The malls of this country are being overrun by the latest threat to freedom. No, it's not Uncle Osama's Traveling Jihad and Puppet Show, but something subtler. I speak, of course, of the innumerable kiosk vendors that prevent the common mall patron from traveling from point A to point B in a speedy manner. In every mall, in every conceivable nook and cranny, a kiosk has sprung up. They seem to have multiplied much like amorous rabbits in a confined space. It used to be that kiosks were rare and confined to places like the Mall of America where retail space was expensive. In places such as this, a kiosk was a way to sell your wonderful merchandise by pledging your less important children into slavery instead of your firstborn.
Now, they are everywhere. Everything from illegal videogames to questionable massage products to revolutionary moisturizers can be had without the need to walk that considerable distance to the opposite end of the mall, and we have kiosks to thank for it. For instance, in the Eden Prairie Mall, one could get something to eat, get 3 different kinds of cell phone service, buy cheap perfumes and colognes, take a short product survey, buy some hermit crabs, have their picture etched into a crystal, moisturize and then go see a movie, all by traveling in a 50-foot circle.
Perhaps what irks me so much about these kiosks is not their ubiquity but their utter lack of salesmanship. Their lack of a physical store that one must enter to be served diminishes their effectiveness, so they must wander their kiosk, whoring themselves to mostly disinterested people who neither want nor particularly care for whatever it is that is being sold. These merchants would be well served to recall the days of the traveling medicine show, where people were conned into buying snake oil and the like just because the man selling it was charming. No such luck here, however, as kiosk vendors today manage only to come off as desperate, pleading idiots.
For instance, when walking through the Mall of America, I was stopped by a cell phone vendor who artlessly stepped in front of me. Despite my instinct to bowl him over and continue on my merry way, I decided to indulge him and keep myself off of mall security's radar. He inquired about my cell phone service. I told him I was with a competing provider, and thought that was the end of it. I stepped past him and he stopped me again. “Sir,” he said. “You dropped something!” I turned around. When, seeing that I had dropped nothing, I asked what he was talking about; he smugly replied, “Your call.” There was then a mighty internal struggle while I debated killing him for his insolence.
This trend shows no signs of slowing or reversing, so I and many others will have to repress varying degrees of homicidal rage on our subsequent trips to the mall. In all fairness, though, the next effeminate metrosexual guy that approaches me and lisps out, “Would you like to moisturize?” is getting thrown over the second floor railing.
In closing, if you are reading this and a kiosk vendor employs you, I implore you: Stop sucking at life and learn how to sell things, or get a real job. Please. My sanity and the sanity of many other decent people depend on it. |
