My Summer In The Mall

“The Mall”. They seem to mostly be dead, dying or on life support now, but I was around in a time when “The Mall” was an institution in every decent-sized community. And in those days, those words (“The Mall”) could evoke feelings of either joy or dread, depending on whether the hearer loved shopping or barely tolerated it. I was always in the second category. But somehow, there was one summer where I found myself working at “The Mall”.

Is the summer job still a thing? In my youth, there were lots of jobs open for students who were out of school for the summer and who 1) wanted to earn money for what teens consider essential or 2) whose parents didn’t want them goofing off with all that extra free time. I fit both categories in those days, and spent every summer working for a paycheck from the time I was 16 years old. Often, those summer jobs tended to continue as part-time gigs after school and on weekends after school went back into session.

The summer after I graduated college was different. For one thing, it was 1982. Not only was it a long time ago, but it was also in the middle of the worst recession since I had started working. 1974-75 had been pretty bad, but I had just turned 16 in the summer of 1975. That was, as it turned out, my last lazy summer of staying up late at night and sleeping until nearly noon, so the state of the economy did not really affect my world.

In 1982, I should have been starting the kind of career suitable for a college grad. Any other time, my double major of Economics and Finance should have set me up for lots of fields in business. But not 1982, because the economy absolutely sucked. A guy I graduated with was happy to find a retail job selling shoes in the mall that year. I had always mulled law school and had taken the LSAT that spring. So, with an acceptance letter from what was then called Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, I was content to continue with the same kinds of summer jobs I had previously held.

I still got a few hours working evenings for the funeral home (though I was no longer on their regular schedule), and also had a 7 a.m.-to-noon gig working for an industrial warehouse. It was a call from my barber that filled out my summer schedule. Any phone calls between me and my barber (Gene) had normally involved me calling him for a haircut appointment. But this time, Gene was calling me.

Gene’s wife managed a small card and gift shop in the mall. They were planning an extended vacation during the summer and she needed to find someone to kind-of-manage the place for the 6 weeks they planned to be gone. Gene knew I was looking for a job and figured that I would have what it took to close the place up at 9 p.m., count the money and make a bank deposit. He turned out to be right.

First off, this was absolutely not the kind of store I would ever have gone into on my own. There was the cutesy name – The Apple Crate. It was not named for a well-known Schwinn bicycle (which spelled Krate with a K), but because of its location in a little alcove that the mall called “The Apple Orchard”. The lede photo is of a promotional postcard of the time, one that featured the statute of Johnny Appleseed. Who was (and is still) buried in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, thankyouverymuch. Anyhow, the Apple Crate was a rustic little store that sold greeting cards. Lots and lots of greeting cards – a merchandise category that I never enjoyed. The rest of the stuff there? Pfaltzgraf stoneware, decorative candles and home decor trinkets were just not my thing. But it was apparently heaven for middle-aged ladies who drifted in and out of the store constantly.

I came in at 5 pm and parked in the section of the parking lot shown in another period postcard. And I wore a necktie. Because shouldn’t anyone who is supposed to be a manager of anything required to wear a tie? There would be two of us working each evening, with a couple of young women alternating on that shift. “Can I help you find anything” was for when someone looked confused. Otherwise, it was “Will that be all?” as they put three cards and a candle or two on the counter and fished through a purse for a billfold. There was not a lot of variety to the customer interaction.

When things were slow, we were to dust shelves or straighten up the greeting card display. You would not believe how sloppy people can be when they are looking at greeting cards, putting the rejects back into any old slot in the rack. It reminded me of the way people seem incapable of re-shelving a library book in the place from which they removed it. Fortunately, someone from American Greetings came in about once a week and freshened up the selections (while making it all neat again).

Learning the back-office things was interesting. Like how to use a cash register and one of those old credit card devices that required you to put the card and a carbon form into the right places, then pull the handle across the device to get the card number to imprint onto the slip. And Like how long something would be allowed to sit on a shelf until it was marked down. And how it would be moved to a “last chance” discounted display to get rid of it. And like the mall’s system for spreading word of shoplifters or other problems. We had the telephone numbers of three other stores we were to call to put them on the lookout of a problem. I got to put it into practice on the night we had a shoplifting incident.

