My birthday presents included gift certificates to Sam Goody and Suncoast. Actually, since the stores are owned by the same company you can use these gift certificates at either place. I also got a birthday gift certificate for $5 from Spencer Gifts (they've been sending me bonus stuff ever since I bought $100+ worth of Iron Maiden things last summer). So off I went to the mall. I live in one of those strange New England towns that has higways and everything else you could ask for, except a mall within reasonable distance. So off I went to that big ol' mall 10 miles away.

There was a time in my life where I used to live for going to the mall. It was the enjoyable default place to go as a teen. Now the mall just sickens me. There's just something so plastic and bombarding about it. A few years ago I went to Las Vegas. While I had an excellent time, there were certainly endless attractive places, casino or not, to spend whatever money you had left. Irresponsible people with no self-control could easily wind up flat broke in one day. But hey, it's Vegas. I enter that electric oasis with the expectation of being entertained. And having been to the City of Sin, I can say that I easily find the mall intensely more sickening. There's no comparason.

Why? I just get the feeling that there's all this special consumer targeting at every step, which means I feel that I myself am being targeted as well. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but maybe not. At a first glance there's a variety of stores, but upon closer inspection the freedom of choice seems to be more of an illusion. All the malls I see now are "Simon Malls" - a chain of malls with the same exact stores inside each one. Are there really more "choices", or just a larger number of cleverly developed consumer magnets? Is the angry black-clad teenager buying the Korn mousepad from Hot Topic really less of a duped targeted comsumer than the perfumed pink-clad teenager buying that $12 bubblegum-pop CD single from FYE? What about the baby boomer walking out of Macy's with a bag of designer-name clothes and another bag of Liz-Clayborne skin creams? Or the liberal in the pony tail who bought $80 in camping equipment at EMS and a $6 frozen cafe latte at Starbucks? Or me, the geeky metal head who's now grown up to be a software engineer, and buys those "collectable" rock star or comic book hero statues at Spencer gifts?

And for that matter, why are my choices limited to the same four rock stars: Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden's mascott "Eddie", or Rob Zombie? How come the only pre-90s hard rock bands that get album promotion on the radio are Aerosmith, AC/DC, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne? Come to think of it, when I went into these T-shirt shops at age 15, you only had four choices for the (then) older hard rock bands: Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Grateful Dead. Is there some marketing significance to the number 4 that I'm missing?

I still have to admit it -- I do love the Iron Maiden statues. When I was 14, in my most die-hard Iron Maiden days, I thought dolls and statues of this mascott should have been made. I thought it would be the coolest thing ever at the time. But they didn't have them back then. And they do now. It's easy to see why: not much of the band's target audience back then could afford something like that. I was a broke 14 year-old. And now, I'm one of those 20/30-something nostalgic hard rock fans who drives a Maxima and earns pay checks.

But I was going to the mall because of my gift certificates. I never buy CDs at a store in the mall, for two simple reasons: 1) They don't have most of the CDs that I'm looking for, and 2) I can always find them cheaper elsewhere. The average CD price at this mall's Sam Goody was $20! Unless it's some rare or imported CD, as a rule of thumb* I usually never pay more than $15 for a CD. But I was given $75 worth of Sam Goody / Suncoast gift certificates, so that's where I have to spend them.

"The problem is that [nostaligia], too, has become a fad. [...] Does this mean that you should reject something just because it's popular? You figure that one out. The answer should come easy to a Satanist." - Anton LaVey, The Devil's Notebook

"I saw a DeadHead sticker on a Cadillac." - Don Henley

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