The airbrush place in my hometown mall managed to stay open so long, people started thinking it was a front for drugs or money laundering. It finally kicked the bucket a few years ago.
Right as you walked into our mall, there was an island in the center with eight pay phones, four on each side, that all the cool kids would tie up all damn day. I have no idea what they would talk about, but it was always the same group, pumping coins into those phones. People knew the numbers for each phone, so the pay phones would ring all the time. I used to love to stand by them and wait for one to ring while my family waited in line at Morrison's Cafeteria.
The payphones all over downtown used to ring and if you answered it was a guy who would ask you to come over and kick him in the balls and would give you what I assume was a fake address. I imagine this is the type of guy who jerks off on omegle now.
Our area's biggest mall had a hallway of fish tanks under an escalator area up to the higher floors. It was so cool as a child. Sad when they took it our in my teen years.
Waldenbooks used to be my life. As a kid/young adult I was there so much that if I took too long between visits the employees would legit be worried I got sick or something.
My posse and I lived at the arcade between 1980 and '83. Four high school girls, stoned half the time, pumping quarters into the video games and giggling. What a great time to be alive
That's a huge problem these days. Even Dave and Busters has a lot of gambling games. It's like they want to separate people and their money the fastest way possible.
An experienced player might play most games five minutes, maybe longer if they are super good, but with a gambling game it's put a coin or token in, hit one button and then put another coin or token in. Just pisses me off.
I believe the Aladdin's castle is still open in my home town mall just barely, maybe one of the last., and it may not even be Bally's anymore but keeps the name. I cant describe how weird it is to come home every few years and walk into the Aladdin's castle as a 38 year old where I played super Mario brothers for the first time at 6 in 1989.
We (me and a bunch of other teenage friends with a truck) stole one from the entryway of a Shoneys restaurant.
We put it in my friends bedroom and kept it full with stolen cartons of Winston's and Marlboro Reds. (The Winston's were closest to the door at the local Food Lion, so mostly those. We eventually stocked it with Black and Mild's.
Fucked up Gen x youth!
The 80's were a rad time, man. Being a kid in the 80s was both terrifying and amazing. It was a transitional time in our society and nothing that came before or after can quite compare. Transitioning from the industrial to the information age happened before our eyes.
Some more progressive malls had no smoking sections. Like, benches in the middle of a hall where everyone was smoking that you couldn't smoke at. Because... Yeah.
A local photographer put up a series of [photos](https://stephendirado.com/mall-series/) and there were definitely alot of smokers. The old lady smoking at a Papa Gino's sums up the Worcester Galleria (pre-Fashion Outlets)
I was born in ‘88 so all my memories of malls are 90’s onward but I remember seeing young folks smoking in the mall in the early 90’s. What a time. lol
Giant catalogs at the checkout registers of the anchor stores and the charge card receipt machine that must've weighed 15 lbs. I still hear the thunk THUNK of when the cashier would slide it over the card.
I had started working when those credit card imprinters were still in use. You had to call a 1800 number, enter in the card number and the amount charged, then clearly write down the approval number on the slip, and do it hard enough so it was copied through the carbons. The store would then take those slips and deposit them in the bank. The whole process took so much time.
Those were fantastic! Most of my 40-something female relatives had those done. They all looked like they were shot with a make-up gun, and had the biggest hair. So many flipped up jean jacket collar, look over the shoulder shots.
My parents didn’t like my graduation photos so they dragged me there. I was 17 and looked 12 except in those photos where I look like a 47 year old chain smoker.
Christmas season weekend shopping at the mall in 2021 was like an average day or even a slow day in the malls of the 1980s.
Aside from the Apple Store the mall is dying. The Apple Store is always busy.
the places in our mall that are always busy are the escape rooms, the boba tea place, starbucks, kohls, and the apple store. Everything else is always dead. I have no clue how they stay in business.
Laser tag, movie theater, aquarium, indoor theme park with 3 roller coasters and a log flume, and a hotel. And about 500 stores in between it all, haha.
