Shopping During Wartime

By Joel Stein

If Osama bin Laden had really thought it out, he'd have realized that the World Trade Center wasn't the center of capitalism. Sure, it stood tall in Manhattan's financial district, but Wall Street is a buttoned-up version of capitalism. The real stuff--the guiltless consumption, the pride of acquisition, the gluttony of a food court at noon--is taking place at the mall.

And the country's greatest mall, without a doubt, is the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minn. It's a capitalistic biosphere, a place where, under one roof, a store called Candy Candy! does battle with not only Candyland and Candy Cravings but also Candy Is Dandy. Nearly 40% of the shoppers who visit its 4.2 million sq. ft. are tourists willing to travel hundreds of miles to pay tribute to a giant replica of the shopping centers they have in their hometowns. The Mall of America is the Disney World of shopping.

But there have been very few tourists since Sept. 11, and America's greatest symbol of consumerism has been suffering from the aftershocks of the attacks. The MOA is a ghost mall, with visitors down at least 30% and more on weekdays. Conventions have been canceled, tourists are afraid to fly, the national economy is unsteady, and the largest state-worker strike in Minnesota history just ended after two weeks. Worse yet, a rumor has been floating around that the MOA is next on al-Qaeda's hit list. And a widely circulated e-mail warning that malls will be hit on Halloween has people particularly worried.

Capitalism, though, is hard to keep down. In fact, the people at the mall move around with a proud sense of defiance, their 6 a.m. power walking a way of telling the terrorists that they cannot be scared out of getting exercise in a patrolled, temperature-controlled environment. Flipping through posters of clearly chadorless J. Lo and Britney at Spencer Gifts has had some of its guilty pleasure replaced by pride.

The thing that's so hard about defeating capitalism is that it springs up everywhere. A kiosk selling fire-fighter souvenirs, called the 911 Marketplace, has grown into a large, second-floor, center-of-the-mall store. Its co-owner Sean Moriarty, 31, a full-time St. Paul fire fighter, is learning just how fast capitalism moves: like the rest of the stores in the mall, his shop has had to mark down the T shirts that bear the Sept. 11 date. Gurdial Singh, 50, a turbaned Sikh, has lost some of the business on the AMERICA'S PRIDE shirts he sells out of his kiosk because a kiosk completely devoted to flag paraphernalia opened next to his two weeks ago. And he is discontinuing the OSAMA BIN LADEN WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE shirts after he sells his last few. "A lot of people say, 'Why do you want to sell this? You are making him a hero.' I'm not getting them anymore," Singh explains. Instead, he is returning to his core business, selling shirts proclaiming WOMEN WANT ME, BASS FEAR ME.

The nightclub, the bowling alley, the comedy club and the sports bars on the fourth floor have suffered from the mall's attendance falloff, but they too are trying to make the best of it. Last Wednesday only six people were at Ltl Ditty's Dueling Piano Bar at 8:30 p.m., despite the fact that Wednesday is Bladder Buster Night, when, starting at 8, the bar serves 25[cent] light beers until the first person leaves the room. Knuckleheads, the comedy club, suffering from the cancellation of Los Angeles-based ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, was able to get 60 people to watch local comedian C. Willi Myles, who relied on weather-related humor instead of current events. "When you talk about bin Laden, you're talking about a guy that killed people," he says.

And you can still make money on love. The Chapel of Love, the only place in the mall where you can get married, has been receiving more inquiries about booking weddings than it normally does, according to apparel manager Debra Lee Fader. On Thursday night, Karyn Johanning, 25, had a "Dream Wedding" with Sebastian Xavier, 38. After a year of being proposed to, Johanning finally said yes three weeks ago. "A few days after [the attacks] happened, she said, 'Let's do it. Let's just live,'" says Xavier, who was wearing a Yankees cap with his tux as a reminder of the tragedy. "We just went on with life because it's too precious to stop." After the ceremony, they got on a train for Las Vegas.