E-Verse Radio

“May I help you find suspenders to match the piano? A tie to go with your tea? Some Mozart for your handbag? If the modern art of selling depends upon creating associations, today’s sales mavericks owe a lot to the history of the department store, the original lifestyle marketers. In the early decades of the 20th century, if you were a person of moderate means and wanted to hear a piano recital, watch a film, sip tea, get a manicure, visit a travel bureau, or sign the kids up for bicycle lessons, the place to go was a downtown department store. Urbanization and rising wages created conditions for the retail giants to thrive, but their fundamental success hinged on an essential insight that still rings true today: Shopping was an excuse to have an experience. Today, Americans shop for necessities, shop for status, shop to socialize, shop to escape, shop to people-watch, shop to educate, and shop as therapy. But it was not always a foregone conclusion that a nation of hardscrabble pioneers would become a nation of shopaholics.”

 

- Christina Larson, Washington Monthly

 

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The World is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
 
The world is too much with us; late and soon,  
    Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:  
    Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
    The winds that will be howling at all hours  
    And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers, 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune; 
It moves us not. — Great God! I’d rather be  
    A pagan suckled in a creed outworn, –
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,  
    Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;  
    Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

 

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1. “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping” – Bo Derek

2. ”I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.” – Tammy Faye Bakker

3. ”My ideal relaxation is working on upholstery. I spend hours in junk shops buying furniture. I do all the upholstery work myself, and it’s like therapy.” – Pamela Anderson

4. ”On the one hand, shopping is dependable: You can do it alone, if you lose your heart to something that is wrong for you, you can return it; it’s instant gratification and yet something you buy may well last for years.” – Judith Krantz

5. ”Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women’s lives. You never saw men milling around in men’s departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.” – Mary Barnett Gilson

 

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Fun in a Bakery Shop (1902)

Shop Look & Listen (1940)

The Filth Shop (1969)

Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (1976)

Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996)

Coffee Shop Hell (2005)

 

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“How about Robert Pinsky’s ‘To Television’?”

 

 

Not a “window on the world”
But as we call you,
A box a tube

 

Terrarium of dreams and wonders.
Coffer of shades, ordained
Cotillion of phosphors
Or liquid crystal

 

Homey miracle, tub
Of acquiescence, vein of defiance.
Your patron in the pantheon would be Hermes

 

Raster dance,
Quick one, little thief, escort
Of the dying and comfort of the sick,

 

In a blue glow my father and little sister sat
Snuggled in one chair watching you
Their wife and mother was sick in the head
I scorned you and them as I scorned so much

 

Now I like you best in a hotel room,
Maybe minutes
Before I have to face an audience: behind
The doors of the armoire, box
Within a box — Tom & Jerry, or also brilliant
And reassuring, Oprah Winfrey.

 

Thank you, for I watched, I watched
Sid Caesar speaking French and Japanese not
Through knowledge but imagination,
His quickness, and Thank You, I watched live
Jackie Robinson stealing

 

Home, the image — O strung shell — enduring
Fleeter than light like these words we
Remember in, they too winged
At the helmet and ankles.

 

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All the preachers claimed it was Satan.

Now the first sets seem more venerable

Than Abraham or Williamsburg

Or the avant-garde. Back then nothing,

 

Not even the bomb, had ever looked so new.

It seemed almost heretical watching it

When we visited relatives in the city,

Secretly delighting, but saying later,

 

After church, probably it would not last,

It would destroy things: standards

And the sacredness of words in books.

It was well into the age of color,

 

Korea and Little Rock long past,

Before anyone got one. Suddenly some

Of them in the next valley had one.

You would know them by their lights

 

Burning late at night, and the recentness

And distance of events entering their talk,

But not one in our valley; for a long time

No one had one, so when the first one

 

Arrived in the van from the furniture store

And the men had set the box on the lawn,

At first we stood back from it, circling it

As they raised its antenna and staked in

 

The guy wires before taking it in the door,

And I seem to recall a kind of blue light

Flickering from inside and then a woman

Calling out that they had got it tuned in –

 

A little fuzzy, a ghost picture, but something

That would stay with us, the way we hurried

Down the dirt roads, the stars, the silence,

Then everyone disappearing into the houses.

 

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Sylvan N. Goldman of Humpty Dumpty Stores and Standard Food Markets developed the shopping trolley so that people could buy more in a single visit. He unveiled his creation in Oklahoma City on June 4, 1937.

 

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Her current profile can be seen at
http://www.abc.net.au/backyard/presenters/JENNIFERFLEMING.htm?newcastle

 

And her blog at:
www.jenfleming.com

 

 

 

“Demon Seed (1977). Julie Christie carries the Demon Seed. Fear for her.”

 

 

 

“Does Lisa from Weird Science count as a robot? Because I believe both lead characters had sex with her and it was mind-blowing.”

 

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The Mall of America near Minneapolis, MN has over 500 stores.

 

It does not have a heating system. It relies on the heat from the lighting, the sunroof and all the people.

 

It has four Gaps and an amusement park.