One of the items taking up shelf space had been a set of barware housed in some generic 1920’s classic car. The car was maybe 18 inches long and the accessories were placed around it. I remember it because 1) it was a royal pain to dust and 2) every time I dusted it I felt sorry for the poor schmuck whose wife would eventually bring it home and deface a perfectly nice family room. One night, about an hour after I had dusted it (of course), it was no longer there. We made our three calls and another to mall security. My co-worker remembered a lady who had been looking at it earlier (a memorable event because nobody ever looked at it) and gave the description to the mall cops. They found the lady, but no car-bar. The woman (much rougher than our typical customers) loudly berated us for identifying her. But nobody could prove anything and that was that. All I remember thinking was “of all the stuff in this store, you had to steal THAT?”

I learned about the off-limits parts of the mall – the maze of large, concrete hallways that led to loading docks and contained stockrooms for the many stores. I made many treks to our own stockroom to replenish shelves of candles, stoneware and other flotsam to keep the economy from grinding to a complete halt. And I got to spend another hour or so each night in the tiny cave of an office in the back of the store to count the cash against the register receipts and prepare a bank deposit.

Life in a mall had its own weird (at least to me) rhythms. The food court was a bustling place to grab some dinner before my shift, but would be a dead zone later in the evening. There was never any natural light, and the elevator music in our climate-controlled universe never stopped until closing time. Then, after we closed off our mall-facing doors there was an eerie silence. The walk to the bank in the dimly-lit after-hours mall was spooky, and I imagined how it could be a great setting for a horror movie scene. I was there, so how hard could it have been for some random homicidal maniac or a werewolf zombie to be there too? Harder than I apparently imagined, because I never saw one.

Soon enough, the manager came back from her vacation and I became unnecessary – though she, being a kind and lovely person, kept me on for a few additional weeks until the start of school loomed. By then, I was ready to move on.

So, did I learn anything? I learned that American Greetings (our cards) and Hallmark (the other guys) were two competing sellers of greeting cards. And that I had even less interest in greeting cards after having to deal with them for the summer. I learned to not be surprised by the goofy stuff that is for sale everywhere you go, and by the way people will buy almost anything once it has been marked down once or twice. I also learned that I had no desire to work retail ever again.

45 thoughts on “My Summer In The Mall”

  1. I can relate to how it is, but… Worked at Lazarus during college and loved it… There was a card shop/camera store (Howards in Ft. Wayne I think) in the Lima Mall (Ohio) that was a favorite hangout… And in my retirement loved working at the chain drug store until the whole drug store chain sold most of their Ohio and Michigan stores to Walgreens.

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    • I salute people who enjoy retail, but I found out that I wasn’t one of them- at least when there were no product lines that interested me. I remember Howard’s – at leasttheyhad cameras. If I had worked in a store that sold cameras I would probably have tried to learn about them.

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  2. You may think this odd, but your job sounds a bit more desirable than my experience working at The Mall. It was one of the last Burger Chef’s in the nation (remember those?) and standing over a sauna of hot grease from cheap beef just doesn’t possess any sort of desirability for me. That said, it was quite lively at times – never any shoplifters (I suppose from controlling access to product) but lots of other colorful people. So maybe my real world schooling in psychology was the upshot.

    To be fair, the store a few doors down had a store similar to where you worked. A girl from high school worked there and I’d sometimes drop in to say hi. That store did seem to possess an ability to make an hour seem like the better part of a day.

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    • Oh yes, my first job was in a Burger King – for 3 weeks. I kind of miss Burger Chef, but as a consumer of hamburgers and not as an employee!

      I think you’ve hit on my biggest problem with the mall job – minutes drug along like hours.

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  3. I have many fond memories of Glenbrook. Spent tons of time there as a kid and, later, as a college student.

    I remember eating on the patio at Hall’s in the Apple Orchard once when I was in kindergarten and seeing my teacher’s aide from distant Yorktown there. It blew my mind that people from my town I knew actually came to Fort Wayne too!

    It’s been a while, but last I knew, the creepy Appleseed statue was inside H&M.

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    • Your revelation was like my own when I discovered that teachers were actual humans with families of their own and real lives outside of my classroom!

      And yes, that statue is really creepy. If you asked a decent AI for the most 70s statue possible of Johnny Applseed, it might depict one much like this one.

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  4. Very interesting article. Believe it or not, I live about one mile from a mall. Stores keep coming and going within it. It rarely seems busy except on weekends. But it’s still there — it was built circa 1975 maybe. I like the mall. I’d hate to see it close.

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  5. Johnny Appleseed was born in Leominster, MA just a few towns over from where I live. Leominister has tried hard to capitalize on its Appleseed-related fame, but that’s been a bit of a challenge as for the most part Johnny walked west to Ohio and Indiana and never looked back. There is a small rest stop on Rt. 2, on the Leominster/Lancaster line that has a gigantic (like shed-sized) apple sculpture in the parking lot.

