Cellular Dissonance

I had a scare this weekend. Nothing along the lines of a full-scale panic attack, mind you, and years ago I'd never think I would succumb to this. But as we were playing pool Saturday evening, between attempts at shots and lucky breaks, I'd peek at the screen of my cell phone, hoping it would offer up something more than illuminated white pixels.

Nope. Just more white, mocking me. Good luck reading those text messages, sucker! I mean, it was Saturday night, so it's not like I was in high demand by any stretch, but there's a disturbing feeling about being off the grid. Much as white people need to be prepared by wearing their performance outerwear, you never know when someone's going to try and get ahold of you to tell you something totally awesome is happening, worth dropping whatever you're doing at the moment.

It's funny enough I'd be so concerned over a phone, anyway. The only reason I got a cell phone in the first place was because my parents wanted me to have that safety net once I had a car. I'd told myself I wasn't important enough that I really needed to be accessible by phone all the time. I had a dorm phone, I had my parents' phone, and if I wasn't near one of those and wasn't online somehow, then anyone who would call me was probably already with me. Eventually, I started talking with a girl or two who had an affinity for the phone over online communiqués, and so I realized that, being one who likes to talk in real life, I didn't mind talking on the phone, either. I still didn't need text-messaging, until I got involved on the McCain campaign and everyone was just texting in lieu of making phone calls. After racking up $50 or $60 in pay-by-the-text messages in a month, I added texting to my phone.

And so, here I was, balancing a pool cue in one hand, flipping my ailing LG VX5400 open and shut, hoping for a different answer each time. Actually, as timing goes, Saturday night isn't really a bad night for a phone to die. What had my mind racing was the question I've been trying not to answer for quite a few months.

Is it time for the smartphone yet?

I'm odd as far as nerds go. I have two computers in my room, a laptop in a case not too far away, and more computers in the garage than I've had girlfriends in my life. My license plate is a geek reference that's lost on everyone else. I speak in memes, I gawk at Apple notebooks in libraries and coffee shops. And yet, I can be a stubborn laggard when new tech-toys emerge. Part of it is thrift, and part of it is an inexplicable hipster-like tendency to not want to be the bandwagon-jumper. Maybe I don't want to be associated with failure, who knows?

And so the guy most people assume is a slave to his CrackBerry or iPhone is a nerd who sends and receives 800 texts a month off a phone with a numeric keypad, hammering the keys the prescribed number of times to get full sentences under that 160-character limit. With apologies to Chamillionaire, they see me textin', they hatin', T9-ing and trying to catch me writing QWERTY.

The last time I upgraded my phone through Verizon, it wasn't much of an upgrade. That was sort of by design. I can text plenty fast on a numeric keypad, so I don't need a phone with a keyboard. If I got a phone with a keyboard, I would have to get a BlackBerry or something requiring a data plan, something I didn't really think was worth the cost. And ever since I broke that first Palm IIIxe back in high school, I've been leery of trying to tote something with a good-sized screen in a pocket like that. My sister can stow her Voyager and my mom can stow her enV2 in their respective purses, but except in the J. Peterman catalog, purses just haven't caught on among men.

The other thing was, I keep feeling like I'm not important to need a BlackBerry. I've got this stigma about the things, that they're tools not for personal use, but for the businessperson who can't or doesn't want to break away from work. If I got one, I know I'd tie it to my work e-mail account. I'm always thinking about work already; I don't need to make it any easier. And yet, that's exactly what I'd do. I'm already doing it in other ways. Part of me feels it's expected, not by my company, but by the customers. It's the one e-mail that comes in after you've left the office for the weekend that makes you feel like you should have been checking e-mails all the while. I don't want a smartphone to turn me into one of those work zombies who never unplugs, but then, the device doesn't turn you, you turn yourself.

And so I can't help but think that my next phone has to be a smartphone. From a work standpoint, I could tether my e-mail to my smartphone, I could check drivers through Field Force Manager's Web portal, I could install Skype Mobile to keep in touch. From a personal standpoint, hell, it'd be cool to be permanently wired. Gmail and Wikipedia access at a moment's notice are worth a glance, for sure. I'd finally have an excuse to join Twitter, too, though that's hardly a motivating factor to buy a smartphone.

As it turned out, it was a non-question in the end. To my surprise, my phone was covered under warranty (I figured they sold insurance so they didn't have to provide warranty coverage), and so I walked out of the Verizon store with a new, identical phone sans the paint chip sustained when I dropped the phone on a stone walkway doing door-to-doors in Wolfeboro. (The bastards gave me back my old, worn battery cover, though.) I kept my contacts, not that I couldn't have recreated them, and I walked out without spending an extra dime.

