Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (77 page)

13 FACTS ABOUT THE
WITCH HAZEL TREE

An amazing product from the pharmacy of Mother Nature
.

• It’s actually more of a shrub, usually reaching just 10 to 20 feet in height. It grows in the eastern U.S. and Canada, China, and Japan.

• The witch hazel sold in drugstores is a distillation of the plant’s branches combined with alcohol. It’s an
astringent
(it shrinks body tissue) with a variety of modern uses, but it had ancient uses, too.

• Native Americans brewed curative teas and medicines from its leaves and bark.

• The Cree called their brew “Magic Water” and used it for colds, coughs, and dysentery.

• The Osage put
shemba,
a poultice of the leaves, on sores, ulcers, boils, and tumors.

• The Potawatomi treated backaches and sore muscles with a liniment made from witch hazel bark.

• The Mohegan concocted remedies from its leaves and stems to treat insect bites, bruises, and cuts.

• English settlers named it the “wych hazel” tree in the 1600s.
Wych
is a Middle English term meaning “flexible” or “pliable,” and it referred to the plant’s branches, which were used as
dowsing rods
to locate water underground.

• It was named wych
hazel
because its leaves resemble those of the hazelnut tree.

• In 1846 Theron Pond of Utica, New York, and an Oneida medicine man sold a witch hazel skin cream called Golden Treasure. It became Pond’s Vanishing Cream, which is still sold today.

• Witch hazel tincture shrinks hemorrhoids, varicose veins, and bags under the eyes. (Grandpa Uncle John swears by it as an aftershave lotion.)

• It also soothes diaper rash, razor burn, and sunburn and takes the itch out of poison ivy and poison oak.

• Witch hazel seeds are said to taste like pistachios.

Manhattan has more Subway sandwich shops (171) than subway stations (147).

A HISTORY OF THE
SHOPPING MALL, PART IV

The shopping mall has been such a central part of American consumer culture for so many years that it’s hard to believe their days could be numbered. But that’s what some retailing experts think. Here’s Part IV of our story; Part III is on
page 399
.

F
INISHING TOUCHES

Victor Gruen may well be considered the “father of the mall,” but he didn’t remain a doting dad for long. Southdale Center, the world’s first enclosed shopping mall, opened its doors in the fall of 1956, and by 1968 Gruen had turned publicly and vehemently against his creation.

So it would fall to other early mall builders, people such as A. Alfred Taubman, Melvin Simon, and Edward J. DeBartolo Sr., to give the shopping mall its modern, standardized form, by taking what they understood about human nature and applying it to Gruen’s original concept. In the process, they fine-tuned the mall into the highly effective, super-efficient “shopping machines” that have dominated American retailing for nearly half a century.

BACK TO BASICS

These developers saw shopping malls the same way that Gruen did, as idealized versions of downtown shopping districts. Working from that starting point, they set about systematically removing all distractions, annoyances, and other barriers to consumption. Your local mall may not contain all of the following features, but there should be much here that looks familiar:

• It’s a truism among mall developers that most shoppers will only walk about three city blocks—about 1,000 feet—before they begin to feel a need to head back to where they’d started. So 1,000 feet became a standard length for malls.

• Most of the stairs, escalators, and elevators are located at the ends of the mall, not in the center. This is done to encourage
shoppers to walk past all the stores on the level they’re on before visiting shops on another level.

In 1968 Steven Spielberg and George Lucas took a directing class taught by Jerry Lewis.

• Malls are usually built with shops on
two
levels, not one or three. This way, if a shopper walks the length of the mall on one level to get to the escalator, then walks the length of the mall on the second level to return to where they started, they’ve walked past every store in the mall and are back where they parked their car. (If there was a third level of shops, a shopper who walked all three levels would finish up at the opposite end of the mall, three city blocks away from where they parked.)

• Another truism among mall developers is that people, like water, tend to flow down more easily than they flow up. Because of this, many malls are designed to encourage people to park and enter the mall on the upper level, not the lower level, on the theory they are more likely to travel down to visit stores on a lower level than travel up to visit stores on a higher level.

THE VISION THING

• Great big openings are designed into the floor that separates the upper level of shops from the lower level. That allows shoppers to see stores on both levels from wherever they happen to be in the mall. The handrails that protect shoppers from falling into the openings are made of glass or otherwise designed so that they don’t obstruct the sight lines to those stores.

• Does your mall’s decor seem dull to you? That’s no accident—the interior of the mall is designed to be aesthetically pleasing but not particularly interesting, so as not to distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise, which is much more important.

• Skylights flood the interiors of malls with natural light, but these skylights are invariably recessed in deep wells to keep direct sunlight from reflecting off of storefront glass, which would create glare and distract shoppers from looking at the merchandise. The wells also contain artificial lighting that comes on late in the day when the natural light begins to fade, to prevent shoppers from receiving a visual cue that it’s time to go home.

A NEIGHBORLY APPROACH

• Great attention is paid to the placement of stores within the mall, something that mall managers refer to as “adjacencies.” The
price of merchandise, as well as the type, factors into this equation: There’s not much point in placing a store that sells $200 silk ties next to one that sells $99 men’s suits.

The Pentagon has 14 fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s, KFC, and Dunkin’ Donuts.

• Likewise, any stores that give off strong smells, like restaurants and hair salons, are kept away from jewelry and other high-end stores. (Would
you
want to smell cheeseburgers or fried fish while you and your fiancé are picking out your wedding rings?)

