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Jordan Heath-Rawlings
For reasons that will become clear in a moment, I took a couple of hours this week and went and hung out at the mall where I used to hang out in high school school. If you have been to a mall regularly over the past few years, you don’t need me to tell you that they’ve changed. This mall wasn’t dead, or even close to dying the way so so many malls are right now. Research suggests that malls are closing rapidly across North America, being turned into condo complexes and mostly Amazon warehouses. Now, my old mall is not yet either of those things, but what it is is half-empty. And what is notable is what has vanished. The stores where we used to kill time and just browse. The music store long gone. The electronics store has vanished. So has the sports apparel shop where we used to gather and swap baseball cards and just hang out and argue over whose team was better. What remains in this mall are stores that you go to with a list a big grocery store, a Walmart, a Home Depot. And in between those three staples are some smaller shops, a big gym, and a lot of empty storefronts. We all understand why this has happened. I am sure online shopping was killing malls even before the pandemic made everyone who wasn’t into a prime member. But what I’m not sure we understand is what we lose when we no longer have an excuse to browse, to find something unexpectedly that delights us, or even to just wander aimlessly just looking. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jason Guriel is the author of several books, including Forgotten Work and his most recent, which we’re discussing today on Browsing, which is now available online and in bookstores everywhere and at your favorite mall, right? I hope, Jason.
Jason Guriel
Well, I hope so, but the bookstores have fled the malls. So maybe the independent bookstores. We’re here to talk about malls, but also just browsing and a whole lot of things that we maybe used to take for granted or maybe used to even not like so much, and now we miss.
Jordan
So, Jason, why don’t you start just by describing that mall that you basically grew up in. Was it a unique mall or just like a suburban mall mall?
Jason Guriel
Well, I grew up in a suburb of Toronto. I grew up near a few malls that my family and I frequented Cloverdale, Sherwood Gardens, Square One when I was a kid. These malls were relatively modest affairs. They were unaffordable. They sort of were human skills to some extent. There was usually a couple of department stores that sort of anchored the mall, and you would have a Cloverdale, which you could walk to and from where I lived, and it’s still around, although slated for condos, I’m given to understand. But Cloverdale had a bookstore like A-W-H. Smith later became a coles. It had a music store, grocery store. So it met our needs. It was sort of beloved bias. The other ones I mentioned, Sherwood and Square One, they were bigger malls, but still at that time, in the 80s, relatively affordable. Those in particular have really kind of metastasized in recent years. They’ve become very upscale. They’ve lost all their physical media stores, more or less. I mean, I think they’ll have an Indigo, but Indigo, my feeling is more or less almost like a lifestyle store at this point. It doesn’t have the selection of books that like the world’s biggest bookstore had once upon a time in downtown Toronto. So the malls have really changed since I was a kid, and I would say they become less useful. And certainly some of the malls, like the bigger ones, have no longer meet the needs of the kind of family that I grew up in. So this is going to sound dumb, but you wrote a whole book on it, so I’m going to get you to define browsing in that mall, maybe that you grew up in. Well, it was a ritual. I had an extremely boring childhood. My parents had a modest upbringing. My parents didn’t. Relatively working class. We didn’t travel a lot. I wasn’t in extracurricular. When Saturday came around, we went to the mall. And it had to be Saturday, because when I was young, that was the era before Sunday shopping, right? Sunday was like it truly was that day of rest that you couldn’t really do anything. So browsing was a ritual. On Saturdays, we would go to the mall as a family. We would inevitably park outside a department store. I don’t know why, but for some reason, that was what we had to do. We didn’t go into the mall proper, go through Sears, go to the food court, and it was a treat. It was actually a treat because my mom was, you know, she was like sort of a committed cook. She made all of the meals. And so it was sort of like a novelty to go to Burger King on Saturday. And we would split up, and it was sort of a lovely experience. I would have a little bit of spending money. Sometimes I would be after a particular book or a cassette, or after that, a CD. If we went to a bigger mall, Square One, which had a comic store, I might be interested in a comic. Sometimes. I wasn’t after anything in particular, but I had a little bit of money and I wanted to browse and I wanted to buy something. It was lovely, and it was what we did every Saturday. And there was a kind of freedom to that. And also sort of, you know, as a young kid, having a little bit of independence, being on my own for an hour, perusing the Stephen King novels that my mom would have frowned upon, which I never brought home. It felt like a kind of an adult activity.