    The only time I’ve worked in a mall was one that had already become a dead mall (I maintained the computer network for a survey call center that operated out of a former department store)…but my first job out of college in 1983 was also selling greeting cards (and toys). Yeah, that was a brutal recession.

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    • Johnny Applebee’s is one place where a northeast Indiana boy does not need to take a back seat to New England! So HA, take THAT! 😛

      And yes, you had to be a person trying to get started in 1980-83 to understand what a nasty recession looks like, with only our Depression-era grandparents to tell us how much worse they had it.

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  6. I can relate to this story on two levels. The summer after I graduated from college, I worked in the men’s department of a department store that was also one of the anchor stores for the local mall. I worked there full-time, and it was quite interesting. I was amazed at the people who, during the summer months, chose to spend a sunny afternoon at the mall. Maybe it was because I was working there full-time, but that store was the last place I wanted to be during a summer afternoon. Fortunately, I was able to land a job in my chosen field that September. I did learn how to properly size men’s clothes during that job!

    During college, I worked at a small mom-and-pop stationery shop that sold greeting cards, as well as magazines, office supplies and tobacco products. The store was also the only approved retailer of Pennsylvania State Lottery tickets in our small town (this was 1982-84). I had to run the Lottery computer – which seemed very high-tech at the time. Just don’t accidentally knock out the computer’s plug to the electrical outlet – because it then took the computer 10 minutes to reboot!

    Everybody in our small town came to that store. What still amazes me is how many people regularly dropped $30-40 a week on the Lottery – and this was in the early 1980s. And these weren’t the richest people in our town. Most of them were working class. The rich people and professionals hardly ever played the Lottery. Which is one reason why I’m not big on gambling to this day.

    I had to watch for shoplifters, and make sure the young boys didn’t try to sneak a peak at Playboy. And, yes, I had to regularly straighten up the shelves for the greeting cards!

    I also remember that either the state or federal taxes on a pack of cigarettes was scheduled to increase on January 1, 1983. Which would take the price of a pack of cigarettes to a whopping $1. As a result, many townsfolk were stocking up on their favorite brand the prior December. I still am amazed at how many brands of cigarettes there were on the market at one time!

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    • I wonder how different my retail experience might have been if the lottery had been in Indiana at the time. Fortunately, it has paid for our roads since. Oh wait, my county just passed a wheel tax of $100 per vehicle per year (on top of state excise taxes), so never mind. 😡

      I think I would have preferred mens’ suits to the stuff in my store.

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  8. I didn’t mind working retail and it was better than some things. I can also see where it is tiresome, though. Malls were wonderful at the time but I think they did disrupt the old downtown Main streets. “Sears will never go out of business.” Now it’s Amazon and Walmart duking it out and small businesses are using those platforms to boost their sales. Everything old is new again.

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    • It is indeed a cycle. I guess another problem with retail is that I am wired to want to DO something. Standing around waiting to ring up someone’s greeting card purchase never felt like that to me.

      I hated malls, as a rule, but I wish they were still here – if that makes any sense.

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  9. Wow, we have an awful lot in common, I turned 16 in fall of ’75, graduated high school in 77, college in ’81 with a double major in Finance and Economics, and couldn’t get a job during that time if I had walked into an interview with a briefcase full of cash. After graduation worked days for our park department moving grass and evenings bartending in a college bar. Took until 83 before I was able to secure a semi professional job, although I would have been much better off financially to have stuck with the park job and/or gone into a trade.

    I too worked in a mall – at Sears in the years 77-79. Fortunately I was a stockboy, so I didn’t have to deal with the public very often, and I worked in the hardware dept, which enabled me to spend most of my income compiling an impressive set of tools. As you’ve stated, there is a lot going on in a mall which the public is not privy too. Some good, some bad, some just interesting.

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    • Oooh, if I had gotten an employee discount on Sears Craftsman tools, I would never have made a dime from working!!

      I have often wondered what my work life would have looked like if I had graduated high school 4 years earlier or later than I did.

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      • And that was back when Craftsman was The Good Stuff! If you’d worked there and overspent on tools I don’t think anyone with a Y chromosome would’ve blamed you.

