I was out of town yesterday and stopped in an unfamiliar mall to pick up a few things. It was one of those giant strip malls with a Home Depot on one end and a Target on the other. I could see another giant strip mall, with a Lowe’s at one end and a Wal-Mart at the other, across the superhighway. On the third corner was an outlet mall, designed to look the way downtowns used to look before they went out of business because it was easier to drive to the mall than downtown.

But now the traffic around malls is horrendous. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get from the mall with the Home Depot to the mall with the Lowe’s by car, yet I could see both stores. If it hadn’t been for the superhighway, I could have walked from one to the other. I ended up in the fake downtown mall by accident. It would have been easier to drive downtown.

All three malls were surrounded by housing developments, some of them just across the access road and a short walk to the mall. But no one was walking because, one, you’d have to climb over a 16-foot privacy fence.