Sunday, April 16, 2006 | 7:32 a.m.
There is nothing like traveling to other places to remind us how well Las Vegas performs its magic and how much the rest of the world still has to learn from us. During a recent trip to Minnesota, I visited the Mall of America, the self-proclaimed "biggest shopping center in the world." But a quick cruise around one portion of the mall and I was ready to go.
Nothing special there. The shops were ordinary; the entertainment flat, a bad county fair. Even the prospect of an array of Elvis impersonators the next day could not get me back. It was not even up to the standards of Circus Circus. Once again, Las Vegas' attractions trump all others. What do you expect in a town where A-entertainment goes begging?
The Mall of America opened in 1992, the same year as the Forum Shops at Caesars. Billed as the greatest shopping experience on Earth, the mall has miles of shopping, more than even the most self-indulgent American - a believer in the idea that being American means that anything worth doing is worth overdoing - could manage.
In design, there is nothing fancy about the Mall of America. It simply melded the American penchant for size with a common feature of cold Northern cities, the connected downtowns of places such as Minneapolis and Spokane. In these frozen cities, you can access almost any part of the downtown by connected walkways. This way, you go from your attached garage to your indoor parking and then to your office without ever going outside. Even better, you can go out to lunch, shop and fill every other need, never encountering the always dreary and freezing cold.
The Mall of America simply took this idea and reversed its direction. Instead of linking downtown by connective walkways, it built an enormous downtown as a shopping experience, well away from the downtown of either of the Twin Cities.
With four floors of shopping and four anchor tenants, everything you need for a consumerfest was there. One of my companions, a known shoe horse, was ecstatic that he could visit the biggest Nordstrom in the world. He was sure he would find a couple of pairs of Italian shoes that he could not find anywhere else. After all, bigger is better, right?
If raw consumption is what you are after, this idea works. I would venture that any store in any mall in America is replicated in the Mall of America. But that is where the imagination ends and Las Vegas begins.
The Forum Shops have been reborn time and again since 1992. The statues move; they speak. The sky changes. There is a kind of life to the place, a sense of self that is much more than simply consumption. It entertains your spirit, even your mind, as well as lightening your wallet more than a little.
And the Forum Shops are the oldest and strangely most stolid of Las Vegas' shopping attractions. Since they opened, we have undergone a remarkable transformation in retail amenities. It is no longer enough to simply sell something on the Las Vegas Strip. You have to entertain along with it.
So we see the shopping at each of the hotels, the redesign of the Fashion Show mall, each with its set of tricks that draws you into its theme. You are never just shopping in Las Vegas. You are always making yourself into something new.
Rather than waste my money, I am going to go back to vacationing on the Strip. Not only do I save the airfare, but I also see more of the world - at least as portrayed by Las Vegas hoteliers - and I get better experience for my buck. Entertainment and shopping have become the same thing. It is no longer about the goods, but about the way you acquire them.
So even though the Mall of America claims 35 million to 40 million visits a year, comparable to the number of visitors to Las Vegas, our ability to sustain illusion provides an emotionally more fulfilling experience than the grandiose, oversized shopping of the Mall of America. It is hard to call Las Vegas subtle, but in comparison, we are quite refined.
archive
