No, Kenny is not dead.
South Park Mall in Charlotte is one of a dying breed – an upscale enclosed traditional shopping mall – targeted at folks (California refugees) who will gladly pay $1,500 for a purse. It’s about the last place in the world I want to visit, but there was an unavoidable need – it is the location of Apple’s retail store.
I had decided that I had had enough with my original iPad one. It is not compatible with iOS6 or 7 and cannot load a webpage now without crashing because it runs out of memory. I was certain that I was going to buy, the only question was whether I want an iPad that was full-size, or the iPad Mini retina display.
On my way to the Apple Store, I passed no fewer than three kiosks offering to repair my phone (like replacing the wearing out battery in my iPhone 4S). I was a little surprised to see a Microsoft kiosk. There were three or four employees and large kiosk that was split between the surface tablets and the Xbox. The only “customer” I saw was a 10-year-old boy who wanted to play the Xbox games. The new head of Microsoft announced today that there are major changes coming to his company as it has lost focus and missed the boat on the mobile revolution.
So I found the Apple Store, and walk in – not at all comfortable with the location nor the Apple “I’m an expert” culture. Despite there being probably 40 employees scurrying around, I seem to be invisible. Eventually a fat guy in the corner spotted me standing by myself and came over and asked if he could help. I explained that I was there to buy an iPad Mini retina and that I have given up trying to use the website – both Apple’s website and T-Mobile’s. He announced that somebody else needed to help me for that, and took me over to the middle aged lady somewhere near the front of the store. She announced in this store with at least 40 people that well it’ll be a few minutes before somebody can help you and made no move to get anyone’s attention. She did not engage me at all in conversation and didn’t even ask my name. The next person that walked in the front door she walked off with them to go solve their problem – I took that as a hint and opportunity to turn around and walk out the front door and leave.
I hopped in my car, and invoked Plan B – I went to the T-Mobile retail store closest to my home. Fernando, who is probably a fairly recent immigrant, immediately attended to me – walked in the back room and pulled out a brand-new iPad Mini retina which I am holding in my hand now. It is an LTE compatible iPad which includes a 200 MB per month of free LTE t-Mobile Internet access for as long as I own the device. I whipped out my debit card and that was that.
So at least for the time being, I have a much more useful tool for maintaining the streaming radio guide data. We’ll see how that goes.
The most ironic part of this is – the only reason I’ve needed to boot my old computer to windows XP since April – is in order to do a backup and sync of my new iPad. Apple does not have a version of iTunes that runs under Linux – and it seems extremely likely they will never create such a beast.
On fanboy message boards talking about Linux, this is a common complaint. “I would be able to completely get rid of windows – except that there is no version of iTunes that runs under Linux, and trying to install WINE or some other windows emulation pretty much requires a computer science degree and lots of luck – and still probably cannot run iTunes. The smartass Linux fanboys universally say something Unhelpful like – well that’s Apple’s fault. I’m sorry, but if your position is to use LinuX, you must throw away your iPad and iPhone – you got your head up your ass if you think that’s ever going to happen. Apple has the ball, and it’s theirs to fumble. Everyone else is a spectator.
Snooty Apple Store employees – yes I have had that experience with an iPod. I remember when Apple was a cool thing to own because you were part of a very small minority that found the interface intuitive. Now, it’s all about the attitude. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Apple just won a trademark in Germany for the layout of their store. I don’t get it. Apparently, they already have that in the US.
Hey Art, next time you go to South Park Mall, don’t dress like a bum! They got an image to uphold, ya know.
Exactly!
One of the reasons people could have heard of South Park was Tammy Faye Bakker was legendary for her shopping trips there. The competing mall built in the 1970s called Eastland Mall closed several years ago and now is owned by the City – which means some elaborate development plan conceived by the city council brain trust. Selling the land to Wal-mart for a mega superwalmart shopping center is about the last thing they would think of.
Light hearted ideas
http://clclt.com/theclog/archives/2014/04/10/nine-uses-for-the-former-eastland-mall-property
Spread the word:
Eastland Mall – un gran nuevo hogar para los niños de Guatemala.
It turns out Eastland Mall is a common name around the country for a defunct mall.
My guess for the reason of the decline of the enclosed mall is a combination of government mandates (“a mall must have a service desk staffed all hours the mall is open that offers strollers for rental and operated a lost and found”) and a legal expectation of “perfect” security while dealing with gangs of teenagers.
Tear it down and make it a strip mall, people’s expectations are much less and no huge utility bills for cooling and heating and elevators and escalators and public bathrooms with baby changing stations in the men’s room, etc..
