Observation

On Saturday I got up early to go do some Observations and to conduct a survey at the Fayette Mall. I arrived at about 12PM and the mall was packed. It took me a good 5 minutes of driving around just to find a parking spot in the lot of over 5800 parking spots. I walked in through Sears which is about the center of the mall. Everyone has to walk through this store to get from one side of the mall to the other. As I walked around and wrote down everything I noticed I caught on to a few trends. There was at least 2/3rds of the people shopping were females. Also you could tell a difference in who had money and who didn’t by where they shopped. The people walking out of Abercrombie and Arden B were distinctively wealthier looking then the people that were in stores like Aeropostale. Also I noticed a lot of the people there were younger. (Under 35-40) I only saw a few older people the whole time I was at the mall. This got me to wondering if I go downtown to corner store will I see a trend of elderly people and very few young people. So I conducted my survey and left to go downtown. I asked about 15-20 people about their opinion on if building malls and big stores is good for the community. Over 75% of them all said that it was good. They all said something like “It expands the town and creates jobs.” Or “it keeps us modernized and with the fashion trends of the rest of America.” So after that I left and headed downtown with a local of Lexington. Me and her went to some small self-owned business down town and asked the workers there opinions. They tended to say that for the city it was a good thing because the malls helped spread out the people instead of having them all in one spot but it caused majority of the small businesses to close do to everyone starting to shop elsewhere and they felt that it caused Lexington to be like every other big city and not its own different city. I guess you could say it lost its local culture. Also my hypotenuse was right I did see a lot more older people (age 40+) downtown then I did see at the mall. So after spending a couple hours running around town I have got different out looks on the impact a mall creates on a city.