![]() None of which is a knock on Apple: Identifying a market niche, finding the bits and pieces that fill that niche, acquiring and branding them are perhaps more essential Silicon Valley skills than are developing software and hardware. They didn’t even invent the mouse or the graphical user interface - the two early innovations that set them apart from IBM’s early personal computers. Apple didn’t invent the cellphone, MP3 player, or cloud computing. They are a company that takes an existing idea, polishes it up, tosses the letter “I” on the name, and marks up the price. Contrary to their image, Apple’s genius isn’t innovation but branding. Apple is all about the digital experience, yet there they sit in the anachronism that is the modern mall, wedged between Foot Locker and Victoria’s Secret. Apple: King of the connected world, home of the iCloud, iPhone, iTunes, iPad, and iMasturbate (coming in 2017, maybe sooner if Apple doesn’t keep thinking about baseball). The mall - the actual building - remains, but it’s two dimensional now, a mind-numbing repetition of stores selling only those items that don’t translate well to online shopping: clothes, jewelry, shoes, pretzels, and Cinnabon.Īnd, perversely, the Apple store. The arcade was already long gone, but wi-fi enabled home gaming added an extra gob of spit to its grave. Bain Capital - Mitt Romney’s merry band of corporate raiders - invaded KB Toys, stole their piggy bank, and bankrupted the mall world’s biggest toy retailer. Who needs them when Amazon and streaming services are so convenient? The internet wasn’t the only pressure, though: Changing tastes killed the pipe shops and the sausage and cheese log retailers. As retail shifted to an online enterprise, the variety of stores decreased: No more bookstores or record stores, for example. Then the internet came along, and like that Daniel Day-Lewis character it drank the mall’s milkshake. Mom could hit the JC Penney and try on beige bras rated to withstand category 5 hurricanes courtesy of their 13 fasteners, and the kids could avoid the whole embarrassing episode by banging away on a pinball machine or steering Q*Bert around his blocky pyramid.īack then the mall had everything: It was a shopping ecosystem. The babysitter was paid in 25 cent increments rather than by the hour, but it was the same thing. ![]() ![]() The arcade served as the mall’s daycare for bored kids and the occasional bored husband/father. Heck, when we lived in the Chicago suburbs our local mall contained a magic shop.Įvery shopping mall housed an arcade, too, at least until home consoles took over the gaming market. Need a black velvet KISS poster, a summer sausage, the new Erma Bombeck book, a Rubik’s Cube, and a “back massager”? All it took was one trip to the local mall. During their heyday malls were essentially enclosed villages, climate-controlled main streets with a variety of stores to suit your shopping needs: bookstores, toy stores, shops offering cheese samples, tobacconists, shoes, clothes, jewelry, stereos, stationery, novelties, on and on. We’re too modern now for mullets and tall bangs yet the mall survives, or at least the basic concept does. This is the hub of ’80s shopping culture, after all. Malls today feel a bit like anachronisms. Daughter’s phone, daughter’s money, daughter’s choice: I drove her to our local mall, home of the Apple store. Many avenues exist for repairing a broken cellphone, from self-service to third parties to, in the case of an iPhone, the Apple store. The real miracle here is the number of consecutive days in which the girl did not shatter her telephone’s fragile screen. My daughter shattered her iPhone’s screen recently, an event that we’ve all come to accept rather than question why we’re carrying around panes of glass in our pockets, but that’s another story. To enter an Apple store is to descend into a chipper circle of Hell.
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