Mall Visit - Rivertown Crossings Mall

On Saturday I went to Rivertown Crossings mall in Grandville, Michigan. The first thing I noticed when I walked inside was how bright the mall was and how shiny everything seemed. The tile flooring was so shiny it almost looked as if they were made out of glass. Also the very first ads that you see are these big pictures on the walls down the first hallway that funnels you into the chaotic center of the mall. The pictures showed a family laughing in a park, and a group of friends all laughing as they are sitting in the mall's food court. This is just one example of how the mall tries to play and persuade you to enter their mall by trying to evoke an emotional response from you. There were a couple other features such as the arched ceiling and plentiful vegetation that according to Pahl's article, prove that the mall is becoming a worship place to those who enter it simply to consume. The lack of windows and distorting halls and bright lights and advertisements screaming and competing for your attention also distract you and make you lose a sense of time, which Pahl also mentioned in his article. While going through various shops I ran into a couple advertisements that I couldn't believe that one- people actually buy this stuff and two- that the "EMPIRE" thinks we are so stupid. One example was a t-shirt I found in EXPRESS. On the front in big "sophisticated" cursive silver letters, it said "True Icon". There a couple problems with this shirt. If someone needs to find their identity by having a shirt tell them their worth there is a problem. Also if someone is listening to these messages that the empire is telling them that they are an icon, very quickly their world can become self centered. Later on in another store I found a perfume line titled "Me". Once again this was annoying because the Empire is trying to persuade its consumers that their identity can be found in their cheap products. Also the title is not creative at all, seriously how long and how much money did a marketing team waste on trying to think of a unique name and somehow end up with "Me"? These are just two examples of messages from the Empire that I found while I was at the mall. When trying to think of how the mall made me feel I did not write a poem but I just remember feeling really unimpressed, and a little angry. It really bothers me that I can walk into a mall and go into any of 50 clothing stores just because I want to when the workers who made all of the mall possible have probably been wearing the same shirt and clothing for months on end because they can not afford getting new ones. I just wish there was more of a balance, why do we have to have all this luxury and others none? It's not because we work harder, or know how to run businesses better it is simply because we were born here and the other billions of people in the world were not, and that is something that no one got to choose. I think that leaves all of us with a great responsibility to make a change, whether by doing a little research and supporting brands and companies that do provide fair wages to their workers or by being intentional with limiting our purchases to necessities, or finding a unique way to use our gifts to make change in whatever field we go into whether that's the arts, business, marketing, or teaching.