Hunting and Gathering
May 30th, 2007
There are two shopping centres that we could reasonable refer to as our locals. One is a testament to the glory of consumerism and commerce. The kind of place that fills in the gaps on the second floor just so they can squeeze a couple of other cart vendors in and block people’s natural passage throughout the centre.
The other centre is what we refer to as the dirt mall, well that’s not entirely true the second centre is actually made of three crappy shopping centres kind of strung together. One of them is particularly dirt mall’ish and the rest is like dirt mall made up to look respectable. If you live in Brisbane try and guess which centres I’m talking about!
Now it may sound like I’m being harsh on this dirt mall and I should point out that we tend to frequent this establishment a lot more than the shiny one. We like that it’s quieter than the shiny one and it generally has everything that we need and it is close.
Something that does differentiate the dirt mall is the sheer number of those grabber machines. There are two chocolates and lollies ones, one with comic book character soft toys and scales to measure your height and weight.
This isn’t unusual at all however people line up at these things at the dirt mall. Seriously the majority of shoppers out there can’t walk past them without pausing. I’ve never in my life seen these machines so used. They should put fruit in them so people would get some vitamins and minerals occasionally.
I have a theory about the machines though. I figure that the people using the dirt mall are slightly more primal than the ones in the shiny place. This is by no means me casting aspersions on the dirt mall people as we shop there ourselves and really a little less delicate and pretty than the Eloi at the other centre is preferable in my books.
No I think it goes back to our hunting and gathering instincts. We want that Batman soft toy but we want it from the machine even though it’s over at K’Mart for five bucks. It’s an achievement to get that damn claw to hold onto the toy. I lousy at them too, I haven’t used one in about ten years so this is all from observation only.
The clearest example of this has to be that it costs more on average to get the chocolate from the claw machine than from the supermarket not thirty metres away.
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The Claw Machine phenomenon in my local area led to a glut of cheap stuffed animals… and a very happy dog who ripped them up.
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