And yet, as I sat in the car, I felt a little bummed out, because in a moment of weakness, I was warming to the smartphone. Not to the slave-to-work element of it, but just the coolness factor of having the world at my fingertips, like just about everyone else, none of whom are concerned over how important they are and whether they actually warrant having a BlackBerry or not. I'm still a little lukewarm on the whole thing, like even though my new phone still works just wonderfully, I'd consider upgrading to a BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile phone tomorrow.

At least this week, I'm hanging onto this old-school phone. But I can't help but wonder when I'm finally going to decide this is one upgrade I can't keep avoiding.

School Daze

One of my friends just started her last semester of law school. She's hardly the only one; I've seen from plenty of Facebook status updates that people are going back to school, starting classes again, or teaching if they're in that line of work. At first, it seemed so early, but then, last Monday was August 24th, and now I'm staring September down the barrel already, wondering where the hell summer went so fast when it barely showed up a month ago.

But this isn't about fleeting time; that's for another day. Rather, it's about those people going back to school.

I'm not going back to school. I admit there's a certain attraction to being a career student, but I've already accumulated my fill of student loans, and I frankly have no idea what I'd do if I were to go to graduate school, other than to say "I'd go get my MBA" with the same awareness I had when I asserted I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was six. I have a mailing from RPI that reminds me when Homecoming Week is (October) and subtly hints at this fall being our five-year college reunion, which also means I'm only halfway to that ten-year benchmark most of our professors discussed when pointing out how many high-tech entrepreneurs had taken ten years between achieving their undergrad and graduate degrees.

And yet, something makes me wish I could go back to college. Not with the pressure of taking classes, of course. I'm just talking about loading my life into the back of my dad's blue Dodge pickup, driving three hours west on winding mountain highways, and pulling into the crowded fire lane behind the Quadrangle to unload boxes into a vacant dorm room. I'm talking about getting everything unpacked, and taking in the calm before the storm, where everyone settles back into a life they put on the shelf for a few months, acclimating to the campus network and off-campus weekend dinners and apartment living without doors and with friendly neighbors. I already had a dream this summer where I moved back into college only to discover I'd somehow been entirely unprepared for any of the classes I somehow hadn't registered for. I think "nightmare" would be a better term if I hadn't woken realizing college was way past tense by now.

I still remember that first weekend, maybe not as vividly as I wish I could, but there are the details that stand out more than others. I remember one spot in the triple already being occupied when I got there, as Liam had been on campus for Air Force ROTC orientation. Greg had gotten there just as I did, and we'd all accepted the furniture layout of the room as it was, because with the space we had in our forced triple, there weren't any other alternatives. I was the only one who'd brought a computer along, as I had my old Power Mac G3 when we would all be receiving our laptops before long. Part of the day was spent doing orientation activities, much as we'd done when we visited the campus for freshman orientation in mid-summer. When I was able to get online, I immediately logged into Napster and downloaded Nina Gordon's "Tonight And The Rest Of My Life," because I'd heard the song on the radio a couple times during the drive over. I'd been hopeful to catch the Bristol NASCAR race that evening, but we were committed to a so-called "Communiversity" event in scenic downtown Troy, somewhere along the Hudson that I can't even recall exactly where something quite so picturesque would be, though Google Maps would probably help. I don't recall how I got back, either, because I doubt I stayed for the whole thing, and I know Liam and Greg didn't, because they'd brought Rollerblades to expedite their escape. We got our new laptops sometime Sunday morning, but in between there, I'd allowed a few people to check their e-mail on my Mac.

What was my first class of the week? I'm sure I have a schedule sitting somewhere, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter what it was. There were greater things happening, greater things to be remembered, than class.

It's hard to accept that was nine years ago. It dawned on me last spring, though. In a way, we had our reunion, sort of coming full-circle. Carmine's brother Chris and Joe's brother Jason were graduating, so Carmine asked if I'd want to come out for the festivities. We left after work on Friday, meeting the Sarnos in Troy. After dinner, we ventured to Hattie's for mojitos, wandering the Saratoga streets like the Broken Lizard actors in "Beerfest," finding a bar I couldn't take you to without walking the steps myself. The next afternoon, as we broke down the dorm room Chris and Jason shared that Carmine, Joe and I had shared in 2001 and 2002, we admitted that while we'd graduated four years before, we'd actually moved to campus eight years prior. Eight is a pretty small number, but when you're twenty-six, eight years seems like an awfully long time. The world was a pretty different place then.

And we were pretty different people then, too.