• Have you ever bought milk, raw meat, or a gallon of ice cream at the mall? Probably not, and there’s a good reason for it: Malls generally do not lease space to stores that sell perishable goods, because once you buy them you have to take them right home, instead of spending more time shopping at the mall.

• Consumer tastes change over time, and mall operators worry about falling out of fashion with shoppers. Because of this, they keep a close watch on individual store sales. Even if a store in the mall is profitable, if it falls below its “tenant profile,” or average sales per square foot of other stores in the same retail category, the mall operator may refuse to renew its lease. Tenant turnover at a well-managed mall can run as high as 10 percent a year.

HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE

Malls have been a part of the American landscape for so long now that a little “mall fatigue” is certainly understandable. But like so much of American culture, the concept has been exported to foreign countries, and malls remain very popular around the world, where they are built not just in the suburbs but in urban centers as well. They have achieved the sort of iconic status once reserved for airports, skyscrapers, and large government buildings. They are the kind of buildings created by emerging societies to communicate to the rest of the world, “We have arrived.” If you climb into a taxicab in almost any major city in the world, be it Moscow, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, or Shanghai, and tell the driver, “Take me to the mall,” he’ll know where to go.

KILL ’EM MALL

America’s love-hate relationship with shopping malls is now more than half a century old, and for as long as it has been fashionable to see malls as unfashionable, people have been predicting their demise. In the 1970s, “category killers” were seen as a threat.
Stand-alone stores like Toys “R” Us focused on a single category of goods, offering a greater selection at a lower price than even the biggest stores in the mall couldn’t match. They were soon followed by “power centers,” strip malls anchored by “big box” stores like Walmart, and discount warehouse stores like Costco and Sam’s Club. In the early 1990s, TV shopping posed a threat, only to fizzle out…and be replaced by even stronger competition posed by Internet retailers like
Amazon.com
.

The Hoshi Ryokan in Komatsu, Japan, is the world’s oldest hotel. It opened in 718 A.D.

By the early 1990s, construction of new malls in the United States had slowed to a crawl, but this had as much to do with rising real estate prices (land in the suburbs wasn’t dirt cheap anymore), the savings and loan crisis (which made construction financing harder to come by), and the fact that most communities that wanted a mall already had one…or two…or more.

Increasing competition from other retailers and bad economic times in recent years have also taken their toll, resulting in declining sales per square foot and rising vacancy rates in malls all over the country. In 2009 General Growth Properties, the nation’s second-largest mall operator, filed for bankruptcy; it was the largest real estate bankruptcy in American history.

FULL CIRCLE

But mall builders and operators keep fighting back, continually reinventing themselves as they try to keep pace with the times. Open-air malls are remade into enclosed malls, and enclosed malls are opened to the fresh air. One strategy tried in Kansas, Georgia, and other areas is to incorporate shopping centers into larger mixed-use developments that include rental apartments, condominiums, office buildings, and other offerings. Legacy Town Center, a 150-acre development in the middle of a 2,700-acre business park north of Dallas, for example, includes 80 outdoor shops and restaurants, 1,500 apartments and townhouses, two office towers, a Marriott Hotel, a landscaped park with hiking trails, and a lake. (Sound familiar?)

In other words, developers are trying to save the mall by
finally
building them just the way that Victor Gruen wanted to in the first place.

Poll results: 58% of Americans have called in sick to work when they weren’t.

CHILDREN OF THE CORN

There are an estimated 35 million teenagers in the United States today, and they are a lucrative target for merchandisers because they have lots of disposable income (more than $100 a week, on average). Believe it or not, a lot of the social science that marketers use to spot teenage trends and cash in on them comes from a farm study done in the 1920s
.

T
HE FARM REPORT

In 1928 an improved strain of hybrid corn seed became available to farmers in Green County, Iowa. Around that same time, a pair of University of Iowa sociologists named Neal C. Gross and Bruce Ryan began a study of how the new seed was being adopted by farmers in the area. Gross and Ryan tracked 259 farmers in all, and the study they published, “The Diffusion of Corn in Two Iowa Communities,” laid the groundwork for a theory of consumer behavior that describes when, how, and why human beings embrace new products and ideas. It turns out that some of the concepts they developed apply as much to modern teenagers as they did to Iowa corn farmers 80 years ago.

FOLLOW THE LEADERS

The new hybrid corn seed offered greater resistance to drought and disease, and it increased crop yields by as much as 20%. Even so, it took almost 15 years for all of the farmers to switch to the new seeds. Gross and Ryan divided them into several groups:

•
Innovators:
The handful of farmers—less than 5% of the total—who took a chance on the new seed in the first few years.

•
Early Adopters:
A somewhat larger group of farmers, but under 15% of the total, who switched to the hybrid seed in the early to mid-1930s after seeing the success of the Innovators. The Early Adopters were some of the most respected farmers in their communities. They were what sociologists call “opinion leaders.”

•
Early and Late Majority:
Only after the Early Adopters had success with the corn did the great majority of farmers follow their example; by 1939 more than 90% of the farmers had switched.

•
Laggards.
The handful of farmers who were the most resistant
to change and the last to try the new seeds. (As late as 1941, there still were two farmers who had not switched to the better seeds.)

John Wayne smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day. (He quit when he got lung cancer.)

FROM CORN TO KIDS

Consumer research firms may use different terms to describe how today’s teenagers respond to new trends, but these modern groupings are surprisingly similar to the ones in Gross and Ryan’s study.

•
Edgers.
The risk-taking nonconformists of the teenage world, Edgers create their own styles to suit themselves, without caring or often in spite of what other people think. They are like the Innovators in Gross and Ryan’s study: They eagerly try new things.