GranolaBox

Shortly before Christmas, Queen of my Universe and I visited a local mall to kill time before a movie and to look for something to put my daughter’s birthday present (a piece of hip jewelry) in. Normally, I avoid malls except in the company of my daughters, who are budding mall rats and QoMU avoids them even more assiduously, but we needed to kill time.

We located what we wanted immediately, but still had time to kill so we went to Lord and Taylor so QoMU could check out their Christmas marketing decorations to get some ideas for her own business. Their decorations were decidedly lame, but as we wandered the store I couldn’t help but notice a curious phenomenon. The nipples on the mannequin’s perky breasts were noticeably erect. Clearly a job for the phone cam.

Then out of curiosity we moved to the more elegant clothing section (not sure what they call it) to see if the whole store was “nippy.” Sure enough….

So out of curiousity and boredom, we decided to scan some of the other mall stores to check the status of other mannequins. JC Penney’s models were unimpressive.

We moved next to H&M, where we didn’t have to go any further than the window to find the headlights blaring.

Oddly enough, the hard nipples were mostly confined to the store window. This was the closest we found in the store itself.

The same thing was true at Forever 21, although the window there had the most prominent features we saw the whole day.

The Bon Ton had very little to offer, and since the car was parked outside and the movie was starting soon we curtailed the rest of our research.

This all led us to some interesting questions.

What discussions go on in the mall meeting rooms, or in corporate board rooms to decide whether or not to use the mannequins with no nipples or the mannequins with high beams? I’d like to be a fly on the wall to hear that discussion.

Is there a demographic among women shoppers that will abuse their credit cards more readily if the mannequin’s nipples are hard? I don’t think they’re trying to hit the lesbian crowd. Most of my lesbian friends wear flannels and Carhart.

Are the mannequin’s with hard nipples in the windows placed there so horny men will encourage their significant others to shop there rather than a store with more nondescript mannequin nipples?

Is this even a conscious decision on the part of the store employees? Do they just pull mannequins off the shelves and dress them regardless of the status of their nipples?

What’s the ratio of erect vs. non-erect nipples produced at the mannequin factory? Are they produced with hard nipples or do store employees simply use something like silly putty or bubble gum to make them hard?

I’ll have to be at least as bored when I started my research to find the answers to these potentially earth-shattering queries.

Filed under: General Observations on January 18th, 2008