I mean, it's romantic to suggest how great it would be to go back to school again. Not as a twenty-eight-year-old with something resembling perspective and life experience, but as a largely-naïve twenty-year-old whose biggest taste of freedom was the lofted bed in Hunt III 1004, the option of choosing whether to go to Sage for dinner or venture to the Union for a grilled chicken-and-cheese sub or just call Hao Wei for takeout. I guess lots of things in life are like that; I started writing a book about the great experiences of my high-school career, but some of the luster wore thin when I realized how much more amazing college was. I'd venture to say my adult-life experiences have been richer and deeper still, but partially because in college, I was still measuring myself against others' expectations instead of living for myself. Those who know me know my fascination with "The Butterfly Effect" and the notion of how one change in the timeline can change everything down the timeline. And so if I sent myself back to college, I'd go as that twenty-year-old armed with just enough advance knowledge to make decisions a little differently. Part of me wants to relive all the good times, just to reinforce the details. Part of me wants to go back and make a few changes, maybe out of greed, because I'd love to have seen how both sides played out.

It'd be nice to go back, but somehow, the prospect of work tomorrow isn't quite as daunting as the prospect of class.

The Price Of Entertainment (Or, Keeping Butts Out Of The Stands)

Last night, I spent a couple hours at Starbucks. Remember that episode of "Family Guy" where they make fun of those people who go to Starbucks with a laptop to be noticed as writers? Yeah, I was one of those. Nothing says wannabe writer like a person at a table for two with an Apple laptop and an overpriced coffee beverage...except maybe being a barista at said overpriced coffee chain.

Originally, I'd been flirting with something I haven't done in several years; a trip to one of the local race tracks. Those who don't follow auto racing (stock car racing, particularly) often don't realize that the big NASCAR shows aren't the be-all and end-all of stock car racing. (More accurately, they aren't aware of it, much as someone indifferent to baseball might not be aware that there's a middle ground between Little League and the major leagues.) Thanks to NASCAR's marketing approach, I'm not so sure a lot of casual new-age viewers realize there's a world of racing in their backyard. But it's there. On Friday and Saturday nights (and Sunday afternoons when the weather gets too cold...in October), or Thursdays if you live in northern Vermont, little quarter- and third-mile oval tracks put on their own racing shows. My grandfather used to pooh-pooh the short-track atmosphere as "where they race the jalopies," and while there are still entry-level classes with first-time racers running resurrected junkyard beaters, there are also prepared divisions shaking the grandstands every week.

In my neighborhood, there are a few options. Closer to the seacoast, there's Lee USA Speedway on Route 125, a third-mile oval. A little closer to Route 101 in Epping, there's a quarter-mile oval called All-Star Speedway. When my dad and I went, it was called Star Speedway, but the ownership of the track changed hands a few years back, in the midst of a track closing due to, shall we say, poor grounds conditions. We always considered ourselves fortunate that we didn't fall through the grandstands at least once. We were never weekly regulars, but we'd catch the special shows, when the regular weekly divisions were joined by the Busch North or the Featherlite Modified touring series. There are those who go weekly; they're mostly the diehards, rooting for someone they know or someone they've followed forever.

I can't be sure, but the last time I went to Lee might have been the Busch North opener in 2000. The series (and track) opener were held on a chilly Sunday in April, so after 2000, I couldn't be home for the opening race. Not long after that, my dad fell ill, and he can't negotiate those old-style wooden bleachers anymore. It's been a while. But I've wanted to get back to the track, maybe with someone who would enjoy it. I know drivers have come and gone, but it doesn't matter who's driving if the racing is good, right?

Last night was a special race at Lee, featuring the International SuperModified Association. The SuperModifieds are open-wheel cars, loud and light alcohol-burners with wings that zip around the track faster than a heavy stock car could dream of. The local tracks run so-called "small-block" SuperModifieds as a weekly division, but the touring ISMA cars are a bigger deal. I figured it would be a fun way to blow a Friday night.

Then I saw the ticket prices. $30 for an adult admission ticket. I'm no stranger to that; we used to pay $25-30 to go see the Busch North cars at Lee or Star. But that was a major NASCAR touring division, a 150-lap feature race plus all the local divisions. This was for a race half that length, plus the weekly stuff. If a ticket was closer to $20, I could have rationalized it; I think weekly admission is around $10 or $12. But $30 for an ISMA show seemed a bit steep. I talked to two of my co-workers Friday; both had considered going to Lee themselves, but the ticket prices were a turnoff for a short race.