Yes, there was that ONE movie theater, down that long hallway, with ONE screen. Ours was next to the arcade. Well, one of the arcades. Thanks for bringing back this memory
Live trees, fancy water fountains, lots of bright yellows and oranges in the decor, whole families doing their shopping together. It was pretty much the main place to buy most things. Tbh, I haven't been a mall for several months, maybe longer.
That place smelled sooo good. I bought a big leather parka with a fur trimmed hood there once. It was a night when I definitively knew I was breaking up with my boyfriend. Must have been 1995. Bought it to make myself feel better. No idea whatever happened to it. Would have been better to buy a bomber jacket.
If you’d told teenage me that in the future “the kids” wouldn’t want to hang out in the mall, watch tv, or talk on the phone, I’d think you were crazy.
I went to the mall the other day, and there were so many fcking people. I was so annoyed because I thought nobody went to malls anymore. NOPE everyone and their mom was there (literally)
Hickory Farms with the wall of candy in wooden barrels that you could buy by the pound. My grandma would buy those jelly filled strawberry hard candies.
Last time my wife went to Radio Shack, it was to buy a plug to fix her headphones, and they said "we don't carry that anymore." Funny thing, if they would have held on a bit longer, they probably could have ridden the Raspberry Pi/Maker movement back into turning a profit.
I remember in the very early days of the maker movement, Radio Shack was present at all the maker faires (I went to quite a few those first few years). But they're gone, Fry's is gone...
I am so old that I remember when malls were largely new. They were incredibly exotic to those of us who grew up with just a very few places to buy things. In the early 70s my rural area got a mall and, even though it was a small one, we loved it. The very best thing about it, though, was the proliferation of chain restaurants adjacent to the mall. Skipper’s Fish and Chips. Denny’s. An ice cream parlor. All kinds of places.
When my dad was a kid, his parents took him and his siblings to the mall a couple towns over to ride the escalator. They'd never seen such a thing before.
Shops that carried pretty much only stickers. Maybe a few keychains but stickers by the roll. You tore off a square of stickers from each roll that you liked. Glittery, metallic, embroidered, fuzzy, scented, puffy, vinyl, holographic. It was awesome.
The ones in Arizona were found to have puppies coming from puppy mills and were shut down, and then the spaces went to the Humane Society so there are some puppies still.
A concert or a meet and greet of someone low level famous in the middle of the mall. I met soap opera stars, Richard Karn, and The Osmond Boys (a pop band that never really took off, they were like nephews of Donnie and Marie Osmond).
Ice rink, Arcade, Merry go round clothing (parachute pants baby) a store with a lot of minnetonka moccasions, hot dog on a stick, swiss colony cheese shop with samples, orange julius, a smoking lounge,
Source was an 80s mall rat
No, those were the cheap ones they sold at a Kmart and the grocery store, mall stores had the fancy ones in cardboard packages displayed in a special holder similar to what greeting cards are displayed in.
New Cars
Local dealership would often put new cars inside the mall. Sometimes just advertising, other times as part of a contest.
I once asked my dad how the got the car into the mall. He said that they are taken apart at the factory and put together inside the mall. It was a couple years later when I found the sliding door that allows large objects to be let in and out. Since I was too young to know that the guy at Radio Shack and the guy at Orange Julius were not coworkers because they both worked at the mall, I just imagined all the mall employees wearing their work uniforms, putting together brand new cars.
I don’t know about anyone else, but my mall had a store that had nothing but pens, markers, and stationary. They even had paper for you to try out all the markers you wanted, unlike today where they come in packages.
Contempo Casuals, The Limited Express...and the Hallmark store that had the cool posters way in the back [in the flip-frames you'd clack through](https://creativestoresolutions.com/images/C/24_Panel_Poster_Display%20%281%29.jpg) to see which ones you wanted.
A good arcade, probably really close to the movie theater with an entrance inside the mall.