Interesting that I would not have thought of th government mandates and I watch “The Independents” with Reason’s Matt Welch every night. 😉 I think you are right.
I would say that I live about 1 mile from a major shopping mall and go to it about once per year over the decade and I half that I have lived near it.
I’d prefer to drive to a further store because the prices are generally lower since the stores pay lower rent outside the malls. For me, it is not so much about the price as for the fact that I don’t plan to spend my entire day in the mall – I know what I want and I want to park as close as possible to the store selling it- that rules out malls.
Back in the 1970s, malls attracted people because they offered free parking to shoppers and no parking tickets. Teenagers loved to hang out in them. Today, teenagers hang out on the internet. When I shop, I prefer to shop on the internet and try to avoid physical stores whereever possible. More women work now than in the 1970s as well- less time to shop.
The malls that are surviving are becoming a “main street” experience. You can go and ice skate in front of shoppers or watch people ice skate as you shop. Some malls, like Mall of America have indoor amusement parks.
My local mall has no stores that sell CDs or music for years. I would say they do now because there is an Apple store and it provides access to iTunes. The mall also has no book stores.
Only one in 100 Apple store visitors buy anything
http://www.cnet.com/news/former-retail-chief-only-1-in-100-apple-store-visitors-actually-buys/
In retrospect, it probably confused them that I started by saying “I’m here today because I decided to buy your $600 device right now”. I should have loitered around the iPod carrying cases for an hour first.
One thing that was annoying to me was there was one idevice after another trying to sell the other idevice. If you wanted information about the iPad or the Mac air, you would go to an iPhone nailed to the table and run a demo to tell you what you’re looking at.
One positive thing compared to some other places (Costco comes to mind) – is the devices were actually corrected to the real Internet via Wi-Fi. I’m sure that creates security concerns, but being able to see my website on the iPad mini confirmed that it would be a useful improvement and workable given my vision issues.
So you are being tracked? Who knew?
Not to worry too much, because al-Obama’s team is in the same quandary as the Establishment (RINO’s included). Don’t worry about creating security concerns, the NSA has your back.
Just move to a secure residence with no elevators, low utility bills, no obtrusive neighbors and no adverse consequences.
Of course my location may not be fully suitable since there are no elevators, we have low utility bills, we have caring neighbors and no adverse consequences, well, other than those Pea Tarty candidates.
I believe there is an Apple store at the Northlake Mall (for as long as that is open) – same stuff different day. I went into buy an iPod mini to process credit card payments for the business (Square is amazing, bank and credit card fees down) they told me to go to a demo computer, order it and pick it up at the genius bar. I drove across the street to Best Buy. They were happy to help. I just don’t need attitude from the geniues
I saw that last night – of course that mall is much closer to you than it is to me, and I doubted I would have any different experience.
My prior experiences with Apple stores were – they spent a lot of money to open a store in Grand Central Station in New York City, replacing a high-end restaurant. I went there partly just because I was curious, and I think I needed something like a charger for my car. Similar to my recent experience, I was pretty much invisible, and left without buying anything.
My experience in New Haven was mostly positive – their store in New Haven is basically right next to the Yale University campus – parking is a problem there, but that’s only indirectly their fault. While the place was busy and it was probably true that there was nobody to help me right away, they asked me my name and put me on a list and when the expert was ready, he already knew what I wanted and was prepared. It was getting a little tense because I knew how much time I had left on the parking meter and parking tickets in New Haven are expensive. I got back to the car with maybe three minutes left on the meter. And these are the high-tech meters at the moment the meter runs out it communicates electronically to the ticket writers to get them to rush over and write you a ticket.
My first iPhone I had bought at the AT&T store in the Boston Post Road mall – and was a much more satisfactory buying experience.
Seasoned sales people are smart enough to ignore your physical appearance – when someone says that they’re here today and they want to buy, if you think oh my this guy needs a hair transplant, and ignore the sale, you’re going to find another job quickly.
People who have money generally don’t feel a need to impress you – we all know the story but Warren Buffett drives around Omaha in a beat up station wagon. He doesn’t care because he doesn’t have to care.
Back in the very early days of personal computers, you had companies like Altair which quickly went out of business. They were told to shoo away the young males who would tend to come into their store to want to poke at their computers – they wanted the rich businessmen in the three-piece suits to be the people in their stores. What they failed to realize was that in five years that geeky teenager was going to be the guy working for major corporations who was going to recommend what to buy, and the person who was going to make the equipment actually do something useful. So I ended up buying a Radio Shack TRS 80 sight unseen for $1000. The store manager wanted to understand the product that he was selling and encouraged us to do things – I ended up writing several demo programs for free that were then distributed to RadioShacks around the country