Jordan
Sure. You’ve written an entire collection of essays on browsing. You clearly think that we’re missing something by not no longer doing it. What are we missing?
Jason Guriel
Well, I didn’t necessarily think we collectively were missing it. I wrote the original essay that forms the heart of this sort of opening chapter of this book about a year into the Pandemic. It was early 2021, and I was feeling very frustrated. I felt we’d been at home for a year. We were very much marooned, consigned to our screens, constantly scrolling, and I was sort of missing bricks and mortar browsing, missing being in record stores, bookstores, movie stores, which had been dwindling anyways prior to the Pandemic. And I wrote this piece that, as I say, form sort of the bulk of the first chapter. And I assumed immediately it was going to be like I just assumed it was too curmudgeonly and too nostalgic and even maybe reactionary. Like, I thought, who’s going to be interested in this? I sent it to an editor I know at the Walrus, not thinking he would actually want to take it. He just happens to be someone who reads a lot of my writing, and I was surprised that he wanted to take it for the magazine. And then when it came out, you know, I always get it wrong. I’ve written things that I thought were relatively benign, and then that provoked, like, a reaction online, like a negative book review or something. I thought it was like a mixed book review, and it wasn’t a big deal. And I wrote this piece thinking, oh, people will hate this piece. I’m being snobby. I’m being nostalgic. I’m mythologizing, you know, experience. The world moved on. We all have apps. We’re all streaming. And I was amazed at the reaction. I mean, it sort of went viral. It really traveled. I know for a fact, according to my editor, that it dominated the traffic for the walls for a while. And, you know, an editor, a food editor at The New York Times linked to it, the Athletic linked to it. And then my publisher wrote to me out of the blue and said, we have this series of books called Field Notes. So I published the Biblioasis, and they conceived of this Field Notes series to essentially to sort of function the way, like, 18th century pamphlets function, like 250 word polemical books on a topic like property or the pandemic or whatever. And so they have this one called On Pandemic, there’s one called On Property and so on. And my publisher, said, why don’t you do would you be interested in doing on browsing? The rest is history. But when I sat out, I thought I was boring a very personal, niche kind of feeling, and I was amazed at how much it seemed to resonate with people online.
Jordan
That’s a fascinating story, but now I’m going to play the journalist and point out that you didn’t answer the actual question, which is, why did something about spending time aimlessly at a mall, looking through CDs or wandering around resonate so far and wide? Clearly, you hit a nerve. What is that nerve, though, that we’re trying to talk about?
Jason Guriel
I mean, I can speak for myself in that I was feeling worn out. We were ordering our groceries. We had really small kids, and we didn’t feel super comfortable taking them out to stores. And we were privileged in the sense that we could order things for a house. We were doing a lot of online ordering all the time. I think we were feeling exhausted. I think we were missing the experience of sort of being bodies in space, moving through stores, discovering things by accident that we hadn’t set out to look for. So much of the experience of online shopping I find alienating like products appear. You as these tiles on the screen, and you click on them and they may or may not be in stock. And so just that communal experience of going out to a store, sharing a set of options with everyone who’s in that store, and they’re all there, they’re on the shelf. You don’t have to click on them. You can pick their in stock, you can pick them up. So maybe it was something to do with that, something to do with missing that sense of community you get from being out and about.
Jordan
What is different about browsing? I mean, you mentioned that shopping online is different because you’re looking for something that may or may not be in stock. But I do a lot of online shopping browsing on my phone, right, where I will just search for random things. What’s different between that and the kind of browsing we’re talking about here?
Jason Guriel
I think that browsing. I hate online shopping. I hate being I mean, I do it, I certainly but you don’t enjoy it.
Jordan
Why not?
