Deep Discounts

All day we heard on various and sundry news programs how nobody was at the malls, nobody was shopping, stores were slashing prices up to 90%. Reporters stood in virtually barren mall parking lots intoning the death of retail sales, and what great sales were going on, but nobody was there, nobody was buying.

GREAT! Sales and no people at the mall, lets go! After spending 2 days in the house first hiding from the last minutes shopping hordes, and then because nobody was open on Christmas except Starbucks (thank you Starbucks, we love you and are totally addicted to your caffeinated drinks, tell us oh great Starbucks, what do we do next? Take over the world in the name of latte? Set myself aflame, sure, just hand me another venti 3 pump Peppermint 3 pump white mocha latte please), we needed to get out, so off we drove to the nearest mall.

The first indication that the reporters were liar, liar pants on fires was the line of cars off the highway waiting to get to the mall exit ramp. Hm, this didn’t bode well. We should have just called it quits, zoomed by the mall and gone to our favorite strip mall Starbucks, but no... how bad could it be.

Really bad apparently. As we crept around the parking lot at -.01 mph, we realized that this was far worse than any holiday frenzy. Since Christmas was over, all that make believe nice through clenched teeth was now gone, laying bare the utmost in hostility and anger buried deep during the just ending holiday season. The gloves were off, no need to be nice anymore because people were in a hurry to get what they wanted or return what they didn’t, and nothing was going to stop them.

We thought we saw a car leaving, only to find that another was already in place to take its spot. As the leaving car eased out of the space, we watched with mixed terror and curiosity as a little compact car whipped past the waiting car, nearly did a two wheeled turn to avoid the leaving car, and whipped into the barely vacant space. We were trapped between the leaving and waiting car and the cars behind us with that feeling of “gosh, I wish I had my glock” because we pretty much felt that bullets would be a’ flying at any moment, especially when the leaving car passenger rolled down the window and started pointing and screaming (I actually ducked because I wasn’t sure the hand was empty) and then the waiting car’s driver got out and started screaming. The woman simply got out of her car and walked away. What kind of person does that? What concept do they have in their head that allows them to do something so callous, dastardly and downright WRONG and simply walk away? We finally squeezed through the hatred and drove away and I really do hope that the waiting driver let all of the air out of that bitch’s tires.

After circling the entire mall we happened upon a nice fellow that was leaving and actually pointed to where he parked to let us know. He must have been a seasoned veteran because he backed up in such a way as to block anyone coming from the other way and allowed us to pull in. So, that was only 20 minutes of trying to find a parking spot.

We went inside and immediately got in line at the Starbucks (because there was no way I could face the onslaught of sadistic, uncaring humanity without a latte), then ventured around looking for all of those wonderful bargains the media shills had screeched about. Yeah, nothing. At least nothing that wasn’t already on sale, and the “bargain” junk was just that, junk. Crap you wouldn’t buy ever, unless it was 2 for a dollar, which is was. Its as though stores actually thought that if people were forced to go a day without being able to shop, they would rush in and buy 2 goofy cat book marks for a dollar, when normally they wouldn’t.

All of the cool stuff was the same outlandish price as before, nothing new. Either the economy isn’t as bad as everyone says, or people are just loading up their credit cards with whatever they can shove in a cart because tomorrow they may lose their jobs and default on their credit cards and mortgages, but by gawd they can play Xbox until the authorities come and repossess everything they “own”.

We made our way through a majority of the mall, only because it took us so long to park that DAMMIT we were going to get our time worth out of it. Finally when I was about to elbow a small, screaming child being drug out of a store by her mother or at the very least yell “SPANK HER, NOBODY WILL SAY A WORD!” we decided to leave. Yeah, don’t get me started on that, because it was the same wreck mentality driving out of the mall.

We stopped at the usual Starbucks on the way home and got another latte to calm our nerves. Ahhh.