The reasons for high ticket prices are many, and I could burn another blog post that'd be interesting to about three people considering the high price of motorsports, making up for lagging attendance and not being able to gouge the teams to pay their own purse, and so on. But especially in this economy, it seems like it would be better to charge a little less, and maybe entice more people to show up, than to turn people away. Friday-night racing isn't the only option out there. You can pick up good seats at a Fisher Cats minor-league baseball game for $15. An evening showing of a movie at a good theater is $10, and if you're up for a second-run flick, the Hooksett theater has prices lower than that. If you have a good stereo system and a nice TV, Redbox rentals are a buck a night. Or, if you're a nerd, you can get a venti Mocha Frappuccino (with whipped cream) for $5, and sit in an air-conditioned Starbucks for a couple hours slaving over your PowerBook.

The annual promoters' workshops in Daytona used to say the same thing; that you're competing against a lot of different options for entertainment dollars. It's even more important now, when people have less money to spend. Thirty dollars wouldn't have set me back too badly, but if I'd wanted to invite Jess and Mark (if they were here), they'd have passed at that price. My roommate Adam probably would have. I can't blame them. Hey, last weekend, after shopping and dinner, we retired to my apartment for hours of playing Rock Band 2 and the Forza demo. If you leave dinner out, and ignore the video games Adam bought on impulse, we had a pretty cheap night and still had a great time.

The same thing crossed my mind earlier this year, when the staff at Yankee Stadium decided to keep ticket prices in a sort of prestige bracket even though they weren't selling out games. Yes, I understand it's the Yankees. But wouldn't it be better to cut prices a bit, if it meant bringing in a few more butts to sit in the seats? People don't go to games alone. They bring friends, family, kids, so right off the bat, if you're selling one ticket, you're probably selling two. When we went to Loudon as a family, that was four tickets at nearly $90 a piece. That's a $360 day in tickets alone, never mind the other expenses of entertainment. A family can't do that more than once or twice a year. My parents rarely went to professional hockey games for that reason. A pair of good Bruins tickets could cost maybe $200, I have no idea what they were running at face value when my parents used to go. But for the same $200, you can get five pairs of minor-league tickets to see the Manchester Monarchs. The name's not the same, but the entertainment value certainly is. For that matter, a family can afford four tickets to see the Monarchs. And they can probably afford four tickets a few times a year, versus one special event. My dad got to enjoy ten or so Monarchs games last year.

You could say the same for concert tickets. I skipped out on the Fleetwood Mac show this spring, partly because I had no one to join me, but partly because the prices for good seats were a bit steep. I'm sure Fleetwood Mac was good, but not $90-100 good. Sure, I could have grabbed cheap seats somewhere, but I'm a bit of a seat snob. I admit that I did pay $190 to see The Eagles last year. Steep, but it was worth every penny, and I don't recall seeing many empty seats. I guess the best price is whatever the market will bear, and there are always plenty of wealthy parents to bankroll their kids' attendance at *NSYNC or Backstreet Boys or (more recently) Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers concerts, but those are more the exception than the rule.

I guess someone has to have done the math, but from where I sit, without a sports-marketing background (but with two first-place trophies in some DECA roleplays on the subject!), it just seems like it'd be better to fill seats and earn on the volume than to gouge those who really, really, really want to go and leave those on the fence feeling like they're getting ripped off. Entertainment doesn't have to be a charity, but it doesn't have to be a luxury, either.

ISMA's supposed to be coming to All-Star Speedway in September. I wonder what ticket prices will be like for that show, though something tells me I'll be choosing Starbucks over All-Star.

Shop 'Til Your Packets Drop

This is starting to become a habit.

Just yesterday, I was musing on the questionable future of a particular retailer, and how they've somehow clung to life like a cockroach after World War III. I also hinted (yes, foreshadowing in a blog entry) that I'd touch on this on a macro scale. Well, here I am, following through on promises made.

The store I'd pointed out in particular was RadioShack, a chain in the midst of a new branding approach (according to Engadget, the chain seems poised for a branding shift to "The Shack"). Ironically, a few nights before this article appeared on Fark, my roommate Adam and I made the offhand remark, "[We] wonder how they're still around." I'm not old enough to appreciate everything RadioShack once was. But I do remember the days of store-branded Realistic stereo equipment and home electronics, of radio-control cars, bins of electronic components, musical instruments. There were days when one had a reason to go to RadioShack. (In those days, there was a space between the two words, before the InterCaps trend caught on with all things electronic.)

I've seen an evolution away from that, but then I walked into the store at the Mall of New Hampshire just yesterday. Compared to the RadioShack with a space, it's like a different store. I'm not even talking about the evolution of technologies themselves. The second-rate home-theater equipment was nowhere near the front of the store, but I could find all manner of cell phones and iPod accessories. It's a small-format store anyway, but this isn't your father's RadioShack, seriously.

Of course, I pondered that for the $3 and change I paid for my coax coupler, I could have found one on some Web site for a fraction of that (plus shipping and handling, of course). And that's what got me thinking that maybe I needed to put this to hypertext, because I've wondered it more than a few times.

