And He Built a Crooked House...

The mall experience is something I avoid whenever possible. Rare’s the time I find what I’m looking for. But last Saturday, I donned my biking gloves and knapsack and headed over to the St-Laurent Shopping Centre.

I had three items on my list: ink for my printer, new jeans, and a new pair of sneakers.

St-Laurent is as horrible as any other mall. It’s an expressionist nightmare where no corridor proceeds in parallel with any other. Entrances and exits, or the escalators up and down, seem to recede as you approach them. The only thing that’s missing for a truly Kaligari-esque experience are looming shadows on the walls, and that’s only because the weirdly artificial light casts no shadows at all.

It’s a house of mirrors, too. Halls that led you to the shoe store yesterday today deposit you outside the food court—Heinlein’s And He Built a Crooked House made manifest.

The Printwell service counter is conveniently located just inside a southern entrance. I approve of Printwell. They exist to screw the system, filling up your printer cartridge for a fraction of the cost of a replacement. My old bird’s been going for a couple of years now thanks to them.

I dropped my cartridge off, and was told it would be ready in about a half an hour, time to pick up jeans and sneakers. I know my jean size (30-34) and my shoe size (12), so it seemed a simple matter of finding what I needed on the shelves.

I started with the sneakers. All my life, I’ve favoured canvas running shoes. They’re comfortable, cheap, and practical. I’m a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy, so they don’t look out of place. And they’ve been around forever. Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine devotes a whole chapter to them. Besides, fashionable footwear angers me. I want function over branding. I’m not vain enough to think a logo magically transforms me into something that I’m not.

St-Laurent has seven shoe stores, four sporting goods stores, and two department stores—more than enough to find a pair of size twelve canvas runners. I like high-tops, but I’m not that fussy; ordinary low cuts are fine.

Could I find what I was looking for? Not a chance. I added a mile or so of wear to my already worn-out sneakers traipsing through the mall, checking every one of those thirteen stores. Only three had canvas sneakers. The offerings at Payless Shoes had quilted padding and cost 3x what I paid the last time for unquilted ones. Footlocker had Converse, but the sales person shook his head when I enquired about size twelve.

I felt a glimmer of hope at SportCheck, where they had both Converse and size twelves. The glimmer faded when I asked price: sixty-five dollars. “You’re paying for the name,” the clerk said sympathetically when I pointed out the shoes were made of canvas, rubber, and a little bit of foam.

If I’m paying for a name, that name had better be along the lines of Stradivarius or Fabergé, not something as supremely inconsequential as eight letters in a circle on the ankles of my running shoes!

Sneakers off the list, I attacked the jeans. Besides the two department stores, St-Laurent boasts eighteen clothing retailers, including two that specialize in jeans. The plethora of choices offered was staggering: boot cut, straight cut, classic cut, slim fit, comfortable fit, high waist, low-riders, button fly, zipper... Some were even ordinary denim blue. But the only choice that mattered—30-34—was nowhere to be found. Not in one of twenty stores.

I couldn’t believe it. There I was, in a temple to commerce, in a day and age where economic pundits and other lackeys of the über-rich prattle on about competition and consumer choice, and not one single competitive price or useful choice was to be found.

Angered at this sham of “giving consumers what they want”, and disgusted by the propaganda that supports it, I went back to Printwell, paid a reasonable price for my unbranded black ink, and left.

Outside, the sun cast comfortingly real shadows on the ground.