Jason Guriel
First of all, I find scrolling my phone a very blinkered, linear experience, right? You sort of call up a website, scroll through the various pictures of the clothing or the CD or the CD hub. People don’t buy CDs, but you know what I mean. You’re scrolling through the product, it’s very linear, it’s very blinker. You click on something and you’re sort of like immediately hustled to the products page, right? Whereas when I used to go into the world’s biggest bookstore, which was a great big bookstore in downtown Toronto, you had a kind of panoramic view of this big space. If you wanted to buy whatever, like a William Gibson novel, you start had to make your way to the science fiction section. You had to make your way to the part of the section for the books whose author’s last name and start with G and on route. You were like being exposed to, like, other possibilities. You might stumble on something you hadn’t seen. And again, I’ve had this experience of online shopping where you click on something that might not be in stock or you order it and then you get the email, like a week later. There’s a delay, there’s a problem. The lovely thing about browsing was if the book was there, it was there, you picked it up. If it wasn’t there, you might stumble on something else that you weren’t necessarily looking for. And I find that the algorithms, the recommendation engines, they never suggest something to me that I’m actually interested in purchasing. They are crunching numbers. They’re looking at what other customers purchased who were interested in that item. You’re not necessarily going to get some quirky, oddball suggestion. The serendipity is really what you lose when you’re shopping online. The sort of chance encounter. Some of the things that have meant the most to me are things that I hadn’t set out to look for, like a particular album or a particular book discovered in a used music store, used bookstore. I was not looking for that particular item. It was not something I was going to find in a more mainstream store or necessarily online. It was purely by chance that I stumbled on it. And some of those albums and books were almost life changing in a sense, and they were purely found through accident.
Jordan
That’s a great explanation. And when we did an episode earlier this year I’m going to talk now about maybe why Browsing resonated with me, but we did an episode earlier this year about our dying attention spans in general, and it’s just incredibly hard to focus and pay attention. And one of the things that came up in that discussion is that it’s very, very difficult for us to be aimless anymore. And I know Browsing isn’t exactly aimless because theoretically you’re going there with like, I might want to buy this CD or this book or whatever, but is it the same general principle that you kind of have to satisfy yourself with whatever happens to be in front of you and you’re not looking through a Netflix queue, which is the best example I can have. Just paralyzed by like, there’s 15,000 movies in here, I got to choose the best one.
Jason Guriel
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think there’s something about the activity of browsing that there’s a semi aimlessness to it, right? Because you can set out for the city, for the bookstore with an idea. But, you know, the way we used to do it, like my buddies and I, when we were in high school in the 1990s, none of us had a smartphone, right? My parents in particular were not helicopter parents. They were an older generation. We were benign neglect the operative principal. And my buddies, we set up for the city on our own. If we split up, we had to arrange to meet somewhere. We were very much alone. And there was certainly that we were maybe joking around with each other, but when we were like when we went into, like, HMV or whatever, we were sort of all on our private missions. We didn’t have tweets or emails coming in. We weren’t checking our phone. So browsing was closer to something like aimlessness. In the book, there’s a really useful definition of browsing that the editor and critic Leon Wieseltier came up with. He wrote about the loss of a beloved record store in The New Republic, like, a decade ago. And he sort of used that occasion to kind of meditate a little bit on the difference between browsing and search. That was his distinction. I think of it as kind of like browsing scrolling, but he was sort of talking about the difference between browsing a store versus searching on Amazon. And he says, browsing is the opposite of search. Search is precise. Browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for. When you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge. Browsing corrects your ignorance. And so he very much for him, browsing was this kind of like time he called it like a time honoured intellectual and cultural activity. It is a kind of aimlessness, but it widens, it doesn’t narrow. Whereas if you’re on Amazon and you’re looking for a particular book, you type that title in and you’re zoomed right to that page and you miss that opportunity to wander. You miss that opportunity for your eyes to fall on something else on an adjacent shelf. So, yeah, that really resonates with me, that idea of browsing as a form of aim, of discovery.
Jordan
You mentioned that it is a time honoured tradition. Is it still a time honored tradition? I have a five year old kid. You mentioned that you have a couple of young kids. Have you tried to get them to browse or take them to a store and say, go find something?
