Call Of The Mall

Profiling malls as powerful intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture, an examination of malls as reflections of commercial and social culture considers what does and does not work in a mall setting and what malls mean to everyday people. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.

Paco Underhill, the Margaret Mead of shopping and author of the huge international bestseller Why We Buy, now takes us to the mall, a place every American has experienced and has an opinion about. The result is a bright, ironic, funny, and shrewd portrait of the mall -- America's gift to personal consumption, its most powerful icon of global commercial muscle, the once new and now aging national town square, the place where we convene in our leisure time.

It's about the shopping mall as an exemplar of our commercial and social culture, the place where our young people have their first taste of social freedom and where the rest of us compare notes. Call of the Mall examines how we use the mall, what it means, why it works when it does, and why it sometimes doesn't.

Profiling malls as intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture, an examination of malls as reflections of commercial and social culture considers what malls mean to ordinary people.