Mall Madness

Today I went to the new Americana at Brand in Glendale. I must say that it sucked. Not only did it look similar to the Farmer's Market/ Grove and 3rd in LA...but many of the stores that I wanted to go to were not opened yet. Don't waste your time going...Kitson and Ed Hardy are not opened. Although the Fox 11 News advertised those particular stores, you will be disappointed if those are your favorite stores.

The mall looked really fancy, but looks can be deceiving. I know that the architect is the same, but couldn't he think of something different. He could have designed something that reflects the Glendale culture better. I felt like I was in Las Vegas for a second, and then when I got to the end all I saw was the crappy, dirty brick building that is the Glendale Galleria.

At least at the Grove when it comes to an end or corner it loops back around to some other stores...but this mall just ended at the street level which made me think how unsafe the mall would be if I lived there. I never understood who would want to live at the mall in the first place, with all the businesses below and surrounding you would never get to sleep in on the weekends.

Another thing that annoyed me at Americana was all the workers. I know the developers said because of this mall they were employing some hundreds of thousands of people but what will happen is eventually when they can't sell those $700,000 condos and they still have to pay rent on the property, all of those people will be laid off.

My last rant about this place is the parking. I went on a Friday afternoon, right after high school students were getting out of school, and the parking lot was empty. However the parking attendants who were just standing around, "directing" traffic wouldn't allow me to park in the open spaces for whatever reason. Not only did I have to park far from the elevators, once I got out to walk towards the elevators there were no signs directing people to exit the parking structure. When leaving, be sure to go to the correct kiosk to pay, because two of them allow credit cards and only one allows cash. The attendant who is in charge of the parking kiosks doesn't tell you which ones are which, considering they all look the same. So I inserted my parking ticket in to the one that only accepts credit cards, and it told me my fee was $3.00, but I wanted to pay cash. So by the time I canceled the transaction, inserted the ticket into the one that accepts cash my fee went up to $5.00. How you may be thinking? It took less than one minute for me to do this, and I was charged an extra $2.00. When I looked at the attendant to find out why this happened, he simply turned his head as if he didn't hear what I had to say. I thought as I walked away that he would be getting laid off by the end of the summer anyways, so they could have my extra $2.00.