I went to the mall with the sister today to buy sunglasses and a few things to help fill out my ever-dreary wardrobe. She was late, so I wandered into the Sharper Image, which is closing down nationwide and was in the process of liquidating everything, including its security sensors and shelf brackets.
That store was always pretty much entirely stocked with useless crap--solar-powered paperweights, anyone?--so I never paid much attention to it. Still, I was surprised just how useless and crappy it all was, once all the careful merchandising and shelf lighting had been stripped away. Most of it looked like garbage, literally garbage, the stuff that gets shoved into a few Hefty bags and tossed into a random apartment dumpster when you're thoroughly sick of trying to clear out your old rental house. Even at 50 to 70 percent off, that shit is way overpriced. In fact, it seems even more overpriced at such a deep discount because it seems something that much on sale should be so much cheaper. I fled before I had to make eye contact with the two salesmen who were glumly presiding over their slow-motion layoffs.
So no tears shed for the Sharper Image. Still, it's unsettling, another tiny sign of something larger. I guess I don't go to the mall that often, and when I do it's to the one that's been dying for the past decade, so I was a little jarred by all the SALE SALE SALE signs and not-quite-fully stocked stores.
We're all saying everything is fine in Austin, if we talk about it at all, and so far it mostly is, but there are definitely some cracks in the foundation, and it's becoming apparent that each piece of our bad economy news has just been coming six to eight months later than in most other places. I wonder what other stalwart national chains are going to disappear, what absolute givens are just not going to be so anymore? (Not that the Sharper Image or any other store was ever an absolute given, but you know what I mean. SUVs, for example. It seemed those would reign supreme over the land forever and ever, amen.)
Anyway, if you can deal with the piranha-like desperation of the salespeople, the unshakable sensation that something truly ugly is about to descend, and the niggling worry that you shouldn't be buying stupid clothes at all but instead stocking up on dried goods and ammo, I found it's not a bad time to go to the mall. Stores are both desperate and trying to get rid of their summer stock right now, so without even looking that hard, I spent just under $80 for two nice skirts and a decent pair of sunglasses, all of which would have cost me about $190 at full price.
And Sharper Image does have this cool USB tape deck you can use to convert cassettes to MP3s, if they don't all sound like they're playing underwater by now. It's marked down to $60 now, but if it goes down to $20 or so I'm totally getting one.