The Last Word: Security to aisle seven

OPINION: Got totally and utterly lost in one of those new Wastefield Malls the other day and then got even more bamboozled inside one of the Mega-marts that occupy all the space inside these malls that isn’t already taken up by car parks.

And don’t get me started on the car parks -- if you want to see real-life evidence of building design being influenced by smash repairers look no further. It just isn’t possible to negotiate those pillars with the box trailer attached without collecting some souvenirs from the other cars.

Being lost in a Mega-mart had a strange hypnotic effect even though we’d run out of nitrous oxide days ago. Things just seemed to end up in the shopping trolley that definitely weren’t on the shopping list. All kinds of strange stuff just appeared on shelves that we had never before visited. Products began begging to join the other products already in the trolley. The bleating didn’t stop until their requests were satisfied and no, the children weren’t even along for the ride, so not their fault -- this time.

Well, they were along for the ride but they were too busy protecting the car from would-be assassins. People just bash into your car without a second thought but they seem to take more care when there’s a small child roped to the bulbar.

Now just what was going on in this Mega-mart that caused trolleys to magically overflow with goods? Whatever they’d done we want the same magic back in our Rabid Reseller shop.

Armed with the trusty Rabid digital camera, on special this month only, we took photos of the entire Mega-mart. Actually we only got as far as aisle seven before this huge dude in a rent-a-cop uniform asked us to cease and desist.

Do they all talk like that? Anyway, he had the gun and we’d forgotten ours, so we decided to agree with his point of view on this occasion.

Back at the shop, we printed out all the photos on our Rabid inkjet printer, also on special this month only, and sat staring at them for hours, until all the Crown Lager was gone.

But where was the magic. After another slab of Crownies arrived, things started to get clearer. This was not a standard Mega-mart. The aisles were all laid out in a connecting pattern that looked eerily familiar. Now where had we seen this geometric design before?

Turning to the comics pages of the Sunday papers for a little light relief the answer to the Mega-mart puzzle was staring us in the face! A maze! No, not amazing, a maze. One of those designs where you can only get in through one door and out through another after you’ve wandered aimlessly up and down every passage in between.

So that’s how they do it! You can’t leave until you’ve shopped every aisle! Pure marketing genius!

Before you could finish another slab of Crownies we’d rearranged the aisles in the Rabid Reseller shop into a maze pattern that would force everyone to peruse every item we have on offer.

All that remained was to wait for the customers to start weaving their way through the aisles, and watch as they piled item after item into their trolleys. Reminder: borrow some trolleys from the Mega-mart before they open tomorrow.

The best laid plans as they say, don’t always translate well into reality. Nobody bought anything until we put things back the way they were. We’re still not quite sure exactly what went wrong.

Perhaps the fact that the trolleys we borrowed are exactly the same width as the aisle was a contributing factor. Maybe we need our own architecturally challenged car park. Could it be that the combination of pugnacious parking followed by maze meandering is the necessary trigger that induces shopaholic behaviour?

The acting junior sales assistant reckons it wasn’t possible to build a maze of aisles when you’ve only got one aisle in the shop, but that just shows the total lack of imagination inherent in a brain addled by too many computer games. Remind me to cancel the staff discount scheme.

Gotta go, customers waiting!