We went to the Willow Grove Mall a couple weeks ago. No, it wasn't my first time there since 2008, but it might as well have been. I seriously can't remember the last time I was there. It used to be that I'd be forced to go around Christmas to do some last minute shopping, but the internet has supplanted the mall's role in that daunting task. Is there any other reason for the Willow Grove Mall's continued existence? I'm not being sarcastic. I'm sincerely curious. Why does this thing still exist?
I mean, we were there to buy sneakers for Willow (daughter, not mall) before she started a six-week soccer thing. But it was a conscious choice to go to the mall for that. There are plenty of other kids' shoe stores in the area that don't require finding them on an in-store map. Honestly, the decision was made probably out of a subconscious nostalgia thing. "Wouldn't it be cool if we brought the kids to the mall?" and what have you. My kids had never been there. It was kinda weird explaining to them what the fuck a mall even was.
Being four years old than I am, and a true denizen of the suburbs as a child, Pam fit the "mall teen demographic" better than I ever did. I've heard tales of Neshaminy Mall hangs every weekend back in her day. It was the "cool spot" to hang out. I don't doubt it. I was slightly left of the mark in terms of that demographic—a little too young to be a true '90s kid, a little too far from an indoor mall to consider it a reasonable hangout, a little too willing to experiment with alcohol to want to waste sober time under bright lights and considerable adult supervision.
That doesn't diminish the very true fact that malls served a very specific purpose for large swaths of teenagers a generation ago. They were the PLACE TO BE. Gather teens in the mall, and they're going to spend money while they're there.
The internet has a lot to do with The Mall's diminished stature in American culture. You can buy everything online, which is even more convenient than going to a big building with a bunch of stores where you can theoretically buy many things but perhaps not everything and plus you gotta leave your couch to do it. The internet is also a place for teens to "hang out," and so the mall becomes less necessary in that regard too. I won't profess to know anything about teenagers these days, but I have to assume that they spend a lot of time online, right? Or am I just being an old person in making that assumption?
But really it just comes down to The Mall's previous reliance on a cultural cache that no longer exists for it, and so malls just seem empty now, just large cavernous haunted houses filled with ghosts of yesterdecade. It wasn't empty when me and the family were there, but it was pretty close to it. And, I dunno, it's not like I felt sad about it, but I just felt weird. You don't need to actually know the deceased to feel kinda depressed and kinda somber at their funeral.
What would it take for "the mall" to be a viable idea nowadays? I have no fucking clue. There were a couple stores I saw that I felt might point in the right direction—Way Out Piercing offers something you can't get digitally, and same with Slime Time, where, I dunno, kids make slime or something?—but those also felt more like band-aids than real remedies. Maybe there is no hope. So it goes.
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One thing I definitely didn't see at the Willow Grove Mall was an Abercrombie & Fitch. I was really only looking for it because we watched a shitty Netflix documentary about the clothing chain around a month prior to our mall trip, and it was still on my mind.
Oh, the doc was your standard cheap chintzy Netflix affair—a shitty craven person strikes it rich and rises toward the heavens flowing with cash and falls to earth like Icarus and the ghosts still linger and all of that shit. It even started like every goddamn documentary on that terrible streaming service begins, it seems like—a man sits on a chair, on camera, and says something like "I can't believe this story is real but it is because I lived it" or some bullshit like that. I hate it. I really fucking hate Netflix.
But I also understood the need to be nostalgic about fucking everything, even some rich kid clothing store from the '00s. Having attended a prep school in the suburbs, I can assure you that I was familiar with Abercrombie. Having grown up knowing full well my family's financial limitations, I never bothered shopping there. Having grown up attempting to be "cool" and "alternative" or however cringy way you want to describe it, I was actually quite scared of the store, scared that I was going to catch the virus and start popping my collar or something. If you're striving to be truly cool, then that means eschewing what the mainstream considers cool, and Abercrombie was as mainstream cool as you could get.
Actually, it's funny, because I'll sit here all day and tell you "fuck rich kid douchebag clothing stores" or whatever, but here's a weird truth: the cologne that I've worn since my sixteenth birthday has been Abercrombie & Fitch's "Fierce." I suppose there is some irony in that fact. I did come to that decision sincerely and without irony, though. I remember it clearly. Some of the girls that I used to pal around with back then and drink in the woods with had all pitched together to get me a gift and a card, and in the card someone had randomly thrown in a little sample of Fierce. I suppose there is a small chance that it was put there as a joke, but I chose then and choose now to believe that my female friends just wanted me to smell nice. And just like the music that you discover at sixteen is the music that sticks with you, so too does the cologne that you discover at sixteen become the cologne that sticks to you.
I try not to think about what that says about me, the fact that I've been wearing a cologne from a store I hated for half of my life at this point. I also try not to think about whether there will come a day when I will have to choose a new cologne for those rare special occasions I actually still wear cologne.
That's probably the main reason I was curious as to whether A&F still existed at WGM. I mean, the documentary did claim that the chain still existed, but that they were making a conscious decision to distance themselves from the very elite, very white reputation that they once had. Even less so than malls, I am not invested in the health and welfare of this particular chain, and I don't really care if they do finally die off or not. At the end of the day, I'm just curious about how that inevitability is going to effect my olfactory glands.