Those who read Freakonomics will recall the chapter in which Levitt and Dubner discussed how the Internet affected the term life insurance market by making information (quotes) accessible, and making it harder for third-party insurance brokers to charge more than the price the market would bear. Surely, the Internet's affected all forms of commerce like that. I remember standing in Best Buy with Carmine and Adam, frustrated that we couldn't access Circuit City's Web site for a price check (and trying to find a Web-based VNC client so we could skirt the firewall). More than just disseminating information, though, the Web has driven a new model of purchasing and distribution. You can't think about that without wondering how much responsibility it held for the closing of electronics chains like Tweeter and Circuit City, among others in all segments of retail.

I admit, I'm old-fashioned and still driven by instant gratification. There's something to be said of the tactile nature of taking a package off the shelf and paying for it. It makes cognitive dissonance more tangible, at least! I still go to the bookstore to buy a book, but if they don't have it, I rarely get on Amazon to place an order when I get home. I buy my electronics in person so I can play with them right away. I buy clothes in person...well, that's obvious. Also, I don't like shipping things to the apartment, where I don't know if someone will help themselves to my parcels if I don't get right home after work.

But there's not that much, aside from maybe groceries, that I can't buy online. If I weren't so enthralled by the act of getting out and spending money in the real world, I'd easily never have to set foot in a mall again. I have plenty of friends who do all their shopping with their fingers and a credit-card number. Even my mother buys most of our gifts online, and she's mildly technophobic. My dad's new camera was ordered through some Amazon-affiliated retailer for about $75 less (shipped!) than the store price at Best Buy. Most of my computer parts have been ordered through NewEgg, whose prices are way more competitive than Best Buy (or formerly Circuit City) could dream of being.

But where would that leave retailers?

I guess part of growing up is all about paradigm shifts. Evolution is survival, and clinging to the past is the most direct route to failure. Look at the RIAA; when potential customers embraced file sharing as a way to obtain music, instead of finding a way to fulfill and profit on a new market demand, they clung tightly to the old way of doing business, and used litigation to discourage the new technology. It's certainly done no favors for goodwill toward the RIAA. The news media is in the same boat now; newspaper subscriptions are dwindling among a younger demographic, but people still demand news. Some media companies found ways to embrace the new technology; others simply cried that subscriptions were falling short, and eventually closed the doors. More will close with time.

Such is the problem with retail. Since college, if I've needed something for my computer and didn't need it immediately, I'd order it from NewEgg. Service was fast, and the shipped price was better than any brick-and-mortar store. Plus, NewEgg had plenty of things (OEM drives and processors, anyone?) that the physical stores simply don't stock. Physical space is limited at a store. A warehouse outside LA is a little more accommodating. NewEgg has facilities in New Jersey now, and who knows where else. But the upkeep on those, say, five or six warehouses is far less than the capital expense of every Best Buy store and distribution center, never mind the floor employees necessary for each store and the staff that operates their Web site. It's obvious that Best Buy is going to have a lot more expenses to move the same product.

That's fine if you can provide some kind of added value. Store retail has an obvious value; you can see and try the product before you buy. For some lines of merchandise, that's more important than others. If I'm buying clothes, I want to try things on, match colors, and feel fabric. You can't do that effectively through a catalog or through the Web. So fashion retail may never entirely die. Electronics, on the other hand...I find it beneficial to try out a camera or a laptop, but if I'm going to go home and order it online, I've just made Best Buy's showroom my bitch, for lack of a better term. Then there's book and music shopping. With music and movies, if you know what you're looking for, it's not as if you're passing up the chance to try before you buy if you order online. Same if I know I'm looking for Dennis Lehane's new book; I don't need to see it to know I want it. But if I've never heard of Dennis Lehane and I'm just browsing the Mystery section at Barnes & Noble, then I think having the book on a shelf would be appealing.

The question is what that added value is worth. In the case of RadioShack, the added value used to be knowledgeable staff. The Fark play on the store's motto was "You've got questions, we've got blank stares." Part of keeping costs down means hiring employees who work for less, and the knowledgeable people will avoid that retail hell, leaving "associate" jobs to kids who know nothing but how to parrot back "Do you need any batteries today?" Was it worth $75 more to my dad to be able to touch the camera in person? Not when he had the tools to order it another way cheaper. On the other hand, my friend Erin paid the premium but walked out of the store with the camera that afternoon. Sometimes, you need it now. Newbury Comics was one store that did have the advantage of knowledgeable staff, but when their CD prices soared to FYE-level, that's when I stopped going in. I love music, but knowledgeable staff and buying local isn't worth a $5 premium on a CD I can buy for $10 at Best Buy.