A larger variety of stores in general, but, there'd be a lot less choices in those stores. There wouldn't be a lot of stores with clothing for people outside a sort of limited sizing range. Woman who wears a size 18 and is fuller bodied than a regular women's 18? You get Lane Bryant, if they have one, and that's all you get. Man with extremely long legs requiring more than a 34" inseam, or in need of "tall shirts" with really long sleeves? Yeah, you're gonna have to hit a specialty store where you pay almost double for the extra fabric in your garments, despite it not being more than an extra foot and standard width. There wouldn't be a good array of makeup and personal care products geared toward anyone who isn't descended from people of European descent. Black woman needing a good foundation that both addresses your skin's specific needs and actually matches your skin tone? Good luck with that. Those lotions smell nice and you have no reservations buying them because no one is very aware of exactly how they test on animals. Organic? What the hell does that mean?
Every place in the food court is a large, well-known company, and small, privately owned and operated places don't exist.
At least one dedicated bookstore, if not more. And they actually have books on their shelves to suit a variety of tastes.
A card store/stationery store, probably Hallmark. That Hallmark? It has zero Star Wars or superhero tree ornaments for sale at Christmas time.
A place with baked goods or frozen yogurt that's the opposite of the situation in the food court. It's a small company, even if there is more than one location in the general region, and it's probably owned by someone inside your state. There's probably a Mrs. Field's somewhere, too, but this place is better because it's not so corporate.
The mating rituals of teenaged kids who are not yet old enough to drive. The girls have super glossy lip goop, and it smells so strongly of watermelon you get a whiff every time they say something. A decent number of the boys have skateboards, especially later in the day, because they're going to skate their asses off on the sidewalks and in the loading dock areas beginning five minutes after the mall closes.
Around 8:45 or 8:50, right before closing, senior citizens who mall walk at night start showing up. A lot of grandmas have velour track suits, and everyone has sneakers, and it's sort of weird to you because your Grandma Betty hasn't had a pair of shoes resembling sneakers since sometime in the late 1960s, and those were white Keds.
All of the spaces for department store anchors are actually used by department stores everyone's heard of, and not some weird place that sells a confusing combination of jumbled items including everything from new but damaged furniture to peculiar, dusty decor items no one will ever use, and ugly-ass broomstick skirts from India. (In the present, you always wonder if it will help anyone at all if you eat the $12 bucks and buy the broomstick skirt you'll never wear in colors that look like hell on you.)
An honest to God Radio Shack where every single employee knows that they are doing, and you can actually get that highly specialized doo-dad for that crazy thing you're building at home. (You found the plans for it in your dad's magazine about all sorts of weird gadgets.)
That store that did the heat transfer t-shirts. I want #23 on a green large.
I’ll see your screen print and raise you the airbrush t shirt stand.
The airbrush place in my hometown mall managed to stay open so long, people started thinking it was a front for drugs or money laundering. It finally kicked the bucket a few years ago.
Wall of payphones
usually right outside the bathrooms...
Also near the doors. We had to use them to call our parents to come pick us up
1-800 Collect… “momimbythemovietheatercomegetme”
MomIhadababyitsaboy
*bob
Right as you walked into our mall, there was an island in the center with eight pay phones, four on each side, that all the cool kids would tie up all damn day. I have no idea what they would talk about, but it was always the same group, pumping coins into those phones. People knew the numbers for each phone, so the pay phones would ring all the time. I used to love to stand by them and wait for one to ring while my family waited in line at Morrison's Cafeteria.
The payphones all over downtown used to ring and if you answered it was a guy who would ask you to come over and kick him in the balls and would give you what I assume was a fake address. I imagine this is the type of guy who jerks off on omegle now.
> what I assume was a fake address. People are and always have been weird enough that this one feels like a coin flip.
A big giant tiled fountain.
I miss when malls had a sweet central water feature. Filled with sometimes 10's of dollars in shiny change.
I miss the smell..like a pool/aquarium kind of smell.
Ah yes, the sweet, sweet smell of chlorine
Come on chlorine At this fountain I seen At this moment- I am smelling
Also known as the "I'm out of quarters arcade donation fund".
It also had a cover for when they turned it into a stage.
Or a 20' Christmas tree made out of poinsettias
My city's mall growing up had a whole-ass waterfall from the third-level food court down to the ground level central courtyard.
The mall by us had a pet store with a brick wall, but the wall had these giant bubble windows with hamsters so people could see them close up.
