism; both are market places of a sort, their halls filled with celestial music and their display cases rich with icons.

But there is one crucial difference. The cathedral was an overwhelmingly male environment. The shopping mall is not.

Almost every man I know dreads going to a shopping mall. Males possess a deep, instinctive aversion to these glass and concrete celebrations of consumer joy. The men one sees in shopping malls are desperate creatures: huddled forlornly over cardboard coffee cups in the food court or trailing disconsolately behind revved up wives and girlfriends. The mall reduces the male to chauffeur, shopping trolley and cash cow.

Many of us come up with pretty good avoidance strategies, golf being the most common. Christmas, however, usually defeats us.

After years of careful study I’ve come up with a foolproof way for men to do shopping malls, so tune in guys and I’ll talk you through it.

Let’s start with the universal law of men and Christmas shopping. Despite having an entire year to carefully plan a shopping list the male never has a clue what he is going to buy. You must never enter a shopping mall in this state. Give yourself some time to think about gifts before you are confronted by the dread of all male shoppers – choice.

What I do is park half a block from the mall. The few minutes walk is plenty of time to get my ideas sorted.

It also gives me time to scout the fringes. There are always a few shops on the outer perimeter of a mall that are accessible without being sucked into the vortex. These can be a godsend for males.

If you can combine fringe shops with high speed purchasing – the natural reflex of the male – you are well on the way to success. I’ll give you an example. Last Saturday I conducted my annual visit to a mall. Through accidents of history I always go to The Palms in Christchurch. I arrived without a thought in my head of what to buy for whom. I parked and walked – still no inspiration. I rounded a corner of the building and there was my perfect fringe shop – Dick Smith.

As I passed its doors the vision of the perfect gift for Sylvia lit up in my head. I weighed it up, made my decision and entered the shop. This took about three nanoseconds. Inside the shop I wasted no time trying to find the product myself. A nice young man took me directly to it. We discussed the various models and options, I selected the one I wanted, paid for it and was back on the street within three minutes.

A problem with malls is that they never stay the same. I am sure The Palms has been rebuilt annually for the past ten years. The landmarks I relied on last Christmas have vanished this year. The exits have been moved, entire corridors have been added. There was always a sports shop (another high-value location for male gift shopping) just to the right of the main entrance. Now there is a clothing boutique (low value!).

In this confused state last Saturday I made a tactical error. I headed for the landmark big box retailer, in this case K-Mart. Every mall is anchored by one or two of these monstrosities. They squat like gargoyles at the most prominent places in the mall, highly visible and almost always a disaster for male shoppers.

They are staffed by dull youths dressed in ill-fitting corporate polo shirts earning $3.00 an hour. These kids are locked away in dark cupboards each night so they possess the complexion of three day old rice pudding and the mental acuity of a vacuum cleaner. They know absolutely nothing about anything in the shop, and furthermore they don’t care. Ask them a question, they shrug their shoulders, say you should “talk to John” and vanish.

On Saturday I was looking for a badminton set. I searched haplessly through K-Mart for 15 minutes, finding neither John nor badminton. I left empty-handed, to the disdain of the young man on security watch at the front entrance.

As well as failing to master the geography of malls I have never developed a resistance to the sensory bombardment of these places. I become hyperactive and over-excited. They should install Ritalin vending machines for people like me, but that’s the last thing they want to do - hyperactive people spend more money.

In this condition it’s vital for the male shopper to know when to cut his losses. On Saturday I stumbled across Rebel Sports, secured the badminton set, flashed through Whitcoulls and was back on the pavement without suffering permanent damage. A Salvation Army Band was playing at the exit. I put $10.00 in their bucket, sent up a small prayer of thanks and thought of cathedrals.

Happy Christmas.