07-15-2017, 07:28 PM
I wouldn't buy shoes or men's suits on line. Art? No way! Furniture? Stereo speakers? Absolutely not.
...I doubt that you bought a car on line. Of course, where you live (Boston) you are in one of the most insane places in which to drive a car.
But cars are not sold in shopping malls except perhaps Mall of America, and I give that qualification because I have never been there.
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The shopping mall may have depended upon a conjunction of realities present in America only between about 1950 and 2000:
1. Suburban sprawl that put potential customers out of easy reach of downtown stores
2. Cheap (for the time) green-field spots for building shopping malls with their giant parking lots
3. Steady employment for high pay of most people in the suburbs
4. Mass advertising on highly-centralized media (especially when there were only three major networks and two independent TV stations in most RV markets -- this is before cable TV and the profusion of recorded video)
5. White people (remember the unwritten rule of many retailers at one time -- blacks and Latinos are your shoplifters) very conformist and manipulable in their buying habits even if they think themselves 'free spirits'
6. People willing to pay full retail for convenience
7. Shopping being an acceptable expression of leisure instead of the boring suburban drudgery that it has become
8. Inexpensive, spacious housing (by standards of this time) in the suburbs, real cost of living in it gutted by inflation, in which to show the stuff
9. Inexpensive college education that was paid for very early in a professional career instead of giant student-debt loads that migt not be paid off before one is 40.
10. a huge youth market with money to burn
11. unmet desires of the consumer society
I see most of these conditions unlikely to return.
...I doubt that you bought a car on line. Of course, where you live (Boston) you are in one of the most insane places in which to drive a car.
But cars are not sold in shopping malls except perhaps Mall of America, and I give that qualification because I have never been there.
........................................................................................
The shopping mall may have depended upon a conjunction of realities present in America only between about 1950 and 2000:
1. Suburban sprawl that put potential customers out of easy reach of downtown stores
2. Cheap (for the time) green-field spots for building shopping malls with their giant parking lots
3. Steady employment for high pay of most people in the suburbs
4. Mass advertising on highly-centralized media (especially when there were only three major networks and two independent TV stations in most RV markets -- this is before cable TV and the profusion of recorded video)
5. White people (remember the unwritten rule of many retailers at one time -- blacks and Latinos are your shoplifters) very conformist and manipulable in their buying habits even if they think themselves 'free spirits'
6. People willing to pay full retail for convenience
7. Shopping being an acceptable expression of leisure instead of the boring suburban drudgery that it has become
8. Inexpensive, spacious housing (by standards of this time) in the suburbs, real cost of living in it gutted by inflation, in which to show the stuff
9. Inexpensive college education that was paid for very early in a professional career instead of giant student-debt loads that migt not be paid off before one is 40.
10. a huge youth market with money to burn
11. unmet desires of the consumer society
I see most of these conditions unlikely to return.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.