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.
I’ve always liked people-watching in malls. It amuses me to look at someone and try to ‘read’ them the way profilers do on the police proceedural dramas. When I was younger, I’d considered trying a piece of street theatre/social experiment, where I’d get a couple of buddies to sit in the mall with signs in their laps, then as someone passed by, hold up the signs reading “9.0,” “7.0,” and “8.0″ as I film the reactions. Kind of my own little candid camera moment. Never did it. (Never found three guys who were willing to risk getting the snot beaten out of them by some irate mall patron.) Still…
The mall visit was interesting on a couple of counts. The place was busy – as you’d expect in the week before Thanksgiving, and the Official Start of the Wretched Excess of the Commercial Gift-giving Season – a.k.a. “Christmas.” But it was not at all vacant and lethargic, as you’d expect from watching the news, with company after company running up the white flag. That’s encouraging, because it points to a situation where the truth is a lot less dire than the sob sisters in the media would have us believe. I’m not saying there’s no recession, or no problems out there, but if you’re not trying to get a loan for a car or a house, and you’re not facing a layoff, life doesn’t really look much different than it did back in July, except for the fact that gasoline is (as of today) going for about a buck-sixty a gallon (!) here in the Panhandle.
So are the malls doing anything differently here than last year to market to consumers scared to spend? Nope. Not as far as I can tell. Like in any tight economy, merchants are already pushing discounts, but that’s not really remarkable. I’m sure any number of stores will be offering specials and sales. No big. I guess the only notable thing to mention is the return of Lay-a-Way programs. I used to love Lay-a-Way – it was a way that I could buy something, and look forward to paying it off and taking possession of it someday soon. Most stores jettisoned Lay-a-Ways back when credit cards and debit cards were suddenly available to every Tom, Dick, and Credit Risk out there. Why encourage “pay-as-you-go” plans, when you can entice buyers to “buy now and pay later”?
I, for one, think that Lay-a-Way is the wave of the future, and a bridge back to a saner time, when people were generally unwilling to put themselves under indentured servitude just to have ‘stuff.’ Instant gratification is an expensive habit, and too often, merchants have become the willing accomplices and enablers that have helped drive our nation into an orgy of personal debt.
So how does this affect your marketing? Cynical or not, I think every merchant should start looking at re-establishing a Lay-a-Way program, and pushing it with marketing and advertising dollars, big time. It’s not only a smart way to lock in consumers with a small investment now – and a guarantee that they won’t be inclined to walk away from the purchase, but it’s a great way to encourage customers to live within their means. That may sound like an altruistic goal, but a bunch of customers with no credit and a load of debt isn’t much different from having no customers at all. Better we should all work together to sell smarter, and help consumers be smarter about how they buy the things they want.
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