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A quick intermission to say that my mom claims that she was involved in a mass shooting event at the Willow Grove Mall in late March of this year. The way she describes it, people started yelling that a man had a gun and was trying to shoot people, and though she hadn't heard a shot, she hid behind a trash can until could run out of the mall and to her car for a getaway. According to the police, pretty much the exact opposite happened. They say that a man was carrying a gun in the mall, that it was indeed fired, but it was done so accidentally, and no one was in any actual danger.
I don't even care whose version is correct. Police lie more often than they tell the truth, but I struggle to think of a reason as to why they'd lie here, unless the shooter was an off-duty cop or something. My mother doesn't lie but was in what she perceived to be a life-threatening situation and it's really difficult to comprehend what is even happening around you when your adrenaline is up that high.
Doesn't matter that the facts aren't straight. The only fact that matters is that this incident has confirmed in my mother's eyes that it is "no longer safe to go anywhere." I've heard every boomer in my life say some version of this phrase sometime in the past six months, and I hate it. True, sometimes it really does feel like being involved in a mass shooting event is more likely than ever, but at the same time, it doesn't feel to me like any situation is more likely to devolve into a shooting than any other situation. So while people like my mother might come to the conclusion that she should never go to the Willow Grove Mall ever again, my own conclusion is: why even bother being scared? If I could get shot anywhere, then why not just go anywhere anyway? If I'm not safe anywhere, then really I'm just as safe anywhere as anywhere else. Why spend my life being scared for an event whose likelihood doesn't change no matter what I do?
But I also understand that people over the age of 60 spend almost every night watching the local news, which is designed to rot your brain and make you scared of everything, so what the fuck can I do about it.
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Does anyone else miss the old Auntie Anne's garlic pretzels?
I'm not making this up—the garlic pretzels used to be different. At least, I don't think I'm making this up. I've googled every variation I could think of involving "auntie annes garlic pretzel changed recipe" and I can't find anything, but I swear this is true. I know it because every Christmas, I would reward myself for surviving an arduous last-minute shopping trip by buying myself a garlic pretzel, and every summer I would relax on the boardwalk with a garlic pretzel again.
You see, this flavor used to be coated in a sort of buttery, liquid garlic sauce. Like, I'm picturing the workers at Auntie Anne's using a brush to dip into a bucket of garlic sauce and then brushing the hot salty pretzel with that sauce. You'd eat a garlic pretzel and your hands would be all sticky wet, ya know?
You can still order a garlic pretzel at Auntie Anne's, but they are different. Now, the garlic is a powder, and it has some parm cheese mixed in with it. They just take the powder, dump it into a bag with a pretzel in it, and shake. Viola, a garlic pretzel. Still pretty tasty, I'll admit, but not the same.
It's logical that they'd change the recipe—in this stage of capitalism, all things point toward profit, and I'm sure garlic powder is a cheaper model (and saves money in how much easier its application is) than its liquid predecessor. I get it. But I still don't like the idea of the change. There are things that are sacrosanct in this world, and Auntie Anne's fucked with one of those things.
But it's weird because I can't find any proof that I'm actually right in this regard, that there was ever a change to begin with. The internet is so empty of proof that I'm starting to question my own memories. there is a greater than 0% chance that I'm making this whole thing up. Maybe it's a false memory. Maybe the savory taste of a garlic pretzel short-circuited my brain. Please, someone tell me they remember the old garlic pretzels; at least at that point we can call it a Mandela Effect instead of just assuming that I'm the lone crazy person here.
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Of course I heard "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)" while we were at the mall. Of course. Fucking Stranger Things.
Let me be clear, though: I only hate Stranger Things. I don't hate this song. I certainly don't hate Kate Bush. I know close to nothing about Kate Bush, I'll be honest. I've been something close to a fan of her most popular album, Hounds of Love, for a few years now. My opinions are as followed: "The Big Sky" is about three times better than the next best song which is indeed "Running Up That Hill"; the back half gets super weird and conceptual and I don't think I like it all that much. That's it. That's the extent of what I got for you as far as Kate Bush goes.
But I know there are definitely people out there who adore the artist, and I can sort of see why. Cult figure, quirky, easy to love those quirks, big powerful music that doesn't speak to the mainstream, etc. And it's been interesting to see these same fans come up against the fact that Kate Bush, because of some (other) shitty Netflix show, is now certifiably mainstream popular, at least for the time being. "Running Up That Hill" is (as of this writing) #4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
I don't really have a horse in the race, but I do find the argument interesting. That argument being that Bush's sudden and kinda arbitrary mainstream success somehow sullies her reputation and steals away at least one reason why so many people liked her in the first place. Fans want to believe that there is a difference between people who have intimately loved this song for decades and people who love the song because Ethan Hawke's daughter plays it on cassette on a shitty '80s kiddie sci-fi movie pastiche.
I don't necessarily know if there is a difference. There are plenty of reasons to like a song, or an album, or an artist. And as much as I loathe to make it seem like I'm defending Stranger Things, I also want to make it clear that I don't condone gatekeeping. You never know, man. Maybe someone discovers "The Big Sky" after they tire out on the Stranger Things song. The source of the listening inspiration doesn't really matter if you just make it a starting point.
Still felt like a pretty awful cliché to hear the song at the mall, of all places.
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There are songs meant for malls, but then there are a few songs actually about malls. Here's the one I know. I still wonder if this song about the mall was the final nail in the coffin for the idea of malls. If malls are made to seem to be an outdated idea on a TV sitcom that already feels incredibly outdated itself, then maybe malls are truly dead.
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