It’s not an either/or situation. If they unlock the doors several hours early, they still have to watch the mall later in the day when the stores are open. It’s not like one cancels out the other.
Oh, I just realized maybe you meant “better” as is “more important”, rather than “easier”. If that’s what you meant, then please ignore my reply.
Betcha Simon Property Groups requires photo ID badges to be displayed on yokes…er…lanyards by all employees. And I’ll betcha they wear them proudly when they stop at the c-store on the way home.
Well, I saw women walking with shopping bags a number of times during the month of December, which is when most of the stores were opening at 8, and even at 7, the closer they got to Christmas. And I did a bit of shopping myself once, afterwards.
Compare and contrast “walking at the mall” with “walking a half-mile down and a half-mile back on Monroe Street”.
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It’s safe. Nobody’s going to knock you down and snatch your purse and run down the street and disappear. And if someone does, there are people around who are alert for precisely this sort of thing, not only The Security Guy strolling up and down, but also other mallwalkers.
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It’s private. When you walk around your neighborhood, there are other people leaning on cars, who watch your approach. Not all of them are friendly. And some of us are just dang self-conscious about approaching groups of strangers leaning on cars.
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At the mall, there are people around. If you fall, or start having chest pains, there are people around to help.
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There are people around to talk to, if you feel the need for early morning chitchat. Valuable human interaction, even if it’s only “good morning”.
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There’s “stuff to look at”, as you walk past the windows. Also valuable mental stimulation. Walking a half-mile down and a half-mile back on the sidewalk on Monroe Street is boring.
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It’s clean. No dog turds on the sidewalk.
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No dogs, period. No barking dogs leaping off their front porch and chasing you, no stray dogs on the sidewalk needing to be finessed.
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It’s quiet. No honking horns, no bicycle riders hollering, “Hey, outa the way asshooooooole…”
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It smells good. No exhaust fumes.
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It’s weatherproof. You can walk in your shirt sleeves no matter what the weather is outside.
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There are toilet facilities. Clean ones.
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At Hickory Point at least, there are a couple of food places open early, if you’ve got a blood sugar problem, or if you discover that you probably should have eaten breakfast and didn’t…
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You can sit down halfway and rest on a nice clean bench if you need to.
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So far at least, it’s free. No membership fee.
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It’s flexible. You can walk any time of the day, from 6 or 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. You’d have to be nuts to try to walk a mile down and a mile back on Monroe Street after dark. Especially if you’re over-65.
The only downside for me is that it’s 5.5 miles from my house, which makes an 11 mile round trip. If I drive the bigass Chevy van, which gets between 11 and 13 mpg, that’s a gallon of gas, or $1.50. And I walk Monday through Saturday, which makes it $9.00 a week, and sure, that’s the same amount as a treadmill, over a year’s time, but walking 20 minutes on a treadmill is boring, and I know I won’t do it, and it’ll take up space in the living room, unless I put it in the basement, where the TV isn’t, and then I know I won’t do it.
Mallwalking rocks, lemme tell ya.
Does anyone else see a really obvious solution here?
Instead of opening the mall late, inform the mall walkers that their sharp eyes and minds are needed. If they see anything out of the ordinary, anything suspicious, report it to mall security and management. That way, the walkers get to do their walking, the management feels more secure and doesn’t have to shell out for doubling the security force during off hours, and everyone wins. Well, except the hypothetical terrorist.
The likelihood of any one mall being targeted is miniscule, and opening the mall later, when you have a ready made population of volunteer security, is feeble minded and cowardly. I do hope the walkers start a letter campaign and convince the management to use the brains they were born with.
Hmmm…maybe it’s just me, but eliminating the security guards and asking the mall patrons to police themselves doesn’t sound like a great idea.
Actually, most of the senior citizens I know list Going from Window to Window and Watching My Neighbors’ Comings-and-Goings, then Immediately Calling Up All Mutual Aquantances on the Phone to Discuss Said Comings-and-Goings as one of their favorite hobbies. The mall would need extra security guards to check out all the suspicious-behavior complaints.
Umm, why are people putting such importance to “mall security” anyways? I don’t know about US malls but our “security” here is pretty weak and consists of maybe 6-8 “guards” walking a mall with over 300 stores (and probably a few undercover guys).
Keeping the doors closed longer is actually better for a TRUE terrorist. If I was planting bombs, I wouldn’t want people to be around! Sheesh. I would break into the closed mall and do my deeds without having 500 people seeing me carrying a huge full pack (with the stores still close it would look weird).
And Blowero, I’m pretty sure the mall would have to keep security in the mall when it’s close anyhow. How does opening the mall to a few dozen/hundred people matter? Since the stores are closed the security guards only have to patrol the walking spaces and those tend to be rather easy to cover.
