I work in the local shopping mall, in a toy store. On my break today I decided to take a walk to my favourite section of the mall. We’ll call it “low-rent” for lack of a better term. Right across from the bargaindepartmentshitstore; Zellers (formerly K-Mart) is a string of a few stores that probably pay little rent compared to my large toy store and some of the larger clothing stores, the Gap, West 49, The Sony Store and etc. One reason is location. No one sets foot in that end of the mall, except for old people looking for discount Depends at the Zellers.

Let’s start with the notion of old people. The focal point of this story is the intersection of two corridors of stores, the Zellers entrance and two mall exits to the parking lot. On one side, adjacent to the doors is a restaurant. I guess the food is what you would find in a diner, but the place is decorated with all this really dark green marble, wood and way too much fake brass. The plate-glass windows on the mall-side of the restaurant are tinted in some kind of faint brown colour to add some “mood”. I don’t know what kind of mood they are trying to achieve, but I think it looks like a cave.

I hardly ever walk this way during the day on weekends, I’m usually venturing to this empty corner of the mall on weeknights when I’ve already had dinner and nothing to do on my break. So this afternoon I walked by the cave and it was full to the brim with seniors. There were old people lined up out the door. What is so damn good in this restaurant that is attracting old people with such efficiency? Are they giving out mortgage refinancing, or free samples of Polident with meals?

Across the hallway is an interesting store that exclusively sells products that are sold on infomercials. Dr. Ho, Magic Bullet, Cold Heat soldering Irons, disposable vacuum cleaners, little plastic containers and yes they have this, Urine Gone. The Urine Gone wasn’t even the best part of walking by that store today. They had two massage chairs set up at the front to the store. Bad idea. Who owns this store? Think about it, you put chairs at the front of your store that are ten times more comfortable than any bench or food court metal pain-in-the-ass chair in the mall and you are going to have issues. In the chair to the right a small asian lady was trying out the myriad of functions the chair had to offer. In the left chair, an old man not suprisingly given all the other seniors in the vicinity was asleep. His left hand, still on the chair control pad thing, vibrating away, fast asleep. How is that teenager behind the desk going to get that guy out of that chair when its closing time?

I continued past a famously cluttered and messy dollar store and I slowed down to the next retail outlet. This one goes by the title of “Island Ink Jet”. The walls are coloured all the hues of the rainbow. I gigantic blue countertop runs diagonally across the store and has built in shelves filled with the latest and greated printer cartridge products. Large signs everywhere in the small store-front proclaim the savings consumers will discover by having their ink-jet cartridges refilled at this location. Are they actually making money off of this? I’m thinking that this is such a narrowly targeted market that they can’t be making enough margin off of this. The man behind the counter is dealing with a customer who seems to be asking the same questions as I am in my head. Apparently you can save 60% on this, versus buying a new cartridge. You can buy franchises to this place? It pains me to think about all the people with hundreds of empty plastic HP printer cartridges with nothing to do with them. Building up in little piles in their basement, taunting them, mocking them. I commend that teenage boy refilling all the masses’ printer inks for the greater good.

Next is the magazine-cigarette-zippo-porn store. I enjoy it because it’s got one of the biggest collections of photography magazines I’ve ever seen. Actually it has one of the biggest magazines collections I’ve ever seen, rivaling Chapters, in an eigth of the space. How they do it astounds me. So today I picked up a copy of Digital Photography magazine, which I think there are at least five different magazines of the same name and Time Magazine’s special issue on Katrina. The interesting thing about this retail outlet are the people about a half a foot off the ground from me working the cash. I think the only requirement to work there is that you are Italian, and that you have a very large gold crucifix on a high-gauge gold chain around your neck at all times.

I paid for my magazines and left, passing all the things I had seen on the way over. I passed something new, outside the Radioshack. They had a new video karaoke machine on display and there was a middle-aged woman, mic in hand, talking like a rock radio station host. She was encouraging passersby to enter the store and check out the deals she obviously knew nothing about. At first I was thinking, was she hired to demo this new product with her trained announcer voice? And then I noticed that she was holding a shopping bag, Sears or something. So this was some irrelevant customer that took matters into her own hands and was yelling into a microphone at people walking behind her. Now I wasn’t the only person to notice this irregularity, other’s were stopping and staring, eyebrows raised in quizzical expressions. She continued ranting off like an auctioneer and then she laughed. It sounded like chipmunk biting down on a big piece of wood that squeaked at 30 decibels with every chomp. It scared the crap out of me. I had never heard anything like it in my life.

At this point I couldn’t take anymore people let loose into these large spaces and corridors. So I walked back past the food court through all the people who are looking at everything else besides where they are walking and back into my part-time job. The sideshow didn’t stop there however, it never stops.