This is a rambling entry, I know, but I just often wonder at what point we'll outgrow the very notion of brick-and-mortar retail. I'd like to hope we never do. There are two things retail has going for it. One is the showroom aspect. The other is the shopping aspect. Shopping online has never felt as natural for me. I'll stare at Web sites for twenty hours of the day, but aimlessly browsing a store isn't done online, it's done walking through aisles and touching shelves and looking at packages. TigerDirect, another electronics e-tailer like NewEgg, acquired the CompUSA brand through their parent Systemax, and is retaining some of the physical CompUSA stores as a sort of test approach. Some products will never translate to the digital realm. Plenty will, though. And so I can't help but wonder if, at some point, it'll simply be too costly to operate those big-box stores when a company could transition from retailer to e-tailer.

There's another element to this, too. Maybe I'm just not the typical retail customer. Let's look at my recent purchase of my pocket camera. I made probably three visits to Best Buy to look at the camera I ended up buying. I wasn't going to save a ton of money over the Best Buy price buying it online, and I had a gift card to use up, so I bought the camera there. But then, I said no to the extended service plan they wanted me to buy. They say that restaurants break even on the food and make their money at the bar. I've heard similar said about retailers, that they make the money off the service contracts and extended warranties they sell. And Lord knows you can't buy anything more than a CD at Best Buy without being offered an extended warranty. Here's one from real life: after my mom ordered my dad's new camera from that Amazon affiliate, they called with a post-sale confirmation call to confirm the order. They also recommended the purchase of rechargeable batteries, as "Canon strongly recommends against using conventional AA batteries in their cameras." Seeing as the camera is designed to work with AA cells and even ships with conventional batteries, we laughed this one off. My dad's theory was they sold the camera at a loss, hoping to profit on the accessories.

What I'm getting at is that the saving grace of the retailer isn't the savvy shopper who does his or her homework, uses the store to test the product in person, then makes a calculated buy. The saving grace is the impulse buyer who has no idea what they're really shopping for, and can easily be steered one way or the other. Or they know what they want, but they need that service contract to avoid problems in the future. I'm actually guilty of this myself; when I went shopping with my friend for a laptop, I was all for her getting an extended contract on it. It's a laptop; things are bound to happen, and while it's no big concern for me to swap a laptop hard drive and reinstall Windows, we both know that's outside her scope of ability or interest, and she can't always count on me being within a few miles with time to bail her out. I'd rather she have that line of defense. When I get my new MacBook Pro this fall, I'd like to say I'll opt out of the AppleCare coverage. But I'll bet I get the laptop at the store so I can play with it in a half-hour instead of a few days.

And if the paradigm of retail does change as we know it, where does that leave our malls? Where will kids shop? Hell, where will they hang out? "Oh, let's go to the food court, then go shopping for clothes and looking at blank storefronts!" Part of the evolution of retail may have to be toward a service orientation. That's one thing I'd thought about in the conversations about the desolate Bedford Mall. The Bedford Mall, of course, has about 20 slots for retailers, and maybe six or seven occupied. The end unit where Alexander's (and later the Drug Emporium and MVP Sports) was has been vacant since MVP/Decathlon moved out, and the Chinese buffet is gone next to it. The movie theater is long gone. With the closing of Linens 'n' Things, that leaves Staples, Marshall's, Papa Gino's, Bob's Stores, a couple one-off merchants and Michael's School of Hair Design. What retailers are you going to invite? The obvious candidates would rather be at the more-accessible Mall of New Hampshire. The Gap left the Bedford Mall for greener pastures years before, and other stores followed. But what can't be replicated at the big mall are local service businesses. It makes little sense to have another Old Navy in the Bedford Mall, but an optician's office would be a good fit. Maybe that's the shift we'll see with retail in general. You can't shove services down a fiber-optic backbone, and convenience will win out if you can put them all in one place.

I can't imagine how hard it will be for retailers to make money the old way, but I can't imagine it dying out altogether, either. But hey, as long as I die before Starbucks becomes a brothel and coffee shop, I'll be okay.

Musings At The Mall

So today after work, I took a spin by the Mall of New Hampshire. I needed shampoo and a coax adapter, and so both of these could be had in one place. Two birds, one stone, right? Now, while I am a shopper, there are days where I'm in no great rush, and I'll let myself stroll around the mall, maybe make a lap, more to people-watch than anything. God knows I don't stop to windowlick or anything. I actually made a couple observations, and thought, wouldn't it be cool if there were a place I could share this?

Yeah, you did get back into this blogging thing for a reason, remember?

So anyway, here are the things that came to mind.

