Must remember: just because the mall is the CLOSEST place to grab lunch doesn’t make it the BEST place, esp. 3 days before Christmas.
Tag: mall
Christmas Shopping
- Need to sleep. Found myself typing “Satan Claus” by mistake.
- Symptom of car culture: I almost feel like I have to justify crossing the street on foot to go to another store instead of moving the car.
- Sun Halo. All you have to do is look up once in a while.
- Linens & Things: Nothing left to sell but the shelves…
- Almost. Walked around a corner and they do have SOME stuff left
- Virgin Megastore is closing too, but they’ve still got lots of stuff. Including 5000 copies of Serial Mom.
- Replica toys: I get the nostalgia factor, but at the same time it’s a weird idea.
- Going out of business sales seen today: 4. Mervyns, Linens & Things,Virgin, Steve & Barry’s.
- And the more stores I look at, the more “What You Own” competes in my head for the ubiquitous Christmas music.
- Amazon’s wishlist needs a generic option. Like “I want an 8GB Micro-SD card” rather than “I want THIS Micro-SD card specifically!”
Shopping Observations
- Can we get a moratorium on covers of “Last Christmas?” Actually, can we get one on the original too?
- Funny how easy it is to spot a cover by Darryl K. Sweet. It makes me want to mash up Xanth, WOT, and every other fantasy series he’s covered
- I can’t see giving someone Countdown to Final Crisis as a gift. Maybe a gag gift?
- Someone EXPANDED The Red Balloon into a full-length film????
- Nothing says Christmas like 50s xmas song played on a mall stage by a guy with a ukulele. Now he’s singing Over the Rainbow. ????
iPhone iLine
I went by the Spectrum for lunch, and the line to get into the Apple Store for the new iPhone was still stretched past several storefronts into the nearest courtyard, right up to the fountain by the carousel — even though they’d launched that morning. Actually, I had several co-workers who were late today because they went down at opening for the launch.
From what I hear it was fairly chaotic, at least in the morning. Apple’s new policy of making you activate the phone in the store was causing delays, especially factoring in the fact that iTunes’ servers got swamped. That would explain why the line was still so long several hours after opening.
Usability note: One of said co-workers got tripped up trying to sync music to his new phone, because the default is to not synchronize music, and the “Sync only checked songs” box looked close enough to being the right option that he didn’t dig deeper.
iCampers across the Spectrum
Since I was going to the Irvine Spectrum for lunch anyway, I figured I’d drop by the Apple Store and see how many people were there for the iPhone launch. I walked by around 1:50pm, about 4 hours before the event, and sure enough there were a bunch of people lined up all along the shops.
You can see some lawn chairs and umbrellas. The campers are sort of hidden in the shade, which is why I upped the brightness on the second picture. Of course, I’m sure everyone waiting in line appreciated the shade. Those shadows will only get longer over the course of the afternoon, and while there’s a nice breeze once you get out into more open areas, the corridors of the mall are better at channeling people than wind.
When I walked by the first time, I only noticed the line running to that corner you can see at the end, maybe 3 storefronts down. About 10 minutes later, after stopping at Kelly’s Coffee, I saw that they were wrapped around that corner, almost the entire length of Forever 21, and stopped at the edge of the patio for the restaurant next door.
Not a huge line—I’ve waited in much longer lines for movies—but bigger than I expected for a phone.