Shop Shop, Hooray!

While I like to think that my blog can be meaningful and thought provoking, I have had WAY too many rants about gloomy topics lately - taxes, school closings, and Mary Kate Olsen, among others.

So please indulge my desire to celebrate something completely frivolous: the continued resurgence of the Stamford Town Center. No longer do us Stamfordites have to hang our heads in shameful subservience to the hushed, marbled glory of the Westchester Mall, with it's fancy stores and overpriced parking.

It wasn't so long ago that the Town Center was teetering on the brink of irrelevancy. One could smell a not-too-distant future where even the Macys would flee, destined to be replaced by a Sears and/or a Steve and Barry's, while the rest of the mall became overrun with Dollar Trees, Fashion Bugs, magazine shops with large inventories of porn, and maybe even a check cashing store.

But just as the mall teetered on brink of going toe up, the Mall Gods did unleash hell, annihilating a whole wing and birthing a shiny new structure from whence the H&M and the Barnes & Noble did emerge . Along with a bunch of soul-sucking, overpriced, mediocre chain restaurants.

Don't get me wrong - while I am PHILOSOPHICALLY violently opposed to the idea of eating at a chain restaurant instead of a local place (with the possible exception of the PF Changs, and OK, I have been known to take the littlings to the California Pizza Kitchen once in a while because the little heathens hate food that has any real taste), in PRACTICE, the presence of a Capital Grille means that the gods of bland upscale mediocrity think this little mall just might make something of itself.

And so...the improvements begat Starbucks! And an Apple Store! And now comes news that Zara is on its way! And more tax revenues through increased shopping traffic, leading to more cachet for the downtown area, leading to appreciated home prices, which will spawn even more pseudo-upscale stores from which we can purchase more stuff to tastefully appoint our renovated Cape Cods. It's a perfect suburban bourgeois storm! We might even be deemed worthy of a J. Crew someday!