File this under bizarre retail experiences:

I went to Pavilions / Vons tonight to get balloons for my boy’s birthday morning. 10pm entry. Sign on the door says they’re open until midnight.

Very few patrons in the place – two in line, maybe. This is the Newport Beach Pavilions by Bonita Canyon. 7+ workers, one on the cash register, one bagging groceries. Several others about.

Knowing that I’m going to buy a few other things, I go straight to the cashier and box boy to get some balloons filled up while I shop (btw – I worked in a market as a jr high kid and hs freshman, so I know how cruddy retail can be).

The cashier and box boy tell me to go pound sand in no uncertain terms.

I start to leave and then ask them for their manager (I’m on the hook for birthday wake-up morning, remember). They make the call for Terii or Terrii. Lots of extra letters.

Terrii doesn’t show up, but someone else does. She’s very helpful and see’s that I’m ticked. This balloon thing is one of our traditions, so I’ve done this quite a bit over the years. I’ve seen 6am produce people fill em up.. cashiers, mangers, the whole crew. They usually make it work. Especially when there’s no one in the store.

I offered to do the balloons myself tonight. The box boy, btw, said he didn’t know how to do it. I scoffed, probably shouldn’t have.

The manager woman who eventually filled up the balloons was a true hero / heroine. That has to be said. She was great. Shoulda got her name.

Anyway – I get the balloons, thank said manager profusely, and head to check-out with my other items.

By this time, Terrii is the one at the cashier. She’s checking me out. As I’m sliding my card through the reader, the manager woman walks by. I’ve got balloons over my head, btw. What does Terrii say to the manager as she passes by?. . . “I can’t believe you filled up these balloons for this guy.”

I was stunned. I freak stared the supervisor Terrii and left the place in a bewildered haze.

As I was shopping, I kept thinking that maybe I’m the NB a-hole. Preventing these people from a clean getaway when their shifts change. But I was there 2 hrs before closing. And I was thinking about how it was one of those critical retail moments that create customers/fans for life – a father getting balloons for his son’s birthday wake-up moment.

There was a moment there when they could have been superheroes, recovering from the initial blow off and coming full force with super service. Instead I’m writing this.

I don’t really expect extraordinary things from average retail . . but with all this word of mouth (WOM) social media stuff, I thought the world might be shrinking a little and retailers changing.

Still 2nd guessing Vons Pavilions

My wife recently remarked that the malls are full. “How could we be in a recession?” she said.

It got me thinking. Personal spending is obviously way down, but people still want to have a mall experience. They want to window shop, buy some small things, taste candy, play with pets, jump through fountains, see cool fashions and maybe dream a little.

The thing that *really* gets me. . in a recession. . is this. People go by the hoards to a place where the finest marketing minds in the world (from the most talented ad agencies known to man) are working their magic. Everything from the display windows and signage, to the cashier talk and uniforms, to the music and temperature, to the promos and tagging… is designed by the best of the best.

This may not be true of every store in every mall. The malls I usually witness are Fashion Island in Newport Beach CA, and South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, CA. But it’s certainly relevant to most of the national chains and high-end designers.

The point is that these people are voluntarily exposing themselves to a situation designed to suck money out of their pockets.

They want to be pitched, sold, persuaded and wow’ed! They want that, deep down.

And what do we complain about in marketing? Let me count the ways: Traditional advertising is dying. There’s too much noise out there. People are shutting out our messages. People are fed up with consumer-driven behavior. The market is resisting our messaging.

Yet, the malls still bring em in.

I realize that malls are “opt-in.” Maybe that’s something to ponder, too. Is there a way you can make your business and partner businesses more like a mall?

Something to think about. Enjoy your weekend. And please comment below to add your observations.

Louis Gray wrote a good article on Google Buzz today. He hits on the key factors at the very end (3rd paragraph from the end). He says, “So how can Google determine relevancy with Buzz and start making sense of the social? Starting with GMail gives the company a major headstart, as they already know which contacts you trade e-mail with most often. They know how often you read e-mail from specific people, who you chat with most frequently by using the integrated GTalk feature, and they will often have data from you that provides your location, helping to tap that metric as well.”

This is definitely where the rubber meets the road. Depending upon how you use the web, your browser, social networks and the like, Google could potentially know loads of information regarding *who’s sharing what and how important are they are to you based on your emails, texts, IMs and voice calls.* This gets really scary when you consider someone like me who has almost all the Google tools integrated – including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Voice and their various extensions in Google Chrome.

Or not – I’m pretty exposed Web-wise, anyway. Of course, it could be very useful for productivity, time-saving, entertainment, buying short-cuts, etc. That’s the grand vision, for sure.

Interestingly, the only way Google doesn’t know what I’m sharing is if I post directly via Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm, Hello.txt or some other social aggregation/post tool.

One thing I’ve noted.. Google could have gathered much more data about the content people share if they’d done a better job integrating “send link as email” within Chrome. Firefox does this really well. With Chrome you have to have an extension (apparently the 3rd pty one works best).. to pop open a gmail page and send. How much info are they missing when chrome users share using other tools because it’s not so easy with their own browser?

This will be a hot topic for some time to come.. what are your thoughts?

Under Armour store disses cotton to get you thinking about their materials and benefits.