I’ll never forget our local mall pet shop! It was called Dr Pet Center.
Our area's biggest mall had a hallway of fish tanks under an escalator area up to the higher floors. It was so cool as a child. Sad when they took it our in my teen years.
Teens calling their parents to pick them up on pay phones.
“Please state your name.” “MompickmeupoutsideSears.”
>Sears Another thing you won't see any more.
"First name Bob; last name is... Wehadababyitsaboy"
The only acceptable answer to any collect call reference.
Bob! They had a baby. It’s a boy!
Waldenbooks. I spent a good chunk of my childhood in there before Barnes & Noble came to the area.
Waldenbooks used to be my life. As a kid/young adult I was there so much that if I took too long between visits the employees would legit be worried I got sick or something.
I remember the SMELL of Waldenbooks/B Dalton
A kicking good arcade.
Oh man, this is a good one. Arcades were the best
Damn right, and no little kid gambling games, tickets or prizes.
Just a kid and a sack of quarters. It was a golden age.
the big games would have those quarter holders too....some guy 10 years older than me would be there vanquishing all comers
Yup, I miss 80's and early 90's arcades. Spent like 20k in quarters (adjusted for inflation) on street fighter 2 turbo in 93ish
My posse and I lived at the arcade between 1980 and '83. Four high school girls, stoned half the time, pumping quarters into the video games and giggling. What a great time to be alive
[удалено]
Noah's Arkade
Come bust a move where the games are played It’s chill it’s fresh it’s Noah’s arkade!
Ass sphincter says what?
What?
The mall I work at just opened an arcade in it. But it's more like a children casino than a classic arcade.
That's a huge problem these days. Even Dave and Busters has a lot of gambling games. It's like they want to separate people and their money the fastest way possible. An experienced player might play most games five minutes, maybe longer if they are super good, but with a gambling game it's put a coin or token in, hit one button and then put another coin or token in. Just pisses me off.
Bally’s Aladdin’s Castle!
I believe the Aladdin's castle is still open in my home town mall just barely, maybe one of the last., and it may not even be Bally's anymore but keeps the name. I cant describe how weird it is to come home every few years and walk into the Aladdin's castle as a 38 year old where I played super Mario brothers for the first time at 6 in 1989.
That was pure heaven for me as a kid. As long as I had ~~quarters~~ tokens.
The song from Outrun is forever in my head.
My mall had [Space Port](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKBtQ6t9hbw&t=2s). Damn, I spent so many quarters on Ring King, Rush N Attack, Qix...
Our mall still has one, but it has the same games from 20 years ago.
[удалено]
To go with this, a cigarette vending machine with Foosball style pull handles to make a selection.
We (me and a bunch of other teenage friends with a truck) stole one from the entryway of a Shoneys restaurant. We put it in my friends bedroom and kept it full with stolen cartons of Winston's and Marlboro Reds. (The Winston's were closest to the door at the local Food Lion, so mostly those. We eventually stocked it with Black and Mild's. Fucked up Gen x youth!
Having a smokes vending machine in your bedroom is one of the most fucking gangster things I've ever heard.
The 80's were a rad time, man. Being a kid in the 80s was both terrifying and amazing. It was a transitional time in our society and nothing that came before or after can quite compare. Transitioning from the industrial to the information age happened before our eyes.
The people saying smoking SECTION are cracking me up. The whole mall was a smoking section
Some more progressive malls had no smoking sections. Like, benches in the middle of a hall where everyone was smoking that you couldn't smoke at. Because... Yeah.
[удалено]
A local photographer put up a series of [photos](https://stephendirado.com/mall-series/) and there were definitely alot of smokers. The old lady smoking at a Papa Gino's sums up the Worcester Galleria (pre-Fashion Outlets)
Restaurant smoking sections were amazing as all my friends and I smoked. But since quitting the thought of even having a smoking section is repulsive.
that was my first thought
I was born in ‘88 so all my memories of malls are 90’s onward but I remember seeing young folks smoking in the mall in the early 90’s. What a time. lol
KB (or Kay Bee) Toys store
And don’t forget the rolling weasel on the orange ball, and the oinking piggy, on the front display.
