Northern Idaho News

Pointed Musings

Strip Malls and Hair Whores

By Joan Opyr, 6-27-06

I am a hair whore; I admit it freely. I travel from salon to salon, refusing to profess my loyalty to any one hairdresser, always looking for the best cut. Lately, however, I have been lavishing my follicles on one establishment in particular: Moscow’s Essence Salon in the new Village Mall. The wonderful Misty Parsons, Senior Stylist, has given me the best cut of my life. She was also kind enough to say that I had a nicely-shaped head, which, while it didn’t make me want to go Vin Diesel, did have me feeling a bit chuffed -- so chuffed, in fact, that I spent a ridiculous amount on some hair volumizing product made from volcanic ash. Yes: volcanic ash. As my eleven-year old daughter pointed out, the remnants of 1980's Mount St. Helen's explosion lie just beneath the surface of our kitchen garden. I could grab the garden dibble, dig down a few inches, and have all the volcanic ash I want.

The Essence Salon promises “beauty, luxury and tranquility” and, despite its location in a truly hideous new strip mall, Essence delivers convincingly. What I'm about to say is so not butch that I hesitate to confess it, but I love Essence so much that I’ve had my eyebrows waxed and my nails professionally manicured. A sports manicure, of course – no Dolly Parton or Patty LaBelle for me. Beauty, luxury and tranquility only go so far when you need to climb into the engine compartment on your 1976 Suburban and replace the gaskets on your exhaust manifold.

I love the Essence Salon, and yet I disapprove of its location. Moscow’s new Village Mall is a wretched-looking collection of buildings on the Troy Highway. What they look like are cheaply-constructed horse barns. The architecture is a mix of shiny aluminum and blood red panels, and each section of this hodge-podge of buildings features a strangely gabled roof. I have no architectural training and no real understanding of the principles of design, but the Village Mall looks like the sort of building I might construct if I were given a roll of Scotch tape and a deck of Bicycle playing cards. It’s not pretty.

Is it clear that I hate strip malls? The city of my birth, Raleigh, North Carolina, has been ruined by them. As the population of Raleigh and the Research Triangle Park has exploded, strip malls have spread out from the city’s center like Plantar’s warts. While I don’t believe that Moscow is in any real danger of booming in anything like the way that Raleigh and the Research Triangle have done, our small and intimate town does have a demonstrable excess of ugly retail space. Moscow’s two major malls, the Eastside Marketplace and the Palouse Empire Mall, are as dead as doornails. Shopping at either is like stepping into a mausoleum that accepts Visa.

The Eastside Marketplace is anchored by a Safeway. The Palouse Empire Mall is book-ended by Winco and a Bon Macy’s. In between and surrounding these anchor stores is . . . nothing. Not really. Of the two, the Palouse Empire Mall seems to be the healthiest, though too many retail outlets within its walls seem to come and go with frightful speed. As for the Eastside Marketplace, apart from a small Sears appliance store, a General Nutrition Center, a multiplex movie theater and a really great burger joint called Rudy’s, the place is like the Mary Celeste. Devoid of people; devoid of customers. As a retail rule of thumb, when a mall begins renting space to the Department of Motor Vehicles, it’s not just gasping for air: it’s Cheyne-Stokes breathing.

Moscow has recently emerged from a nasty battle over whether or not to allow a WalMart Supercenter to be built on the east end of town, between Paradise Ridge and the City Cemetery. Had the rezone of the land in question succeeded, the Supercenter would have been caddy-corner to the Eastside Marketplace. I can't picture Sears or Safeway or the vitamin store surviving that.

Still, as empty and slow as the Eastside Marketplace is, I wonder how the Village Mall located just up the highway will fare? Apart from the Essence Salon, the Village Mall is empty. There are two other shops -- one with a window full of sportswear, UI Vandals and WSU Cougars sweatshirts and such, and another shop selling naughty night attire. This is Moscow’s third such store; the other two, located downtown, are Eclectica and Sweet Streak Lingerie. No, I am not making this up. Someone racked his or her brains for a great name for a lingerie store and all they could come up with was Sweet Streak. Why not Frederick's of Logging Wood or Victoria's Dead Giveaway? I've heard there's such a thing as truth in advertising. Perhaps the items on display in the window at Sweet Streak are meant to appeal to nuns and Mennonites. Who knows? With three -- count 'em, three -- lingerie shops in this city of only 21,000, I'm forced to wonder what our mostly Catholic and Mormon residents are getting up to. Forced to wonder but trying to forget.

How many lingerie stores can one small town support? How many salons? How many tire stores and appliance stores, clothing stores, shoe stores, and purveyors of outdoor equipment? We have several independent bookstores (two solely Christian in focus) and two of the larger chains. No matter how much we all run up our credit cards or spend our home equity, retail is a support service; it's not an industry. While Moscow's self-styled pro-growth crowd pushes for every retail rezone that crosses the desk of Moscow's City Council, our town is clearly glutted with empty retail space. The Village Mall is three-quarters empty. The new Rodeo Center has nothing in it. Our malls are distressing retail dead zones. If it weren't for those damned addictive green tea smoothies at the Palouse Empire Mall Starbuck's, I'd do all of my clothes shopping via the Sierra Trading Post catalog. Good stuff, deep discounts, and no smells from the city's sewage treatment plant across the road wafting through the Bon Macy's.

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