I am sitting in a pizza shop in a huge shopping complex in a large city in Canada.
Every time the door opens, my napkins blow off onto the floor and a cold wind sweeps over me as though I was adrift on an iceberg. That’s because all these gigantic stores, though connected, somehow forgot to put a roof over their mall.
What the heck is it with the end of the enclosed shopping mall? I’ve always loved those warm, cozy places. I could sit hour by hour on a nice big bench with coffee in hand and people watch. Now and then, someone I knew would sit down beside me and we’d chat. I will pay you $100 if you will bring me a photo of a bench anywhere in the new commercial centres and if you find one, it will be sitting outside somewhere at the mercy of the weather.
Now, with these Titanic-sized stand-alone stores with entrances that face the parking lots, you have to walk half a mile from store to store in the frickin’ cold, dodging cars like a fox trying to lose the hounds.
Oh well, as a friend of mine used to frequently say and now I do too, they didn’t ask me before they went ahead with this and so they did it wrong.
©2012 Jim Hagarty