        I graduated college 3 years after you. The economy had rebounded somewhat by then and I was able to find a job without too much trouble, so I suspect the same would’ve held true for you. Then again, I was a studly Computer Science grad while you were an Econ nerd, so maybe not. ;^)

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  10. The Apple Crate thrived with its greeting cards clientele despite all the Hallmark stores that seemed to be everywhere back then and up until about the last ten years. We had three Hallmark stores just in our five-mile-square city at one time. The small Hallmark store my mom/I patronized for years went from selling only cards to moving to a larger store and then selling everything you could imagine, including clothes, stuffed animals and kitchen items. Now you can get greeting cards at the grocery store, so no need to make a special trip to the card store. Well, that’s too bad you were soured on the retail experience JP. I never did that job, only waitressing during college, so I can’t commiserate with you, but a friend of mine used to work at Highland Appliance during her college years. She was knowledgeable about every appliance this popular Michigan appliance store carried. She would gripe to us girls about how men would not give her the sale, waiting for the next male salesman, even if the man’s wife was standing there and would likely be the person most likely to use the appliance … like you, she said “I’ll never work in retail again!”

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    • I guess I never knew that The Apple Crate was a chain, but now that you mention it, it makes perfect sense!

      I can imagine that it was incredibly frustrating for your friend. I remember buying a lawnmower from an equipment business and being pleasantly surprised that the lady who worked there was the one all the guys came to with questions.

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      • No, The Apple Crate wasn’t a chain store … I just Googled that to verify. I should have written my comment more clearly … what I meant was that The Apple Crate was a small independent store, which was able to hold its own and compete with a big chain store like Hallmark, which had multiple stores in every city and was more well known. Support small stores always!

        Yes, my friend underwent many hours of training before they would put her out on the sales floor at Highland Appliance (later called Highland Superstores). She was miffed when this happened. I have a similar experience as you with my HVAC tech who is a woman, a grandmother, in the business for 30+ years and often brings male trainees with her.

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  11. I can remember that time period, 82, as I was working, and had been for a few years, (I graduated at 22 into a well paying full time job and there was always a shortage in my career), but many of my friends could not find any job at all. When I switched from hospital to retail in 2003 that was interesting as I had not touched a cash register since I was 18, (and seldom then, as I was the typist when I was a student pre-computers). If I was on an evening shift, and my only tech had gone on break I would sometimes have to ring someone through, which basically just involved scanning a bar code on the Rx bag and letting them use their debit card….but occasionally something unusual would come up with the cash like a seniors discount or a tax free status card or someone using points – and it was nice just to page the cash manager and they would take over and solve the problem, and even if they did get annoyed with me I did not care as that was not part of my job – my job was to check and counsel and give advice. The cash maangers did all the end of day cash stuff too, so you had to try and get all the customers out by 9pm, or head office would complain about the overtime – not easy to do, because sometimes the ER dept would sent people over last minute – I remember once having 6 people come in and if they got in the door it meant you had to fill their Rx because it was usually an emergency. I always drove the one cash manager home, as she did not have a car and she had the store keys, and it made me nervous if someone was watching her routine, walking across parking lot and the few blocks to her house. It was not a good set-up, even if it was a small town. To this day, I will not volunteer for anything that involves taking in money. I’ve been retired ten years now, and my work colleagues tell me people have gotten a lot ruder than they used to be, and very demanding and impatient. But a lot of stores have cut support staff as a cost-saving as profit is king now. Our half-dead mall still has a Hallmark store, and honestly I don’t know how it survives, although I did buy some light-up Christmas candles there last year (sorry!)

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    • PS. Oh and we would have regular shoplifters who seemed to frequent the high end cosmetic aisles, they would often target the perfume. One of the cosmeticians told me recently she is now wearing a body camera there is so much theft, and some of the larger stores have a storewalker.

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      • It’s not just theft of perfumes and cosmetics….for awhile it was narcotics breakins. But that has settled down now, as the stores now have to have a time delayed narcotic safe, and a notice is posted on the front door to that effect. I know an independent pharmacist who owned his own store who had a break-in during the day while they were open. Two guys with a gun, (and we are not used to guns here) and the staff were made to lie down on the floor while they grabbed the narcotics. The cops caught them and they were given 8 years in jail. But generally I worked in a safe area, and never had any bad situations, although we would sometimes deal with sketchy characters, and a few forgeries, and once a psych patient who threatened to blow up the store. Interesting times looking back….

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    • I knew you were in pharmacy, but did not realize you had been on the retail end. Good for you for pushing the transactional stuff onto someone who was there for that. I always feel sorry for the retail pharmacists in my life, they look so frazzled.

