Blog Week 4

After reading through the slideshow on malls I felt it necessary to write about the different successes of some of the malls in London. Westmount Mall, in my opinion, is a much more pleasant space to walk through than White Oaks or Masonville Mall yet it is in jeopardy of closing its doors because of the lack of interest from the public. I find it to be more visually appealing as well as much easier to navigate yet people, when given the choice, will inevitably choose that as the weakest of the three main malls in London. This brings me to my point that it is not the mall itself that attracts people but the stores that are in the mall. An obvious exception to this rule would be the mega-malls such as West Edmonton Mall or the Mall of America which attract people not with the stores inside but with carnival midways, amusement park rides or water parks. This brings up an interesting argument on which aspect of the mall is more important to the consumer: the appeal of the mall itself or the stores. For 90% of the malls in North America I would say that the variety of stores is the main reason for a person to shop at a particular mall. To back up this point I turn to Karl Marx and his term commodity fetishism, that it is the commodity itself that fulfills our human desire and not the space or context it is sold in. This could be why big box stores such as Wal-Mart are now becoming the predominant shopping locale because a person can get everything they want under one roof and are not concerned with the aesthetic appeal of a mall. In short I believe that most malls are selected on the commodities they offer instead of the interior décor but they are slowly getting pushed out of popularity by the convenience of the big box store.