The news that federal stimulus money will help build a hotel at the Mall of America may have pleased some folks -- it'll mean jobs, and we need jobs.
On the other hand, another hotel? You don't see people clustered around the doors of the Mall in sleeping bags, cooking over cans of Sterno. If only there was a place to stay for the night!
Moreover, in this interminable recession, the idea of paying for a hotel so you get up and shop makes you feel like someone in 1932 reading stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald splashing around the fountain at the Plaza Hotel with a bottle in one hand at the height of the Jazz Age. Heady, mad, crazy days!
Why, at the peak of the boom, people would pay someone to carry them from the hotel to the limo that took them to the Mall. There was even talk of putting the Mall up on wheels and driving it around to the hotels to make it easier to go into debt.
Even more surprising: They're still thinking about expanding the Mall. Don't mark me down as a Mall hater: I like malls. The idea of the mall may have been surpassed in recent years by open-air -- read, freezing half the year -- places called "Lifestyle Centers," where you can center your lifestyle, but Americans of my generation still like malls.
But in this economic climate -- read, freezing all year round -- the idea of 100 more stores seems a bit out of step with reality. People are no longer buying large houses for 37 cents down, then taking out home-equity loans so they can transport home the contents of an entire Pottery Barn.
If the stores have names like MEAT FOR A PENNY or BOB'S HOUSE OF FAUCET WASHERS, maybe.
I know, I know: They have to plan for the future when things improve. Until then, perhaps a hotel might work if they marketed it differently: pretend shopping. You have a nice night on a soft bed, get up, shop all day, then give it back.