The statistics for domestic bombings during the late 1960s and early 1970s would surprise some people. Many perps are tenured professors now though. We abandoned Vietnam to the Commies so they aren’t even mad any more.
What any of this has to do with Jihadist mall bombings in Iowa… No clue.
I guess you’re right, badmana - it’s easier to secure a mall when the doors are unlocked, and you need exactly the same number of security guards when a mall is closed as when it’s open. In fact, we should just leave all buildings unlocked 24 hours a day, and we’d never have any problems.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, and? We’re not talking about 10,000 people here…we’re talking about a few dozen/hundred people here I’m sure (although I can’t check since the link doesn’t work for me).
I would accept if they said they couldn’t keep doing this because of vandels/thiefs/problems but beagledave only mentions the whole terrorist countermeasure angle and it makes no damn sense.
The point of my post is that the COST of security “guards” don’t need to change whether the mall is opened or not. The group of people walking the malls are going to be very low risk folks who want to do a bit of window shopping before the mall opens. Unless these malls are a haven for drugs and gangs, security is moot.
And many places are open 24 (like my local grocery stores - Dominons) where 3-4 people (a cashier and a few stackers) watch over a huge grocery store. It’s not like I run into trouble making kids (or terrorists, take your pick) during my late night shopping trips…sheesh.
A building with locked doors can be ‘patrolled’ by the building alarms & motion detectors (with say one gaurd watching cameras). The terrorist invading to plant his bomb would set the alarms off when he broke in and get himself a lot of attention pretty damn fast.
Look it it this way: The mall likely pays their alarm company a monthly fee, whether the alarms are on from 10PM to 6 AM or 10PM to 8AM. However, when the doors are open, they must pay gaurds to patrol (gaurds being required only when the door is open). If the mall owners feel that they need extra security during the terror alert, shortening open hours (non-alarmed hours) reduces the additional cash outlay.
Are the constant terror alerts ridiculous? I think so. They’re crying wolf, to the point that we all laugh and dismiss it. It reminds me of when I was I college, there was a dorm fire that a bunch of people died in because they igored the alarm, after having something like 15 false alarms that semester.
But that doesn’t change the fiscal logic of the shopping mall.
Malls do make great soft targets. They have nice drive-up loading docks that would be very easy to breech. They have lots of fitting rooms, bathrooms with stalls, trash receptacles, planters, freestanding displays and other places where an incideniary or toxin-releasing device could easily be hidden. They have chlorinated water fountains which could be ammoniated on the run, releasing a big cloud of doom.
But…
If the shopping mall were claiming that it was fiscally prohibitive to provide adequate security during the extended early walkers’ hours, that would be reasonable. If they said that “current security issues make it important that we provide the utmost possible protection for our patrons, both mallwalkers and shoppers alike, and we feel that we’ll best be able to serve that important need if we reduce the early walkers’ hours to one hour per day” then this could be chalked up as a simple fiscal reaity issue.
But instead, they appealed to the convenient fearmonger’s excuse of “homeland security” which seems to mean that they either believe that someone entering during walkers’ hours pose a threat, or they believe that they’re not capable of providing adequate security against a terror threat for the early morning walkers. If it’s the former, then they need to do away with walkers’ hours altogether. If it’s the latter, how much moreso is adequate security a problem when the entire mall is open, all doors are unsecured, and thousands of people are on the premises as opposed to a couple of hundred, tops? The whole mall should be closed, if that’s the case.
They need to be clearer as to the real motives behind this decision. “Homeland security” as a coverall just doesn’t inform the patrons nearly well enough.
Raising the terror alert is supposed to be a signal to state and local governments to move things up a notch in terms of security. I don’t think that it is supposed to change the daily routines of anyone else.
True, but more likely than not these less populated areas would be places where you would find nuclear plants, arsenals, chemical factories, etc. – especially if the next attack is supposed to be as bad as 9/11.
The choice to scale back the early morning walking hours sounds like a Barney Fife decision to me.
Another point to be made in re the presence / absence of security guards: Most likely, they are already there before the shops in the mall open for the day. Every retail job I have ever had has employees working well before and after store hours, usually 2 - 3 hours. The employees of the mall’s tenants most likely do not have keys to the doors, and therefore security is already there to let them in. I know at my local mall, there are only 6 people on security during open hours and 3 during the tenants’ pre-open and post-close times.
So, as TeaElle said, if the mall owners had simply said “We can’t afford to double the security staff,” then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. The use of “Homeland Security” as a cover for this is ridiculous – IMO Simon was trying to avoid the protests that will result from limited mallwalking times by asserting a reason other than simple cost savings. The mall is just as easy a target later – if not more so – than it is early in the day. The more people in the building, the easier it is for any one of them to do something unnoticed, and the greater the collateral damage to the mall’s patrons.