The Rocky Mountain Collegian

The holiday season marks the time of year when millions scramble to shopping malls in search of the perfect presents for their loved ones. It also happens to be my least favorite time of year.

Being raised in a strong outdoorsy family has a lot to do with my extreme distaste for shopping malls. I was raised doing activities like hiking through Babler State Park, rowing at Creve Coeur Lake, repelling at Sherwood Forest, camping at Troy, MO. and fishing at Tilles Park. My parents taught my three siblings and I that the true meaning of having a good time is not about how much you have, but who you spend your time with.

What is ironic, however, is that despite my distaste for shopping malls, I worked for three years at the store that is the Havana for why I dislike them: Abercrombie & Fitch. After school, teenagers, particularly girls, would loiter for hours inside the store discussing their personal and social business out loud as if they wanted the entire store to hear. Most of the time, they never bought anything, although they would try on every single piece of clothing they could get their hands on, leaving behind huge piles of clothes for my coworkers and me to hang up.

For this reason, I often asked to work in the men's section, but it was no more of an escape from superficiality. Nothing made my eyes roll more than having male coworkers who were "serial tanners" tell me about how much they were able to lift at the gym while stealing stares at the barely legal female shoppers who walked in. Sometimes they would even look at the store's infamous pornographic catalogue together while on the clock.

On the worst days, angry mothers of teenage boys would scream at me personally for the provocative photographs of women that hung on the store's walls that they said scarred their 19-year-old sons' "innocent" eyes. Even worse, during holiday season, I would be assigned to "pat down" customers who left the store without purchasing anything and set off the alarm.

A store like Abercrombie & Fitch fosters all of the negative aspects of a consumer-based society I am personally opposed to: consumerism, materialism, superficiality, artificiality, deception, temptation-psychology, becoming a spending addict, unethical marketing and advertising schemes and the fact that people from lower economic statuses suffering most from these things.

These days, it is almost imperative that socializing and shopping malls go hand-in-hand for many teenagers. This concept is especially glorified by Hollywood films such as "Clueless," "Mean Girls," and most notably, "Mallrats."

The memories and relationships I have formed were not bought or made at a shopping mall. The close-knit relationships I made with my rowing team as a teen certainly were not relationships that could have been made by regularly hanging out at the mall. This is because we experienced the highs and lows of working together towards a single goal that caused us to grow closer. As a teenager, the after-school "meeting place" for my girlfriends and me was the Delmar Loop: an area in St. Louis that centers in at diversity, embraces individuality, and holds strong appreciation for the arts and people's unique talents. While the "mall girls" were busy being consumed, I was most likely enjoying my time with down to Earth and humorous individuals at the Loop over a game of pool at Fitz's, or having a memorable conversation over cigarettes and coffee at the outdoor seating Starbucks nearby.

It worries me to see marketing strategists targeting "tweens," or older children, since they currently make up a large amount of consumers at shopping malls. It's even more shocking to see parents contribute to this activity by giving their tweens their credit cards, and dropping them off at the malls to hang out after school. At that age, I was playing games like "Red Rover" and "Twister" with the neighborhood kids, selling girl-scout cookies and holding "secret meetings" in my treehouse.

As for the holiday season, I find different ways to give meaningful presents for Christmas without having to revisit the arena that places importance on external values, or to have nauseous memories of (gulp) my old horrible job at Abercrombie. Because I like to take photographs, I sometimes blow up a good picture of a loved one and mount it with a quote, then buy an interesting frame to go with it. Burning a personal CD mix of someone's favorite songs and designing the CD cover with your own flair is another option. Or, for those who prefer to flex it at the sheisty malls, I give cash instead.

Batool Alsamadi is a sophomore studying accounting.

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