Archive for November 22nd, 2008

The wave of the future.

Dropped by our local Mall today, with my daughter and her friend. Going to the mall here in Amarillo (Centrally Located Between Two Oceans!™) is a little different experience (by several orders of magnitude) than it is in Dallas, Atlanta, or any other major metro area. To start with, when you’re the only game in town (Amarillo’s Westgate Mall is the only shopping mall for 180 miles) you’re left with not a lot of competition, save from strip centers. When you’re “it” you don’t get the variety in stores – and in demographics – the way you do in a place like Dallas. In the Metroplex, you have your old money mall (Northpark), your neuveau riche mall (The Shops at Willow Bend), your upscale suburban mall (Frisco’s Stonebriar Mall), the upper-middle class mall (Valley View), a blue-collar mall (Town East), a tourist attraction mall (The Galleria) and so forth. Here, it’s one mall to fit all. In a way, that makes Westgate Mall both a cliché, and simultaneously a microcosm of mall life. Read the rest of this entry »