hating suburbia

The other day, a boss of ours took John and I with to visit the Apple store over our lunch break, which is located in Southcenter mall in Tukwila, a suburb of Seattle. The store is pretty small, with computers on each side of the store and a small island in the middle with iPhones, iPods, etc. It was packed with people, at noon on a Thursday.

I figured, hey, other people are just coming here on their lunch breaks too. They grab a bite to eat at the food court and then walk around the mall a bit. Right? Only, Southcenter has no food court. There is a Johnny Rockets, a Rainforest Cafe (essentially Chuck-E-Cheese for tweens and their parents who can afford $18 per plate for lunch), and a few other restaurants with separate buildings beyond the parking lot — an Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory, and something else I can’t recall the name of — all fairly pricey and certainly not a quick lunching. No World Wraps, Pita Pit, Pagliacci Pizza, nothing of the sort for just grabbing lunch and going elsewhere 15 minutes later. Do all of the people crowding the mall at noon on a Thursday have jobs with two-hour lunch breaks so they can hang around the Apple store for 30 mins, take an hour to eat at Olive Garden, and spent another 15-30 minutes stuck in parking-lot traffic while searching for the perfect spot? An alternative, I suppose, is that they bring their lunches to work to eat at their desk, and then spend their lunch break at the mall.

After work, the three of us went to Fry’s to get some work-essentials. As we drove past Target I noted how useless the building was — nothing but blank empty walls — until you reached the entrance. In Seattle, a better example of use of space is Uwajimaya Village, which is essentially a mall with a grocery store (Uwajimaya) surrounded by small shops which are all connected to Uwajimaya. All of the surrounding stores have their own street-facing storefronts and can be accessed separately of Uwajimaya, or while you shop for groceries. Oh, there is a food court too (and questionable-quality apartments above it all) while remaining about as large (maybe smaller) as a suburban grocery store.

The above simply works, and without the need for massive parking lots adjacent of each other for two stores which try to sell everything. Instead, there is specialization of shops and a central point of collaboration between them to provide a diverse set of services and goods to each customer that walks into the complex.

Back to Fry’s. The store itself seemed like a cross between a K-mart and a Radio Shack. They had some neat components for sale, null-modem cables, external 1.44mb floppy drives, etc. but seemed really slack on brand-name goods, probably to keep prices low. Another effect of low-prices, I assume, is that their employees had little care in following through with a sale. When Bakha wanted to buy a laptop, he had to ask three different employees for information on their return policy — receiving only one bit from each, and piecing it together himself. This, after one employee responded that he didn’t work in that area and didn’t think to direct him to someone who did.

So, the customer is on their own in the über-mega-store and after being funneled through the single entrance to the checkout area and directed to a numbered register by someone-who-I-can’t-imagine-justifies-their-$8-per-hour, your bag and receipt are checked at the exit 30 feet away. When did this become commonplace? Why is the customer treated as an unwelcome guest, and then as a criminal after making purchases? More importantly, why do people tolerate it? I can see the appeal now of the Apple store, where employees are so obnoxiously helpful and friendly. I, for one, will now never purchase anything from Fry’s. Fuck that store, fuck their employees, and fuck their policy of treating their customers as mindless cattle who probably stole their cheap slave-labor goods.