The Mall
Give me something to believe in. I'm as alive as you need me to be.
“Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing.” - Michael Chabon, Manhood for Amateurs (2000)
If it wasn’t for the notification from my iPhone 15 Pro’s Dynamic Island that my order was ready, I wouldn’t have turned around to learn the food runner robot was right behind me with my usual Chick-fil-A order.
I had my AirPods in, listening to Hasan Piker commentate on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearing. Like a haptic tap on the shoulder but not quite, I grab my tray and Diet Dr. Pepper. I faintly hear the robot squeak “my pleasure,” while Hasan howls too loudly at a viewer’s preposterous hot take.
Me and sixty thousand others are in real-time watching and commenting on a guy watching YouTube videos of a US Senate hearing. At the same time, I eat a meticulously protein-dense fast food meal, alone, delivered by a robot that hasn’t been programmed to get my attention in the physical world. It might be my only meal today.
My purchase earns me just enough rewards points for an ice cream cone. Maybe the future isn’t so bad? I bite into the last waffle bit. The future is a hellscape, and it’s too late.
My first job was at a Chick-fil-A in Tucson. I was fourteen, making something like $5.50 an hour. My title was “Second Mile Service,” which meant cleaning trays, refilling drinks, and putting on the damn cow costume to stand in the blistering Arizona summer heat and wave at traffic—or getting kicked in the shin by kids during weekly family night. I didn’t last long.
When I finally returned my uniform a year or so later while moving to California, nobody remembered me. That’s ok. But I was there long enough to read all of S. Truett Cathy’s books—Peanut Oil-soaked Christianity, with chapters on why closing Sundays was good for business and how gleeful customer service sold more chicken because of a deeply spiritual and human set of principles. It was something to chew on.
I read them all at fourteen, a queer kid in a cow suit absorbing a manual for a world that wasn't designed for them. I knew then, and I know now, the specific, exclusionary politics that my waffle fries fund. I'm not here to solve the contradiction or seek ethical exoneration; I am just hungry.
There was a time when learning something new felt rare, like finding something you didn’t know existed at the far end of the mall. I used to rely on Wizard or Star Wars Magazine for Hollywood insider information. Physical monthly magazines! With nothing but blurbs on James Cameron’s Spider-Man or Star Wars: Underground. If you know, you know.
Now, every flippant industry update arrives instantly; endlessly optimized to be appealing without necessarily being useful. I could consume all day and still feel underfed. Art and knowledge go the way of cigarettes and junk food: available solutions in lieu of nutrition.
I’m back in the present, political punditry still ringing in my ear like the productivity of a workout, standing at the front of a near-vacant Chick-fil-A, lid removed for a Diet Dr. Pepper refill.
With these new sterile fast food structures, the one providing second-mile service is being programmed. The human employees are off doing three other, uniquely 2020s jobs. A cashier tends the line of delivery drivers. Behind a porcelain wall, an employee loads food onto the robot, eyes locked on the serving timer’s emoji, making sure it stays happy while I wait for anyone to make eye contact.
Since moving back to Tucson, I’ve found myself making a habit of regularly going to the mall as if just to like… check on things. I don’t know when civil war will break out, but as I’ve come to find out, the mall is a nice vibe check on non-mass shooting days.
This habit started when I ordered a Nine Inch Nails Tron: Ares t-shirt online for pickup at the Hot Topic at full price back when the movie was fresh. I’d get a boba and walk around. People watching is not a new pastime for me, but it never felt important like it does. For my own sanity, I’m seeking out spaces where people haven’t been curated for me, but united under at least some sort of shared goal. Even if that goal is boba. That’s the bar for me at this point.
The Burger King that was once there is a ghost. How does that happen? The gyro place I used to like is gone. But Kelly’s Cajun Grill, positioned next to a Panda Express, survived an apocalypse or two somehow, and the bourbon chicken tastes the same as it did in 2011. There’s a bit I do just for myself where I try a free sample from the man in the visor standing outside the food line with a tray and become so incredulous that I’m sold on the chicken and get in line, even though I was gonna eat there anyway. Everything around it underwent buggy software updates. Or, nature took over with joyful vines and foliage that have grown with time around and through the concrete.