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      • I worked the first 3 decades in hospital, but when the hospitals in my area amalgamated and my small rural hospital lost all it’s beds, I no longer wanted to work for the new hosptial organization so I switched to retail in the same small town, and the money was better in retail (but no pension) and things were good for the first five years, but then the pharmacy chain I worked for got bought out by a big grocery store corporation and the first thing they did was cut the support (tech) staff and the pharmacist overlap 9-5 and 1-9, so after that I never got a meal break and it was impossible to get everything done with less staff, as the margin for error in pharmacy is zero, so you can’t really speed up or cut corners on your therapeutic checks. As I mostly worked the evening shift and we were one block from ER (basically the only thing left of the rural hospital other than a few chronic care beds) it would be quite busy. We routinely left 50 Rx’s undone every night because we would be dealing with ER Rx’s and then the other people who had given us 24hrs notice, would be in the next day complaining (and justifiably so) about things not being ready and it just got to be way too stressful. After I quit that corporate store got sold to an independent and now when I go in there there are 6 pharmacy techs back there, and I never worked with more than 3, and only 1 after 5pm. I went part time at another store for a year, and then retired early to look after my mother, which I was able to do as I had my hospital pension at 60. I’ve been retired ten years now and don’t miss it at all, as now the pharmacists here can do minor ailment prescribing, (for things like bladder infections and shingles and soon to be strep throat and Viagra and 29 other minor conditions) and along with corporate quotas for vaccines and med reviews, and oh yea that regular job of checking 200 plus Rx’s every day, so it’s even worse and that’s why they all look frazzled. In the US I hear major complaints about the working conditions at CVS and Walmart, good salaries but the same stuff, not enough staff and no meal breaks and quotas. At the end, when I got hassled for not meeting my flu shot quota (I was working only the Friday 3-9pm shift and who comes in on a Friday night for a flu shot?) I quit. I enjoyed the people aspect of retail, helping people one on one as it was a small town and you got to know everyone over ten years, but the rest of it forget it. Hospital was more clinical, and lots of variety, but also more removed from the patient except for palliative care which I did a lot of in my early days with pain pumps etc but it has it’s own burnout rate. Overall I had a good career for 35 years, a not so good one for 5 years, but today – I’m not sure I would chose pharmacy again. With the minor ailment prescribing, they should be giving us a billing number and then you could set up your own practice like the nurse practioners do and forget the dispensing part. It may go the way of AI eventually anyway….although you can’t make an AI program think like a human, as we know from WordPress! You can see where the doctors are upset as it’s turf war protection, as the government is looking for ways to save money and pharmacists are cheaper than a patient going to ER. This is more info than you might need, but pharmacy is a funny job to try and explain, as the tv interviews only ever show the counting trays!

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      • Yeah, that seems to be the way most careers have gone – constantly working more and more with less support and stingy increases in pay and benefits that don’t keep up. Every time I have a challenging day driving a truck, I think back on the last frustrating years of lawyering, and I start smiling again.

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    • Joni, not to mention, I stopped buy Hallmark, or any other brand cards, at retailers when my local Dollar Tree put in a couple of aisles of cards, two for a dollar, and and actual Hallmark cards aisle, a dollar-twenty-five for one! Who cares if they’re “last years” cards? When that happened, was the last time I spent $5.75 for a single card at Target! Not to mention, as a guy that sends Thank-You cards, the Dollar Tree has 10 Thank You card plus envelop packs for $1.50!

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      • I’m impressed you still send cards Andy! On the rare occasion I need a card, usually a birthday card, I buy it at Dollarama too. That’s why I can’t figure out how the Hallmark store stays in business, especially as the rents in the mall are reputed to be high? Maybe it’s a front for some other (shady?) business!? I only go in the Hallmark store in the fall to get a FREE purse-size Hallmark calendar, but every year I expect it will be the last as so many people track their appointments on their cell phones now.

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  12. First, people were concerned that stores were leaving the old cities like Newark, NJ. Then the suburban downtown areas were threatened by the new shopping malls. The malls became “shoppers’ paradises”–big department stores and smaller shops. Jam-packed on the weekends, and especially around Christmas.

    Our local mall, the Livingston Mall, was an amazing place with fountains, grand staircases, dramatic modern sculptures. Santa and Christmas villages during the holiday season. At that time, if you told me that this modern wonder would slowly die, become vacated, and face demolition, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that is the reality today.

    I suspect that people thought of you as a conscientious, honest, and reliable person (like me 🤣) which is why the card store owners picked you out to run their store while they were away. And you apparently did the job well, which is something to be proud of. As anyone who has to hire someone to do something will tell you, “It’s so hard to find good help these days!”