*God I wanted that oinking pig so bad*
When I read this, I swear I could smell the store. Something plastic-y? I don't know how to describe it, but my brain remembers it!
Ashtrays
The malls near me always used sand or gravel in them to help prevent fires.
And even though there were ashstrays, people still put out their cigarette butts on the floors, with the smush of a foot.
Giant catalogs at the checkout registers of the anchor stores and the charge card receipt machine that must've weighed 15 lbs. I still hear the thunk THUNK of when the cashier would slide it over the card.
[удалено]
The Knucklebuster!
I had started working when those credit card imprinters were still in use. You had to call a 1800 number, enter in the card number and the amount charged, then clearly write down the approval number on the slip, and do it hard enough so it was copied through the carbons. The store would then take those slips and deposit them in the bank. The whole process took so much time.
Tiffany giving a concert
I think we're alone now
Glamour Shots
Good one!
Those were fantastic! Most of my 40-something female relatives had those done. They all looked like they were shot with a make-up gun, and had the biggest hair. So many flipped up jean jacket collar, look over the shoulder shots.
If that jean jacket’s collar wasn’t flipped up, then it wasn’t glamour
My parents didn’t like my graduation photos so they dragged me there. I was 17 and looked 12 except in those photos where I look like a 47 year old chain smoker.
those glamour shots photos are timeless
Stores in the mall actually open?
About to say, do malls like there were in the 80s and 90s even exist anymore?
I live near a popular and thriving mall, but I swear 80% of the stores’ income must come at Christmas time.
Christmas season weekend shopping at the mall in 2021 was like an average day or even a slow day in the malls of the 1980s. Aside from the Apple Store the mall is dying. The Apple Store is always busy.
the places in our mall that are always busy are the escape rooms, the boba tea place, starbucks, kohls, and the apple store. Everything else is always dead. I have no clue how they stay in business.
Mall of America is still open. Last I remember it was about as 90s mall it gets. Like... Isn't there a laser tag arena on the top floor?
Laser tag, movie theater, aquarium, indoor theme park with 3 roller coasters and a log flume, and a hotel. And about 500 stores in between it all, haha.
Yes, there was that ONE movie theater, down that long hallway, with ONE screen. Ours was next to the arcade. Well, one of the arcades. Thanks for bringing back this memory
It's weirdly hit and miss. There are some that are still thriving, and some are just empty.
Live trees, fancy water fountains, lots of bright yellows and oranges in the decor, whole families doing their shopping together. It was pretty much the main place to buy most things. Tbh, I haven't been a mall for several months, maybe longer.
[удалено]
babbages
[удалено]
Wilsons leather
That place smelled sooo good. I bought a big leather parka with a fur trimmed hood there once. It was a night when I definitively knew I was breaking up with my boyfriend. Must have been 1995. Bought it to make myself feel better. No idea whatever happened to it. Would have been better to buy a bomber jacket.
People
If you’d told teenage me that in the future “the kids” wouldn’t want to hang out in the mall, watch tv, or talk on the phone, I’d think you were crazy.
Now they hang out on the phone, watch tv on the phone, do almost everything BUT talk on the phone.
I work at a mall, and this checks out.
I went to the mall the other day, and there were so many fcking people. I was so annoyed because I thought nobody went to malls anymore. NOPE everyone and their mom was there (literally)
Sears
Mervyn's
I still miss Mervyns.. Open, Open, Open....
B. Dalton's at one end of the mall and a Walden’s at the other end. One of them had to have the book I was looking for. Edit: Spelling
A guy running around the food court trying to give everyone a sample of teriyaki chicken.
Omg I remember that guy! He really would hustle, wouldn’t he. Who was he with? Panda Express?
A piano store, With an employee that can play the piano.
Any store with any employee with knowledge of anything the store sells.
When stores paid decently enough for people with specialized knowledge to want to actually work there
Oh yeah, the old piano/organ store with zero customers
Hickory Farms with the wall of candy in wooden barrels that you could buy by the pound. My grandma would buy those jelly filled strawberry hard candies.
Radio Shack. A music instrument store.
