Mall St.

For Robert Gibbs, the "Main Street" is something of an improvised mall, a place that should sell with all the potency of a mall, but still containing the originality and randomness that comes with independent retailers. The result of this is that Gibbs views main street in much the same way that he views the average mall, ideas like average foot-candle lighting, and price-aperture ratio, ideas that although seemingly rigid, make a tremendous amount of logical sense. Gibbs evaluates main street with the eyes, ears, and senses of a consumer, but with the mind of Paco Underhill, and the language of the average shop owner or city planner; in other words, a consumer sees the mall, the shops, the sidewalk, and experiences the street as a whole, whereas Gibbs notices the intracies of the experience, and can properly separate them out in such a way that he can reformulate them for an end result that distills what the shopper actually wants.

Value judgments would seem to be outside the breadth of this course, but the modern consumer would seem to be developing a distaste for being sold to. This means that the mall with it's genericised clothing and foods, holds a draw for the shopper only utilitarianlly, and not as a place that one actively seeks out. While the mall may teach some lessons in how to make customers purchase on the spot, it also reveals lessons in making shopping a chore actively avoided. The death sentence for any downtown or main street should be the inclusion of a Foot Locker, or similarly corporatized shop, for the real value of downtown is that it has something, either in character or content that simply cannot be gotten at the mall.

I think the single biggest contributing factor to making main street a desirable place to be, is having reasons to be there. As above, it is all about creating something that creates a magnet in a non abstract way, and something not provided by the mall.