Remember when you could go to a Sharper Image or Brookstone store in the mall?
10I can’t remember the differences, but I know that, if you timed it right, you could sit in a massage chair for longer than you should.
Remember when those ionizing air “purifiers” were all the rage, and they’d have like six of them running at the same time, and all the ozone in the air would make your nose hurt?
I’m old.
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I remember when “malls” were a thing. How many decades ago was that again?
@narfcake Yeah. As much as I maligned them like everyone else back in the day, I miss them now …
@narfcake Their downfall was in the way that they became so boringly interchangeable.
I spent a lot of quality time and money in Brookstone before they closed the stores in the malls by me. I have plenty of cool but useless items to prove it.
@heartny Hmmmm …
/showme human wearing shirt that says “Heart NY” is in living room where every object is labelled “Brookstore”.
@cfg83 Here’s the image you requested for “human wearing shirt that says Heart NY is in living room where every object is labelled Brookstore.”
I can remember this rowing machine that Sharper Image had and we had a blast playing with that thing for a while. It was probably early mid-80s
I enjoyed checking out the weird items at Spencer Gifts in the malls!
@MrGoodGuy Let’s do an AI cross-refrenence test …
/showme human wearing shirt that says “Mr Good Guy” is in living room where every object is labelled “Spencer Gifts”.
@cfg83 Here’s the image you requested for “human wearing shirt that says “Mr Good Guy” is in living room where every object is labelled “Spe…”
@mediocrebot Very good test outcome. It looks like you could feed the same inputs over and over again and get a tweaked-but-equivalent output.
I was never a big mall guy but I always liked to look through these:
@aetris Oh yeah, Skymall magazine was cool.
As mentioned… Spencer gifts was great!
@chienfou We still have a Spencer here in Houston.
@chienfou @werehatrack Huh. I just checked, apparently there’s one near me too. I’m surprised!
What I recall about both of them was the fact that while their gadgetry looked and seemed good in their catalog, the reality of actually seeing it was rather different. The cheapness of the quality was often obvious, as was the fact that it was mostly just mundane stuff that was given the Extra Strength Puffery treatment.
@werehatrack Maybe Brookstore was the Johnson Smith Catalog for adults :
@werehatrack I’m a sucker for extra strength puffery, that’s why I bought a bunch of useless stuff at Brookstone.
/showme extra strength puffery in a Brookstone store at the mall
@heartny Here’s the image you requested for “extra strength puffery in a Brookstone store at the mall”
@mediocrebot Looks legit. Brookstone did sell a lot of different pillows.
@heartny This made me laugh
. That would be a good brand name for pillows.
@Kyeh Sounds more appealing than “My Pillow”. And these have Mega Fluff Action too. Lol
@heartny
Better than MAGA … 
And a couple of stores over from Brookstone was Radio Shack. Sigh.
@mehcuda67 And just a few farther down was Walden Books or B Dalton. Over in the other wing, Remington had their knives and shavers store.
@mehcuda67 @werehatrack And Hoffritz had great knives and scissors. I also miss CompUSA, Circuit City and Border Books, although they were generally outside the mall not in it.
@heartny
@heartny @narfcake After Circuit City went belly up, I thought Best Buy was next, but there you go.
@cfg83 I’m surprised Best Buy survived. Check things out there and then buy on Amazon for a better price.
My then 7 year old grand daughter asked me how old I’d be on my next birthday. She then looked at me incredulously and asked, “You’re not dead yet?”. I asked her if I looked dead.
Of course my then grandson at 10 stated, very matter of factly, that anyone over 17 was old. When he worked out how many years until he was 17, I asked him if he would be old in 7 years. Horrified he said, “No way!”. I then asked him how old was old. He said, “Anyone over 18.”.
Once one of my traditional aged college students stated in class, “Anyone over 40 needs to retire to give us young people a chance.”. I immediately said, “Oh that would be great! 40-60 years of retirement at your expense. When can I start?” Most of the class burst out laughing although some looked horrified.
According to my mother you are not old until you are 104.
So depending on whom you ask you are old, surprisingly not dead yet, or have a long ways to go to be old. Take your pick.
@Kidsandliz Great stories.
I’ve known people in their 20s with a very old mindset and others in their 80s who still think like they’re young.