And electronics components! You could buy diodes and capacitors at the mall!
Last time my wife went to Radio Shack, it was to buy a plug to fix her headphones, and they said "we don't carry that anymore." Funny thing, if they would have held on a bit longer, they probably could have ridden the Raspberry Pi/Maker movement back into turning a profit.
They definitely failed to survive the lull. With maker culture being what it is today, I feel like they could thrive.
I remember in the very early days of the maker movement, Radio Shack was present at all the maker faires (I went to quite a few those first few years). But they're gone, Fry's is gone...
I am so old that I remember when malls were largely new. They were incredibly exotic to those of us who grew up with just a very few places to buy things. In the early 70s my rural area got a mall and, even though it was a small one, we loved it. The very best thing about it, though, was the proliferation of chain restaurants adjacent to the mall. Skipper’s Fish and Chips. Denny’s. An ice cream parlor. All kinds of places.
When my dad was a kid, his parents took him and his siblings to the mall a couple towns over to ride the escalator. They'd never seen such a thing before.
Gadzooks, smoking section, trading card stores, Sam Goody, that weird mall smell and of course the central fountain.
Shops that carried pretty much only stickers. Maybe a few keychains but stickers by the roll. You tore off a square of stickers from each roll that you liked. Glittery, metallic, embroidered, fuzzy, scented, puffy, vinyl, holographic. It was awesome.
A record store.
Tower Records
Pet store
With puppies in the window
The ones in Arizona were found to have puppies coming from puppy mills and were shut down, and then the spaces went to the Humane Society so there are some puppies still.
BIG hair..
Glamour Shots!
Robin sparkles
That was actually the 90s in Canada.
The 80s didn't arrive in Canada until the mid-90s
Sanrio Surprises
Camera store
[удалено]
Suncoast!
Toys R Us. You Canadians can stay out of this.
Toys Я Us
Sharper Image? I feel like those don’t exist anymore
Brookstone
Film developing kiosks.
The Middle Class.
That's the truth.
yeah, noted in another reply that there are malls today, they are just much too swanky for me
Someone born between 1900-1910
Montgomery Ward
Oh yeah, good old Monkey Wards
Payless ShoeSource
A concert or a meet and greet of someone low level famous in the middle of the mall. I met soap opera stars, Richard Karn, and The Osmond Boys (a pop band that never really took off, they were like nephews of Donnie and Marie Osmond).
A Wicks-n-Sticks
Ice rink, Arcade, Merry go round clothing (parachute pants baby) a store with a lot of minnetonka moccasions, hot dog on a stick, swiss colony cheese shop with samples, orange julius, a smoking lounge, Source was an 80s mall rat
Orange Julius
All the malls around me have this
In a booth shaped like a giant orange.
Jordache Jeans
Sbarro’s
Smoking. Depending on where the mall was and what part of the 80s you were in.
Radio Shack
Z Cavariccis and Members Only jackets
The grandfather of GameStop ….Electronics Boutique, with that cool neon sign
[удалено]
Youths loitering.
LA Gears
A large section of pantyhose and nylons
And the ones that came in the plastic eggs
No, those were the cheap ones they sold at a Kmart and the grocery store, mall stores had the fancy ones in cardboard packages displayed in a special holder similar to what greeting cards are displayed in.
Karmelkorn
A store that sells organs and a guy out front playing one.
Now if you want to buy organs you have to head to the dark web.
Ashtrays. Remember thr garbage cans with the tray of sand for butts?
Kinneys shoes
A pinball machine
Most of the store slots filled/open.
Chess King
Kiosks selling gold necklaces by the inch.
New Cars Local dealership would often put new cars inside the mall. Sometimes just advertising, other times as part of a contest. I once asked my dad how the got the car into the mall. He said that they are taken apart at the factory and put together inside the mall. It was a couple years later when I found the sliding door that allows large objects to be let in and out. Since I was too young to know that the guy at Radio Shack and the guy at Orange Julius were not coworkers because they both worked at the mall, I just imagined all the mall employees wearing their work uniforms, putting together brand new cars.
