Yikes. While I’m NOT a mall person at all and generally dislike large crowds, I’d never, ever consider suicide as an option to too much mall trawling. Sadly, some poor guy in Jiangsu Province (in Eastern China) decided to end it all after five hours with his girlfriend this past Christmas, leaping from a balcony after she wanted to go to one more shop. Wow. Now, the kind of amusing thing here is this seems to be such a huge problem in China (men hating to shop with their wives and/or girlfriends, not men throwing themselves off balconies when they do too much shopping with their wives and/or girlfriends) that some areas actually have what amount to “husband check-in” stations that keep the king of beasts there pacified and sane, although probably still worrying about their bank balances after all that purchasing power happening below.

I think we should have these sorts of things here as well, but it seems that Hollywood already thought of that little problem way back in 1932, as you can see above in that fun old MGM short. Then again, maybe over-shopping was a bad thing for Depression-era America, but these days, man and women alike will run over each other just to spend five hours or more snapping up two dollar toasters and half-price sweat socks. Perhaps there can be both ladies and mens check-in areas just so staggered shopping becomes a new habit people pick up. Heck, they’ll certainly be staggering after a few free glasses of watered-down booze. Still, I’d be fully into some of this pre-Hays Code era relaxation if this were actually existing today at a retail paradise near me. Heck, the floor show would even get me out for a stroll even if I was already well stocked with tomatoes and peaches…