Pride Goeth Before a Mall
Hence it’s been some time since I’ve visited a mall in December, opting instead to buy my overpriced gifts over the Internet. Until about a week ago that is, when my wife and I, temporarily deprived of our senses — I suspect a chemical leak — took our kids to the mall.
What ended up bothering me about the trip, though, wasn’t the parking or the crowds. It was the fact that, sometime after my last visit, this particular mall added a raft of attractions aimed specifically at siphoning off whatever flotsam parents have left in their already frequently raided pockets.
This seems particularly cruel, given what an easy target parents are in December; we already spend the whole month shuffling around shell-shocked, trying not to think about our credit card bills.
For one, there’s the picture with Santa. This is nothing new, but what got me was the price: $19.95 for a "package" that consists of two fuzzy 5x7’s spit out of an ink jet printer. They’re taken by a dour teenager whose idea of holiday cheer is suppressing her urge to tell you how lame you are, instead allowing her scowl to do the talking.
But that’s just the beginning. There’s also the $1.50 holiday train ride, marked with a sign that parents are welcome to ride with their toddlers — as long as they fork up $1.50 as well. This is to discourage the parents who are just pretending they want to keep Jimmy from diving head first from a moving caboose; really, they’re trying to scam a free three-minute ride in circles past a tie store. ("Look honey! The ties again!")
Then there’s the "Bouncy House," which is also $1.50, and the $2 carousel ride in the food court, made up of seven horses that look exactly like horses on a real carousel, if real carousels were made out of cardboard.
All these come in addition to the usual parent traps, like the vending machines that spit out eight Reeses Pieces for a quarter, or the "rides," now 50 cents, wherein a little ice cream truck shimmies back and forth in place for five minutes. Even the kids have a sort of ambivalent look when they’re on these things, as if they know they’re cheesy but figure it beats another jaunt through Crabtree & Evelyn.
I kvetch, but of course we took part in all these activities: After all, there aren’t many ways to keep your kid away from a Bouncy House without a fight, short of surreptitiously puncturing it with a finely sharpened candy cane.
We even got the $19.95 Santa picture — even though my 3-year-old daughter, now old enough to know better, wouldn’t go near him, and my son, 15 months, spent the entire "sitting" with his hands outstretched imploringly to the camera, as if he were begging the dour teenager to take him away from all this.
I guess malls are in the business of making money, and who better to make it from than parents who want to show their kids a good time and are too tired to care about being rooked? But that doesn’t mean we have to just sit back and take it. In fact, rather than go broke, next year I’m going to find more ways to entertain the kids at home.
So if you see me in my yard in a red suit, driving a holiday train that looks suspiciously like a rider mower, don’t laugh. Just bring me over a big pretzel.