 

It draws 40 million visitors each year; more than Disney World, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined.

 

The Mall of America is an international tourist attraction – more than one third of visitors come from over 150 miles away. Airlines offer travel and shopping package deals to shoppers from Germany, Japan, Switzerland, England and Australia.

 

Only five miles away from the Mall of America is the Southdale mall. It was the first enclosed shopping mall ever, opening less than 50 years ago (October 8, 1956).

 

The world’s largest shopping mall is the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada.

 

 

 

The “West Ed Mall” in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, there are over 800 stores.

 

It has the world’s largest indoor wave pool.

 

It has over 110 places to eat.

 

Of course, West Ed Mall, the world’s largest mall, has the world’s largest parking lot.

 

There are one-third of a million lighting fixtures.

 

It has 58 entrances.

 

West Ed Mall was opened in 1981, and the fourth phase was completed 17 years later.

 

There are two A & Ws, two Baskin Robbinses, two KFCs, two Arbys, two Dairy Queens, three Orange Juliuses and three McDonalds in West Ed Mall.

 

Surprisingly, there is only one Starbucks there.

 

 

 

There are 50,000 shopping malls in the United States alone.

 

Women will buy more if they hear their heels clicking on polished hard surfaces, so designers often use hard flooring in hallways. Inside the stores themselves, there is often carpeting or softer surfaces to lure customers in and make them feel at home.

 

Places to sit in the common areas of malls are hard to find. People aren’t shopping when they’re sitting.

 

Escalators are placed strategically to force shoppers to pass the maximum number of storefronts.

 

Most malls have bends and turns as shoppers typically won’t walk towards something that seems more than one tenth of a mile away.

 

Floor plans in malls are disorienting for a reason – so shoppers cannot make a quick exit.

 

The average mall shopper stays for 80 minutes and spends $75 each visit.

 

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“It’s comments like last week’s on A Boy and His Dog that make me want to rerun my list: top five movies that contain cannibalism and lesbians. It ran a couple years ago, when I first started writing lists. Unfortunately, I can’t remember all of the items — it had definitely been a challenge to write. Perhaps readers can finish the list. I just remember.”

1. Fried Green Tomatoes
2. Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
3. I think The Hunger, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon as vampire lesbians, was one of the items.
4. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
5. Pink Flamingoes

 

“Since I made the list, I’ve thought of two others that marginally fit.”

6. Serenity/Firefly (on the TV show, there were cannibals and lesbians; only cannibals in the movie, though, as far as I could tell)
7. Hannibal (I couldn’t bear to see the movie, but the book qualifies for this list in the other respects)

 

“Oh, and if anyone takes offense, please point out to them that I am a woman and a feminist, though neither a cannibal nor a lesbian. And I can’t take any movie with Don Johnson seriously. After all, this is a guy who married Melanie Griffith . . . twice! Sometimes, with age, wisdom in dating choices does not come.”

 

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“For this week’s episode I have a series of home shopping network video bloopers that have done the rounds for a while.”

 

“Computers for Porn”

 

 

“Guy vs. Sword”

 

 

“QVC Ladder”

 

 

 

“Horse Butterfly Moth”

 

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Commerce City, Colorado

 

Bonus: Bloomington, MN. www.mallofamerica.com

 

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[Anyone out there ever worked as a "mystery shopper?" Please send in your stories. - E]

 

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“On top five movies/TVG shows in which dolls come to life – the scariest is undoubtedly the one with Michael Redgrave from the British film Dead of Night (1945). As far as I know this was Ealing Studio’s only foray into horror, but is still regarded as one of the best British horror films ever made.”

 

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Does anyone keep the old E-Verses? Does anyone out there have a full run of old E-Verse installments for the past few years? I lost all of mine in the great crash of May 2006. If you do, and you wouldn’t mind sending them to me, please write in and let me know how far back your archive runs. I would like to set up an archive so new E-Versers can see how we used to do it. Thanks.

 

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Bauer, Joan. Rules of the Road. 1998.

Birmingham, Stephen. Carriage Trade. 1993.

Bogosian, Eric. Mall. 2000.

Burroughs, Augusten. Sellevision. 2000.

Clair, Daphne. Wilde Man. 1997.

Elsschot, Willem. Cheese. 2002.

Harper, Madeline. Keepsakes. 1998.

Kinsella, Sophie. Confessions of a Shopaholic. 2001.

Kinsella, Sophie. Shopaholic Takes Manhattan. 2002.

Kinsella, Sophie. Shopaholic Ties the Knot. 2002.

Kramer, Gavin. Shopping. 1998.

Martin, Steve. Shopgirl. 2000.

Nicholson, Geoff. Everything and More. 1995.

Pearson, Ridley. Hidden Charges. 1987.

Peck, Richard. Secrets of the Shopping Mall. 1979.

Rudnick, Paul. I’ll Take It. 1989.

Stella, Leslie. The Easy Hour. 2003.

Waite, Judy. Shopaholic. 2003.

 

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A spree of shoppers.

 

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