Jason Guriel
It’s very interesting because my kids are six and three. They were obviously a couple of years younger when the pandemic started, and we just didn’t bring them to a lot of stores. Right when we finally started relenting and most of us were backed, my daughter, she only just got back because she was the last cohort, right when we finally relented and took them to source, they were blown away. We took them to Loblaws, and it was better than going to the Rom or something. It was so exciting. They each got to, like, pick a treat. Like, just the stimulation of running down aisles. The sensory stimulation has been somewhat impoverished in some ways by the pandemic, so that will possibly shift. But, you know, we had this interesting experience earlier in the summer because it was my son’s birthday and I think we were in Ottawa. We were visiting his grandparents, and he really wanted to watch. I think the new Minions movie was out, and he really wanted to rewatch Despicable Me. And at that time, it had just left Netflix. We thought it was there, and it had left and it wasn’t there. Right. And my kids are growing up with streaming and the Internet, and for them, like, so called content, it’s plentiful it’s everywhere. You pull it out of the air. And it was almost like it almost sort of took him up short a little bit. Like, oh, this thing that was accessible is no longer accessible. On our way home, we stopped in Belleville. We always stopped in Belleville because there’s a lovely mall that has incredibly not one, but two music stores. It has a sun. And these have really vanished right, from malls. Right? I mean, there’s certainly independence downtown. Those have dwindled, but we stopped at Belleville and they have a Sunrise and they have a Sam the Record Man. They have the last Sam the Record Man. Someone bought the rights to it. You can buy a Tshirt at this store that says, yes, this is the last Sam the Record Man. And I have that T shirt. So we stopped at the mall and we found Despicable Me on DVD for $4. We have a little portable DVD player. And so on the rest of the way home, they watch Despicable Me in the back seat. And so they’re starting to get, or at least my son is starting to get the idea that actually streaming is not necessarily the solution to everything, that you still kind of need stuff, right? Like, you’re starting to get that, oh, it’s important to have the DVD because some of the movies are not on Netflix or Disney Plus or whatever.
Jordan
That’s funny. And I will ask you my final question, but just to share a story on the flip side of that. When we started taking my daughter to toy stores after the pandemic, she could not understand why the toy store in our neighbourhood did not have the exact specific copy of the one book that she wanted, because she’s so used to me being able to go on Amazon or somewhere else and get exactly the book that she wants. She didn’t understand that, like, a store just didn’t have everything.
Jason Guriel
Yeah. And that is an interesting point. My kids are going to have a very different childhood in the sense that I experienced real limits as a kid, like, especially a young kid. Like, you couldn’t go, you know, if you wanted something, you had to go to the store. You couldn’t go on Sunday. You had to make do with what was there. If what was there, wasn’t there, you had to figure it out, right? And they’re having a little bit of that experience, too, with, like, Saturday morning cartoons. Like, they have really, like, CDC kids, right? And so they go downstairs and they put it on, but they get annoyed when there’s a show on that they don’t like and it’s like we have to explain to them, no, it’s like live TV. Like, we can’t fast forward through this. You can’t choose. You have to sort of endure it. They’re sort of okay, right? Like they make you you can’t choose. Yeah, but they’re not used to having to accept not used to not having a choice in what they want to consume. Exactly. And I think what’s interesting is I experience the limitless, the seemingly limit, let’s say seemingly limitless choice, because I think there are limits to the Internet in some respects, and I’ve had my frustrations with finding things, but that seemingly limitless choice actually starts to be oppressive in a way. And I think earlier you used the word paralyzed. I’ve had that experience of sort of popped in front of something like Netflix and feeling paralyzed with indecision and then just watching whatever stupid thing is trending at the moment. So I think there was a real value to having some limits and having a kind of circumscribed set of choices, and we survived.
Jordan
Last question. If somebody’s been listening to this conversation and it’s kind of like intrigued by it, they’re probably like, why am I getting this conversation on a news podcast? But it’s okay. That’s why we do these on the weekend. The question I have is, how would you recommend somebody who maybe has lost that feeling or doesn’t quite remember it? Try to experience browsing today, tomorrow, and see if it moves them.
Jason Guriel
Well, I think you’d have to leave your phone at home and set up for a nice walkable neighbourhood that still has some bookstores, like an area that sort of high density and pedestrian friendly, and leave your phone, which I think is like an unthinkable notion, but being truly arranged to be truly by yourself for a while. And that’s a tall order. But I think what I really miss when I was younger was that ability of being truly by myself and just wandering and being open to discovery and more often than not, finding something that I hadn’t set up for it. And it sort of taken the top of my head off, to quote Emily Dickinson.
Jordan
Jason, thank you so much for this. It’s a fascinating conversation.
Jason Guriel
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jordan
Jason Guriel, Author of On Browsing. That was The Big Story. You can find more at the Bigstorypodcast CA. If you scroll down or click on the Episodes page, you can browse for an episode you might have missed. You can also find us on Twitter at the bigstory FPN. You can also email us hello at Thebistorypodcast CA, and of course, call us 416-935-5935. Leave us a voicemail. We’re always happy to hear from you. You can get The Big Story in every single podcast player, and you can ask for it on your smart speaker by saying, play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. Take some time to walk around, aimlessly and we’ll talk Monday.
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