I really am not sure how RadioShack is still in business. Saturday night, at our rapidly-becoming-weekly Starbucks gathering, Adam and I questioned the existence of RadioShack. We acknowledged it as the place that's often the only place to go for some random electronic thing that you need now. Then, this morning I came across a Fark link to an article about the chain. Apparently, RadioShack is going to rebrand its stores as The Shack, and it also seems that the stores will increase their focus on cell-phone sales, now bringing T-Mobile to their service line. The Fark thread was amusing, a catalog of anecdotes from people who remembered when you could get decent stuff there, and how now it's regarded as a last resort for immediate purchases (how Adam and I recognized it), a haven for hard-sell and clueless salespeople and also dependent on selling you batteries.

Now, before I came across this article, I'd planned to hit Radio...er, The Shack today anyway. So maybe I went in with this negative prejudice already. But I set foot in an empty store with three guys hovering around the counter in conversation. The first half of the store, once the display center for televisions, store-branded home theater junk and radio-control cars, was pretty much devoid of gondola shelves, the walls lined with cell phones and iPod accessories. I felt a salesman's eyes on me immediately, so I did my usual thing—I made a beeline for the electronics at the back of the store, looking like I was assured of what I needed. (Some Farker mentioned this strategy too.) I found something that'll work, and while checking out, the guy behind the counter immediately asked, "Do you need anything else, maybe batteries?"

Self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe. I attributed my negativity to that. But the people who came in the store after me hardly made it three feet inside before being pounced by a "helpful" salesman. Even The Onion had an article about this phenomenon...with a store that seems to offer so little and have so little firm direction (do we really need another cell phone middleman?), how is RadioShack still around? At least Circuit City knew what it was. Then again, we knew how crappy it was, too. That's more an indictment of the retail paradigm in a digital age. But that's for another blog entry.

Simon Properties: We're working hard to not look so bleak. Not surprisingly, we've lost a few small stores to the recession. It's not like JCPenney or Macy's have left anchor slots gaping and dark. If you want to see that, go see the Bedford Mall...Your Neighborhood Ghost Town Since 2001. (Or thereabouts.) But a couple jewelry places have gone out, and a few others here and there. Once upon a time, they'd just put up the metal grate in the door, take the signs off the wall, and leave it. Or maybe they'd put that white partition up that they use when some slot is getting remodeled. But what they've done with some is more subtle. They've put black curtains up in the doorways, and added benches and fake plants to create a sort of sitting area against the wall. It's tasteful, subtle, and it doesn't draw your attention to the blank and empty storefront. A few are serving as display windows for other stores in the mall.

It's not that bad, believe me. But you do notice, if you remember something used to be somewhere, or had been for a while. Like most things, you notice when you look.

Doesn't everyone already have a cell phone? I noticed that there's another cell phone store opening. I think it's a T-Mobile store. Now, T-Mobile has a kiosk in the mall; they had two. Verizon Wireless and AT&T have stores in the mall, too. VZW has two, if you count the GoWireless store that seems to be a Verizon reseller. Plus, you can get phones from almost any provider at the aforementioned RadioShack. So, that said, why do we need so many cell phone stores? I can justify why we need a Starbucks or a Dunkin' Donuts every block; some people will go to the competitor's store a block away because they're too lazy to continue on their way without that venti double nonfat iced mocha latte with whipped cream and served at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. But do we really need eight cell phone kiosks at the mall? Especially when you can find another in the RadioShack at the mall, or standalone retailers in strip malls a mile down South Willow?

(I guess another part of it is that as carriers merge, they inherit each other's stores. But come on, we all have cell phones...so let's get real.)

What's the target demographic of Forever 21? Apparently, Forever 21 is one of the more popular fashion retailers at the mall, since they moved in a few years ago. No, I did not ask this of the female shoppers; you just can't take five steps without seeing a bright yellow bag with "Forever 21" emblazoned on it. Either people are reusing their bags because they're just that good, or lots of girls shop there. Now, I laughed at the name when they first moved in. "Forever" any age implies that you were once that age, and though it may be long past now, damn it, you're going to stay that age no matter how time and fate betray you. Therefore, I imagined what Carmine and Katie did, a bunch of thirty-somethings and MILFs trying to defy time by wearing clothing that would make 1980s Madonna blush.

And instead, most of those yellow bags are in the hands of girls who aren't quite 21 yet, far as I can tell. How can you be "forever 21" if you haven't ever been 21 to begin with? But that brings up another question...

Should I take a seat over there? A few Christmas Eves ago, I was strolling the mall last-minute when I bumped into Isaac. He lamented that he had yet to see an "attractive" woman at the mall that afternoon. I have to assume Isaac was wearing the fidelity-to-his-girlfriend goggles, because I've never found that assessment to be true. The problem is, I don't know if I'm supposed to find these women attractive!

