shopping

A week ago, I needed to drop off a package at the post office, and I noticed there was a post office inside Crestwood Mall—an old shopping mall in southwest St. Louis County. Since this post office was on my way to another stop, I decided to venture into Crestwood Mall to the once-mighty mall that was in dire straits.

When I pulled into the mall parking lot, I noticed a few things:

• There were two other cars in the entire lot where I parked.
• There was a huge, black crow sitting on a handicapped parking sign, watching me walk towards the door.

Not very encouraging.

Anyways, I purposely parked at an end of the mall so I could get a little mall-walking into my day (hey, when you're a programmer, and you sit 90% of your life, you'll take any exercise you can get!). My spirits weren't lifted when I tried entering the automatic doors, but was stymied:

Now, I can understand a temporary problem, but it looked to me like none of the doors had been maintained in a while; paint was falling off, locking mechanisms were detached from the push-to-open doors, and the doors felt a bit like they would fall apart when I pushed them open!

After entering, I saw not one person for the first few hundred yards. In fact, during my entire 20 minute circuit around the mall, I noticed about 8 people in total, and only three were inside stores. I felt like I was Will Smith in I, Legend! There were areas of the mall (for example, the old food terrace) where not one store was open, and every inch of storefront was boarded up. In fact, many of the mall's bathrooms looked like they'd been closed for a very long time:

Now, what if I wanted to get a few dollars to spend at one of the three or four remaining stores? Oh, sorry... the ATMs here don't work either:

What happened, I asked myself, to the glorious mall that just ten years prior boasted a Dillards, Macys, all the requisite indoor-mall stores (Auntie Anne's, Claire's, Sam Goody's, Pasta House, hundreds of cell phone stores, etc.)? It used to be a destination for southern countygoers, but no longer.

The few remaining kiosks in the mall were empty (completely!), and many of the storefronts weren't even barricaded by a dropdown metal grate, meaning people could simply walk back into the abandoned store and sit behind the counter if they wanted. It was quite eerie—especially with the echoes of music played over the PA system in a large, empty space.

Even when I walked by the Sears (the only remaining store that had any semblance of being a 'mall-type' store, but which is also closing soon), I didn't see anyone inside.

It was almost a nightmarish experience (I really thought I heard a few zombies every now and then), and I think I'll avoid the place for a while.

At long last, I've added a proper storefront to my website to facilitate purchases of different items I have been selling for many years... I typically get one or two orders per month for the Pro-Life bumper stickers I've made and sold since 2004, and instead of going through a lengthy back-and-forth email conversation to go over payment, shipping, etc., I figured a storefront would be much easier to manage.

The store is running on Übercart 2.x on my Drupal site. It currently has very few products, but I'm thinking of posting a couple other items here and there (such as old camera parts), so I can sell them in one place rather than on Craigslist, eBay, word-of-mouth, etc. Makes payment handling much easier as well!

What do you think of the store? Check out all the product listings.