There’s a Korean snack spot where a teenager in a t-shirt and jeans is running the register for their family’s business. No corporate script or “Welcome to the Brand!” Just a kid and a hotel room-like kitchenette that had only been open a week. On the monitor behind him, Kpop Demon Hunters is on a silent loop. It’s not “curated” for a demographic; it’s just what’s on.
The landmark stores that were once there, the KB Toys and the Discovery Channel Store, are all gone. In their place is a fascinating array of thematically similar locally-owned retro games, comic book, and toy stores. I’ll go with Josh, who is also free on Thursdays, and we’ll venture to the mall to tread familiar ground with little hopes beyond a Wetzel Pretzel, a boba, and maybe a raid battle in Pokémon Go.
In 2026, more than one place at the mall is dedicated to simply providing tables and space to play Dungeons & Dragons, or Pokémon, or, for some reason, there’s a One Piece trading card game that’s very popular. Do you know anything about that? I can only keep up so much, but what franchise or brand does it matter? The dull roar of deliberation was punctuated by muted “Yess!” from winning players. They still do this? Should I be doing this? Could I even be upset when there’s so much joy in the room? That? No, no, that’s body odor. But there’s community in the room, too. For sure.
The mall has never-not been ground zero for cultural identity signifiers. Why do you think I’m partial to BoxLunch or Hot Topic? Same company, I think, which feels right: one store sells you the sanitized geek version of your weirdness, the other sells you the gauges and spiked collar. Either way, the promise is the same — you buy your signifiers for the world, and the world will recognize you’re wearing an Invader Zim shirt twenty-five years after its cancellation on Nickelodeon. You purchase, in essence, Chabon’s handshake. But the clearance rack is where that handshake fails.
The clearance, especially high-pop-culture-turnover places like those, is a graveyard of attempted signals: the franchise artifacts that couldn’t recruit enough people to become an identity. The stuff that sat under fluorescent lights long enough to admit the truth: most longing doesn’t convert, and maybe there are too many M3GAN 2.0 tee shirts in stock. Most “community” doesn’t happen. Most community is mocked and atomized. Most of the time, the market misreads the human.
And I love it there.
I love it because the ignored artifacts are usually right up my alley, obviously! Yes, this dorky Tron shirt is coming home with me. Hell yes. Not because I’m trying to prove anything or ironically revel in flops (though I do enjoy that). I’m not cosplaying a demographic. I like it. It’s $3. It’s a piece of a world I bought into at full-fucking-price that culture at large didn’t fully take. A flare that never got answered, and I can still decide it means something to me. Or maybe the hipsterism of the 2010s is ingrained in me like the hippy movement of the 1960s in Boomers.
Grand Cinemas Oracle View was a six-screen second-run movie theater near the Tucson Mall. Dollar Tuesdays, $2 otherwise. These were the clearance section of the movies. The extremely low barrier to entry gave way to exploration. Although movie tickets were usually what, $7 in 2006? I remember seeing Cars there. It closed in 2015 to become a Comcast call center. They gave the posters away for free on the last day.
When I abruptly moved to Pendleton, Oregon, when I was eighteen, long story — I found stability in its sole local Wal-Mart. I can already hear how that sounds. But it wasn’t funny at the time. It was medicine. In a freshman college essay, I wrote on the subject
When I first moved to Pendleton, I found myself wandering around an unfamiliar town for the first time in years. With the town as small as it is, I walked the streets looking at the various mom-and-pop shops and making extraneous trips to Walmart. I don’t know why I did this, maybe it was because that’s obviously the biggest store in town. Or, perhaps it was the familiarity of it all. The same walls. The same shelves, products. The department store was representing a universal concept of home. Not one that meant any great deal to me, but one that was sort of ingrained into my mind at birth. A gravitation towards recognizable brands that can call you back to a time just as strongly as a childhood tune can.