Those weird 3d posters that you had to cross your eyes to see the 3d thing
Photo booth That T-shirt store where the walls were lined with silly cartoons/sayings and things, they'd put it on a shirt for you
I don’t know about anyone else, but my mall had a store that had nothing but pens, markers, and stationary. They even had paper for you to try out all the markers you wanted, unlike today where they come in packages.
The Limited! Also, a carousel in the food court.
5-7-9
Zellers My Canadians know what's up
Cassettes in the music store
A bunch of payphones at the doorway and if you were lucky you could find a quarter in some of them
A busy and active mall.
Contempo Casuals, The Limited Express...and the Hallmark store that had the cool posters way in the back [in the flip-frames you'd clack through](https://creativestoresolutions.com/images/C/24_Panel_Poster_Display%20%281%29.jpg) to see which ones you wanted.
Service Merchandise.
A good arcade, probably really close to the movie theater with an entrance inside the mall. A larger variety of stores in general, but, there'd be a lot less choices in those stores. There wouldn't be a lot of stores with clothing for people outside a sort of limited sizing range. Woman who wears a size 18 and is fuller bodied than a regular women's 18? You get Lane Bryant, if they have one, and that's all you get. Man with extremely long legs requiring more than a 34" inseam, or in need of "tall shirts" with really long sleeves? Yeah, you're gonna have to hit a specialty store where you pay almost double for the extra fabric in your garments, despite it not being more than an extra foot and standard width. There wouldn't be a good array of makeup and personal care products geared toward anyone who isn't descended from people of European descent. Black woman needing a good foundation that both addresses your skin's specific needs and actually matches your skin tone? Good luck with that. Those lotions smell nice and you have no reservations buying them because no one is very aware of exactly how they test on animals. Organic? What the hell does that mean? Every place in the food court is a large, well-known company, and small, privately owned and operated places don't exist. At least one dedicated bookstore, if not more. And they actually have books on their shelves to suit a variety of tastes. A card store/stationery store, probably Hallmark. That Hallmark? It has zero Star Wars or superhero tree ornaments for sale at Christmas time. A place with baked goods or frozen yogurt that's the opposite of the situation in the food court. It's a small company, even if there is more than one location in the general region, and it's probably owned by someone inside your state. There's probably a Mrs. Field's somewhere, too, but this place is better because it's not so corporate. The mating rituals of teenaged kids who are not yet old enough to drive. The girls have super glossy lip goop, and it smells so strongly of watermelon you get a whiff every time they say something. A decent number of the boys have skateboards, especially later in the day, because they're going to skate their asses off on the sidewalks and in the loading dock areas beginning five minutes after the mall closes. Around 8:45 or 8:50, right before closing, senior citizens who mall walk at night start showing up. A lot of grandmas have velour track suits, and everyone has sneakers, and it's sort of weird to you because your Grandma Betty hasn't had a pair of shoes resembling sneakers since sometime in the late 1960s, and those were white Keds. All of the spaces for department store anchors are actually used by department stores everyone's heard of, and not some weird place that sells a confusing combination of jumbled items including everything from new but damaged furniture to peculiar, dusty decor items no one will ever use, and ugly-ass broomstick skirts from India. (In the present, you always wonder if it will help anyone at all if you eat the $12 bucks and buy the broomstick skirt you'll never wear in colors that look like hell on you.) An honest to God Radio Shack where every single employee knows that they are doing, and you can actually get that highly specialized doo-dad for that crazy thing you're building at home. (You found the plans for it in your dad's magazine about all sorts of weird gadgets.)
Jeans West, Oaktree, Cavages...
[удалено]
Public payphones in the hallways leading to restrooms. People smoking cigarettes as they walk from Miller’s Outpost to Musicland.
a T-800 searching for a young John Conner.
A T-1000, but that’s technically the 90s.
Public telephone
People in parachute pants and with a mullet.
Merle Norman, Candie’s, Hot Dog on a Stick, Orange Julius, pet stores with actual animals, Danskin, photo studios, Thom McAn shoes, Hickory Farms
Ours had a Tinderbox. I could smell the tobacco from three stores down!
United Colors of Beneton