6 Things that Suck at the Ghetto Mall

Malls date back to the 1700s and were, probably, totally kick ass back then. There wasn’t a Hot Topic to be seen, mall walkers had yet to be invented and the foul, sugary stench of Cinnabon was mostly overshadowed by the foul, sugary stench of corpses in the river. I assume the rivers were bloated with corpses back in the 1700s, just like 1980’s Detroit.

The problem with malls was that they became so popular people started building more and more of them until most large cities hit the saturation point. And at that moment the number of malls outweighed the coolness and usefulness of malls, ensuring that what little coolness and usefulness there was had to be rationed, with most of it being doled out to the malls that don’t suck and were not located in the shitty ghetto parts of your town. This is where the Ghetto Mall was born. And here is why the Ghetto Mall sucks.

1 – The Stink Store

Every Ghetto Mall has a store that stinks in it. That’s meant in a literal fashion, it’s a store that is actually malodorous. How is it, in this modern age, we’re still forced to endure flea market stench in shopping centers? In close proximity to food and textiles? It’s appalling. Whether the stink store is a second hand clothing store that has a strict “we will not wash the skids out of anything we sell” policy or it’s a bakery featuring foods from a country you’ve never heard of, you can smell it from three stores away and it’s never a pleasant experience. It will not be found in the cool mall where you buy your shoes, it will be in the outlet mall, or the mall that used to have a Pizza Hut in 1989 but now has a Pizza Hassan’s which sells a slice with a Fanta and a bowl of tabouli for only $6.95

2 – The Broke Ass Ride

Only the slowest of children, physically and mentally, are ever drawn in by those terrible 25 cent rides that look like psych ward merry-go-rounds or cartoon animals born with FAS. Still, the Ghetto Mall will place them near most entrances, possibly as some kind of post-modern sign post to ensure that you realize just what a shitty situation you’re in, like a decrepit, skeletal tree outside a haunted house or a fat guy struggling into his Rascal outside a Denny’s.

3 – The Bathroom

Apparently the first corner that gets cut at a Ghetto Mall is the janitorial staff. Either that or the washrooms actually exist in the crotch of some pan dimensional beast we can’t perceive with our eyes but whose cheesy crotch odor never quite seems to get scoured off those toilet mints.

I can’t say for sure if the women have it any better but there is no substance that normally resides in the human body that I haven’t seen smeared across nearly every surface of a ghetto mall bathroom. One time I even saw a stall wherein someone had written “fag” in poop, right on the back of the door. I was in awe for the entire duration of my sit, that someone would reach into their own Playdoh Fun Factory and then have the perplexing gall to mock the sexuality of whoever else was going to have a sit down for the next week or so until it got cleaned off.

4 – Vast Spaces

No Ghetto Mall is really fully complete unless it’s incomplete. The worst ones will actually have long, desolate hallways of closed storefronts and depressing silence that resemble a backwoods road straight to a hillbilly commune full of inbred cannibals having a hoedown.

Good malls can pack all those empty spaces to the gills with shit like shoe stores and Claire’s and Taco Del Mar. Your ghetto mall will have a grocery store that uses mismatched carts stolen from better grocery stores, then 15 empty stores, then a 99 cent store that sells expired canned ham from Senegal.

5 – Unique Brand Names

Speaking of canned ham from Senegal, nothing at the Ghetto Mall was built, packaged, cured, rolled, produced, mashed, pickled, grown, distilled or deep basted in a country you or anyone you have ever loved has been to. In fact, if they did go there, you would stop loving them.

Ghetto Malls gave up on trying to offer you products you want and instead offer you products you can afford if your income is based on the sale of cans and other products gleaned from the sides of highways and the neighbors’ recycling. Do you want Old Navy? Ghetto Mall has Old Codger. Want Aeropostale? Ghetto Mall has Gunt Brand.

6 – That Restaurant

By and large a mall restaurant is a mistake at the best of times. Of course the food court is a safe bet for all your processed semi-nutritional needs, but an actual sit-down eatery complete with Flo the waitress and liver and onions on the menu, that’s a whole different ball game.

90% of the customer base at these restaurants will be elderly people who just want to eat fish and every waitress will be built like either Shrek or Skeletor. Logically there can be nothing wrong with eating here, beyond the odd sanitation issue, and yet glancing within will convince you that every bite is costing you a piece of your soul