I can't tell age. If I see a cute girl, I can't tell you if she's sixteen or eighteen or twenty-five. Yeah, I can tell if she's 30. But under that can be hard to tell. The girls don't make it any easier. Fashion isn't too revealing, unless you happen to catch a collegiate or high-school athletic t-shirt or sweatshirt. Parents aren't revealing, because what 14-year-old still gets chaperoned around the mall these days? There's just no way to tell from a quick glance. I just do what's safest, and try not to acknowledge any of them. After all, you never know when Chris Hansen is watching you.

Why does techno sell young-adult fashion? Every time you walk past a Hollister, Abercrombie or whatever label, they're blasting techno. I know there's a survey that says why. When the marketing people come forth with The Data, you do what The Data tell you to do. But are people universally driven by techno? I'd think it would make people hyper and leave the store faster.

And yeah, I thought this all up in the span of about twenty-five minutes. Go, me.

The Rickroll Cake: An Explanation

So I turned twenty-eight this week. Monday at 4:43am EST, to be anally precise. As birthdays do when you're not in one of those marquée years, it came, it went. But despite the relative lack of fanfare, Carmine found a way to mark this one like no birthday before. He executed, from afar, the Most Epic Birthday Rickroll Ever.

Now, for some, this requires an explanation. Most of this explanation is relative to the fact that, well, the Rickroll was performed in the presence of my co-workers, who now may or may not think I'm gay. Most will never read this, but I feel compelled to explain the Rickroll for those who aren't already in the know.

It started with a Web site I will not name here, but it's a site known for hatching many of the most popular Internet memes, among them lolcats. One thing they can't take credit for, though, is the hyperlink bait-and-switch. It's all too easy to send someone a link (especially if you can disguise it through HTML code) that looks like pertinent content, but actually directs to something else. For years, people would use this approach to deliver content from a noted "shock site," something like Tubgirl or Goatse (and if you don't know, trust me, you really don't want to know).

This particular site adopted a different approach when they realized every member had seen Tubgirl, Goatse and friends. For some reason, an image of a duck on wheels became popular. Not surprisingly, it was dubbed the "duckroll." This was all well and good. Then, apparently there was some rumored release of a video game preview or a movie trailer preview on YouTube. When the initial servers couldn't handle the load, a forum poster quickly offered a YouTube mirror for everyone to watch.

Those who clicked were treated to...a music video for 1980s pop singer Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." Surely, you know the song; it's the song that makes you envision a soulful black musician making promises of eternal faithfulness. The video, though, showcases Astley, a slim white British musician, delivering the lyrics. Couple that with the fashion and "dance moves" symbolic of the '80s, and you have a flashback like no other. The variant was labeled a "Rickroll." And with that, the practice grew quickly, even beyond the realm of its originating Web site. Rickrolling was easy to do, relatively harmless, and always good for a laugh. And the more unexpected, the better. Depending on who you ask, the trend peaked or jumped the shark when, at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Astley himself emerged from a parade float and lip-synched "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively Rickrolling the parade in person. I vote for the former.

Of course, Carmine was quick to embrace the humor inherent in the Rickroll, and he labeled me as his target. The first few Rickrolls were low-key, just disguised links as they used to do things. Then, he left a CD in my car stereo with a single track, so I was greeted to "Never Gonna Give You Up" when I got ready to leave the office. While I was awaiting a call from a guy named Richard in New Jersey, Carmine gave me a message from Rick with a 973 area code. I dialed, only to find that it was Rick Astley at the other end to tell me how he'd never give me up. I've received Rickroll calls on my cell, almost always when my battery's near death. And then, this spring sometime, my friend Ashley e-mailed me a song by a new artist named Reliant Sky. I listened to the MP3, recognized the first couple notes immediately, and learned that Carmine had put Ashley up to forwarding the track along. (He also pointed out that Reliant Sky is an anagram of Rick Astley. He puts time into this.) I figured that was the peak.

Then my birthday. We always do cakes at the office, so when Carmine's mom and two co-workers were at my back with a cake, it wasn't too surprising. Then, I stood up to blow the candles out...

The cake itself was beautiful, though I can't give all the credit to Carmine. Chris had to forward his mother a good still shot of Rick from the iconic video. Stop & Shop crafted the confectionary masterpiece. And Mrs. Sarno simply executed the plan as her boys requested. The result was a flawless Happy Birthday Rickroll. But something this involved could only derive from one mind, and for that, I give mad props to Carmine.

The only problem is, it's much like when Carmine composed "Ode To Counter-Strike" at RPI. How do you top that?

Truth is, I'm a little afraid to find out.