So when I would make these trips to Walmart, I’d just walk in with my hoodie up and headphones in, never speaking a word to anyone. I never really had an objective. Nothing I was really shopping for, I’d just sort of...people watch. A pastime that I’m more familiar with than I’d like to admit, but it always made me uneasy. Judgmental aisle browsing with a preconceived stereotype of Walmart shoppers that might have come about during my time in LA, or maybe that’s something that Walmart brings on itself. Ideas that birthed things like “The Walmart Game” where if you see anyone at Walmart you’d rather be: you lose.
Pendleton was not the happiest time for me, despite the mountain of support I had in hindsight. My psoriasis was at its worst and most widespread. I resented leaving Los Angeles for a town with a main street and a Walmart.
One of Miley Cyrus’ many opuses, “Party in the USA,” describes this feeling better and catchier than my freshman college essay. It’s Pop Americana as emergency contact. When our personal lives feel untethered, we gravitate to systemic familiarity—and that’s what she’s saying: “My tummy’s turning and I’m feeling kind homesick, too much pressure and I’m nervous / That’s when the DJ dropped my favorite tune and the Britney song was on.” The chorus hits, and for three minutes, I’m not in Pendleton, and Miley isn’t in Los Angeles. We’re somewhere else.
I know what it is to send the flare and get back silence. To make a thing and watch it not attach to anyone’s life the way you meant it to. To realize the gesture might be doomed and still make it anyway. There’s a specific loneliness in that — not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being unreceived. In my clearance purchase, I’m rescuing a failed signal.
Back in 2018, between production assistant gigs in Atlanta, one of the many mall jobs I worked was at a Goorin Bros. hat shop in Ponce City Market. Some of the hats were nice, but I drew a few too many Justin Timberlake comparisons in my time there, and the corporate-sanitized vibe of the whole thing, in its fakeness, made everything that wasn’t securing some new film gig seem pointless.
One shift, Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya came in. I’ll never forget them, especially her twirling around, trying on hats as the tourists do. I didn’t fanboy this time. I did my job, making polite small talk, complimenting the fedoras and ballcaps briefly tried. They had just moved into the building, Maya excitedly exclaimed to me unprompted. She had just gotten a job; Stranger Things. Her father, quieter and more aware of his celebrity, bought a few hats, and I managed the transaction without acknowledging it, as much as I love Before Sunrise or Gattaca, and they went on their way.
In Atlanta’s film scene at that time, it wasn’t unusual to have some faint connection to Stranger Things. “Winona Ryder lives in my building.” “Will’s brother is always just kind of hanging out in East Atlanta Village.” I lived near the Oakland Cemetery, where filming frequently occurred. Friends worked on the show, grateful for the years of employment it brought. Now they’re dorky memories your uncle tells.
…
Michael Chabon writes that “every work of art is one half of a secret handshake,” and it’s true. It’s a feeling I know all too well in my music and work, even though I don’t like to admit it. My most popular song is from when I was 18, and it’s because it has “ducks” in the title. Televangelist came out to silence. I’m writing these essays that might not find anyone.
It’s accidental and desperate. The big corporate anchors left, and actual Tucsonans are filling the gaps. Perhaps the community is growing because the structure was finally empty enough to let it. The bloatware is shed.
I’m defending not capitalism but the muted recognition of survival not between, but among the kids at the register, the people playing D&D in the back of a coffee shop that exists inside a mall that the rest of the country gave up on.
Inside one of these collectable toy stores, there was a rack of used DVDs and Blu-rays; there usually are, and I flock to them. 2 for $5. The thrift gods look favorably upon me as I pick up The Green Hornet in 3D and the first season of HBO’s Looking, a show very, very close to my heart. Somehow, I thrifted at the mall in 2026.
Sliding glass entrance doors open for folks coming in, and I slip my way out. My AirPods are dying, and the sun is setting, in my opinion, too soon. Political punditry has been replaced with Weezer deep cuts. I’m not sure if my nervous system is regulated because I don’t think I’ve ever known what that’s like. I didn’t cure my longing, nor destroy the systems that keep me in the Matrix. But I did make it a non-emergency.
Tyler Scruggs is a writer, musician, and thrift store manager based in Tucson, Arizona. His new album, In Town For Work, is coming in 2026.