    It kind of amazes me that the world keeps on running, day after day. The fact that employers can consistently compel individuals to come in on time in the morning, do repetitive boring tasks that they often have no personal interest in, and then do the same thing all over again the next day–that’s no small feat. But I guess people are desperate for money, even in small amounts, and will do what they can to get it.

    Below: The Livingston Mall in its heyday.

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    • I have been amazed at the continuous high turnover in property. Stuff from the 1890s was outmoded by the 1920s. Stuff from the 20s was old hat by the 50s. 50s properties were functionally obsolete by the 80s, and now buildings from the 80s are going to ruin because they are not worth fixing up.

      I am amazed at the number of people rendered unfit to work because of substance abuse, mental disorders or alternative lifestyles that don’t seem to coexist with a regular job. When you think of the number of people on SSI/SSD and are thus not working, it’s amazing how the rest of us keep the lights on.

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  13. If stuck in a mall, waiting for a family member to finish shopping, my husband will always head to the Greeting Card Shop. He likes to read all the funny cards – one of which he will buy for my next birthday.

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  14. I’m always amazed at how the “mall system” grew, and then died, all in my lifetime. The city I live in now, had some early outdoor malls that had been planned to be put under roofs (some happened, some did not). Two of the last built were built in 1970 and 1972, called Northridge and Southridge. Southridge still exists, but sort of with small junk type retailers in it, altho it IS in a premium neighborhood.

    Northridge was open for 30 years, then died, then stayed empty for almost 25 years while the city fought the Chinese company that had bought the property and didn’t do anything with it. An inspector died while investigating an electrical box, and multiple arson fires broke out, and the city finally had enough information to seize it and tear it to the ground. Both my older sister and my younger brother worked there in the 70’s, while in college, and had fond memories of it, when it was sort of a retail destination. What killed this mall, and the far northwestern neighborhood, was the city started building welfare housing that far out of town, which transferred crime into the area. Normal middle-class home-owners that had bought in expecting a middle class neighborhood with retail efficiencies, immediately lost 30% of their property value, and no one would touch a house there from then on. There was a plan to build luxury apartments adjacent to the retail property, and the crime killed it all!

    One of the older malls that had been adjacent to a wealthy neighborhood near the lake, and had been an open air mall, was built in 1954, and enclosed in 1974. Then in 2006, it started to build on to the mall in the new “city street” methodology: where the stores just looked like a regular city with stand alone stores. and had drivable streets (only the design was like Disneyland!) This is a big thing when I lived on the east coast! Unlike the malls in the western suburbs that were still struggling to hold on, this mall attracted upscale stores and had premium apartments built above the new stores! (I’m not sure I’d pay $2500. a month to live in a mall).

    I can’t even imagine shopping in a mall anymore. Amazon and Walmart killed it, and on a busy day, who wants to park blocks away from the entrance? I remember in the freezing Wisconsin winter, going to the movie theater at Northridge, and getting out at 10pm, and having to walk blocks into the parking lot to find my frozen car, and then sit in the cold car while it was warming up and able to drive! Sheesh…

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    • The first mall I experienced was an early one – Glenbrook in Fort Wayne, which opened in 1966. It must have been a fortuitous location because it is still doing OK. Southtown Mall opened later (early 70s?) and was less successful. I think it closed 15 years ago or more, mainly because of its deteriorating area.

      A center (Glendale) near my current neighborhood opened in 1959, was enclosed as a mall in the early 70s, then died and was redeveloped back into an open-air shopping center maybe 15 years ago, and seems to be doing fine.

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  17. It’s a good question about summer jobs. I wonder if they’re still available (or at least as plentiful) in fast food. I worked at McDonald’s for a couple of summers and it never occurred to me they’d have to adjust their staffing (a little) less than three months after they hired me because I’d be gone again. Apparently that wasn’t a problem, or they needed extra help over the summer. The things we take for granted…

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    • My own kids all worked at a nearby country club (boys on the golf course and daughter in the restaurant/clubhouse/pool). They got full time hours in summer and reduced hours that let them keep working through at least part of the school year.

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      • I worked as a beach boy at a hotel near our house for several summers, getting paid minimum wage and tips to rake seaweed from the beach, put up umbrellas, and keep the foot wash clean for guests. There wasn’t much to it; a lot of sitting around similar to your retail experience. I often wonder if I could’ve parlayed that entry-level job into a full career in the hospitality industry.

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