Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Thursday, February 21, 2002
21:19 - Brian the Mallrat	(top)
Bigger is not always better. Especially when it comes to malls. The mall near where I live is the Eastridge Mall, off Capitol Expressway, right next to Raging Waters. You can even see it in one of those photos I took from Quimby road. It's got three levels (or two, depending on how you count the weird pseudo-split-level near the middle that shelves a whole bunch of stores onto a semi-floor that puts me in mind of Being John Malkovich), a ton of stores, and all the parking in the world. When it opened in the late 80s or early 90s, it was one of the biggest malls anyone had ever seen, and it served the whole upscale eastern residential region of Silicon Valley. You'd think that such a mall would be a good place to look for a software store, wouldn't you? Well, let me tell you this: Eastridge Mall is completely useless. Every single time I've ever been to Eastridge, I have left angry and unsatisfied. For all its stores and all its parking and all its locationlocationlocation, it's the worst mall I've ever been in, especially when looking for a simple software store. Why is this? It's because Eastridge is a mall that has passed the Shoe Event Horizon. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, it is a place where it is apparently no longer economically feasible to open anything but a shoe store. Shoes own Eastridge, to the exclusion of anything else. I went into the mall last Christmas, looking for a place to buy a computer game. I went to the map kiosk near the entrance. I looked for "Electronics"-- okay, nothing. I look for "Computers"-- nothing. What do I find? About thirty separate entries for shoe stores, under like five different categories. MEN'S FORMAL. WOMEN'S FORMAL. MEN'S ATHLETIC. WOMEN'S ATHLETIC. CHILDREN'S. This cannot be happening, I told myself. This can't be-- Oh, but wait! Look, under "Specialty"-- there's an Electronics Boutique! ...And it's right down below me, right across the entrance plaza on the first floor, just down an escalator. In fact, it's right th-- And that's when I noticed that the Electronics Boutique, evidently recently enough that the kiosk had not been updated to reflect it, had been taken out-- and replaced with A SHOE STORE. So I've not been back to Eastridge since then, except on one or two morbid occasions where I was in the area and felt the need to go in and see if anything had magically changed. It hadn't. I no longer hold out any hope that there is anything in that mall that stocks any item I might want to buy. I have one pair of shoes, and it does me just fine, thank you. Now... on the other hand, there's Vallco Fashion Park. It's in Cupertino, just a couple of miles from work, screened from the freeway by thick pine woods and a tasteful soundwall. The mall straddles Wolfe Road-- it's mostly on one level, with a first floor only at both ends of the mall, on either side of the street. It's very small, especially compared to Eastridge. Small, quaint, quirky. And yet every time I've been in it, I've found exactly what I needed and left satisfied. There are all kinds of places to park-- street-level lots, a garage under the mall, a circumference road. There's a large video arcade at one end, in the cavelike first floor that only extends for a few stores before ending and forcing you upstairs, and right next to it is a candy stand with super-sour gumballs. Upstairs is a comic shop with Vertigo trade paperbacks a-plenty. Further along there are stores that specialize in chessboards, a big-windowed restaurant right over the middle of the street below, and a costume jewelry store with the best name I've ever seen: "C'est Faux". Then there's a Nature Company, a place to get alpaca blankets, during Christmas a free gift-wrapping station, and best of all, not a ^%$@&$ shoe store in sight. I went into Vallco just yesterday after work to get a new 64MB Flash card for my camera, and a new battery. I went in the Sears side, where there was a map kiosk as soon as I came out into the mall interior. I didn't even need to look at it, though, because out of the myriad camera stores in the mall, one was staring me right in the face from across the entrance plaza: Ritz Camera. I go in, ask for the two items, find exactly the ones I'm looking for, and I'm out of there and on the road again in ten minutes. I only wish I still lived in Santa Clara or Cupertino, so Vallco could be my local mall. Not San Jose, where I'm stuck with Eastridge. Maybe I should just walk there all the time and wear out some shoes.