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Jasmine Barragan
Professor Koning
English 113B
24 February 2014
The Northridge Fashion Center: A Social Commerce Center
Driving up to the Northridge Mall, on Nordhoff Street and Tampa Avenue, its green
landscape amazes my eyes with such clean and well-maintained bushes and trash-less parking
lots. The moment I walk through the automatic sliding doors into the Northridge Mall and am
blasted with cool, outward-blowing air, the first thing I see is the mall directory. It is hard to
avoid glancing at the directory because it is placed directly in front of me. As I scan for the stores
I wish to shop at, I notice that all the stores of my interest are not only located on the same level
but are not more than fifteen steps from each other. I realize that as I make my way to Hollister
there is low music playing throughout the entire mall and as I pass stores I can hear slightly
louder, different music playing inside. As I descend on the escalator, the mall lounging area
comes into view and takes up most of the enlarged walkway. When I arrive at the entrance of
Hollister, there are shoppers coming in and out with similar clothing styles as mine. Inside I am
greeted with the strong scent of cologne and smiling welcoming employees no older than me. At
the mall, I feel comfortable and eager to shop.
The Northridge Fashion Center is viewed as a typical mall for entertainment and
shopping. According to the malls website, www.Northridgefashioncenter.com, the mall has two
levels and contains one hundred and seventy stores. It has an inviting atmosphere that attracts
teens, young adults, and mothers. The stores range from affordable to expensive and are arranged
as such. Surrounding the mall, there are multiple high-class restaurants, along with juice bars,
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coffee shops, and fast food dining areas. While many may view the Northridge Mall as simply a
place for entertainment, upon closer examination, stratified social classes, unnecessary
consumerism, and the disparate attraction of different people based on geographic location are
revealed.
To a typical shopper, when asked about what the Northridge mall is, will answer with
something along the lines of; a collection of popular stores and restaurants. While this is not
entirely wrong, the design of the mall is structured in such a way as to draw the attention of
multiple consumer groups. The owner of the Northridge mall separated the stores by social class
and by putting similar stores near each other. In the journal Social Classes and Spending
Behavior by Pierre Martineau mentions Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt have described a six-
class system: the Upper-Upper, or old families; Lower-Upper, or the professionals and successful
businessmen; Lower-Middle, or the white collar salaried class; Upper-Lower, or the wage earner,
skilled worker group; and Lower-Lower, or the unskilled labor group. The first and second level
at the mall separates the lower-middle and upper-lower social class with the types of stores on
the floor and how far apart they are from each other. Abercrombie and Fitch, Coach, and Fossils
contain affluent customers with similar taste and wealth, which are the type of people those
stores target when they advertise. In the excerpt Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of
Urban Space, written by Mike Davis, he explains how a creator of a space puts into thought the
people they want to attract Frederick Law Olmsted, the father od Central Park, conceived public
landscape and parks as safety-valves, mixing classes and ethnicities in common recreations and
pleasures. The lower level of the mall has all the stores that contains affordable merchandise.
The mall is laid out so that there are several annoying booths splayed across an otherwise wide
and open walkway.
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The Northridge Fashion center is a welcoming environment. It has seating areas fifteen
steps away from each other and an open lounge that has comfortable cushioned seats and
elevated chairs with counters surrounding the area. The mall designer placed plants in every
open corner and area in the mall to represent comforting, home-like decorations. The walls are
painted a light beige color to define simplicity and calmness within the area. This mall is a
welcoming space to intentional invite consumers to spend and entice them to return. In the
journal Personal values and shopping behavior by Yuanfeng Cai and Randell Shannon says
Warshaw and Davis define intention as the degree to which a person has formulated conscious
plans to perform and not perform some specified future behavior. This leads to the assumption
that the malls advertisements are not necessarily shoving deals down consumers throats but
instead, only giving consumers the idea of shopping because once they have a conscious thought
about shopping they have some intention of going shopping. The mall has neon advertisements,
for example Victoria Secret, that catches the consumers eye and drives them into the store to
shop around. Unnecessary consumerism is set into place because not only do the shoppers have
the low price advertisements in mind but the brand is also playing a key role to pulling them into
the store. In the journal article Sustainable Retailing and Consumerism by Peter Jones, David
Hieller, Daphane Comfort and Ian Eastwood define consumerism as the steady growth in the
attraction and consumption of goods and services. This means that in order for there to be
consumerism there must be some form of steady growth. For there to be steady growth, the
Northridge mall must have thought of ways to not only attract customers but also keep them
coming back.
The Panorama Mall has an opposite shopping environment compared to that of the
Northridge Mall, therefore consumerism at the Panorama mall differs greatly from consumerism
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at the Northridge mall. The Panorama Mall is located on Chase Street and Van Nuys Boulevard.
Its two anchor stores are El Curacao and Wal-Mart, which are at the ends of the mall, this alone
lets us know that the advertisements will not be targeting the more affluent of the social classes,
seeing as most upper class shoppers have never even stepped foot in an El Curacao. The
Panorama mall is a small strip that is only two blocks long in length, which makes it about the
length of the smallest section of the Northridge mall. The inside of the mall is full of Spanish
music as opposed to more main stream music, yet again giving away the type of customers the
Panorama mall is targeting. By playing music that is appealing to the ethnic groups in Panorama
(Hispanics), and providing food that corresponds with their cultural heritage, the Panorama mall
is ensuring to some degree the reoccurring business of their customers. The entire Panorama mall
is covered in booths selling anything from household electronics to junk food that contain
popular Mexican-American snakes. Most if not all of the stores are not considered popular or
upper class stores and are not widely known. The panorama mall has a small aisle that have
small open box stores, such as a swap meet, that sell their merchandise on tables and pinned
against the walls. The swap meet has shopping booths in every angle the customer turns towards
(such as the Panorama mall) and the type of selling techniques such as bargaining.
The space that is the Northridge mall can be viewed from many angles. The environment
ranges from a casual social space to separated businesses targeting consumers. The mall does a
great job of knowing the type of people that live near the mall and shop in the mall and have
tailored their advertising techniques accordingly. The amount of thought that goes into catering
for specific consumers is evident in the mall layout. The mall is basically divided up into two
halves; the half catering to consumers who know exactly what they need and have time for little
else (the Sears side), and the side that caters to those who are most likely there without having
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any clear destination in mind (the opposite end). The Northridge Malls hidden agenda is to
divide social classes by carefully placing certain stores on certain levels to promote unnecessary
consumerism.

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Works Cited
Cai, Yuanfeng, and Randall Shannon. "Personal Values and Mall Shopping Behaviour."
International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 40.4 (2012): 290-318.
Davis, Mike. Fortress L.A. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New
York: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.
Jones, Peter, David Hillier, Daphne Comfort, and Ian Eastwood. "Sustainable Retailing and
Consumerism." Management Research News, 28.1 (2005): 34-44.
Martineau, Pierre. "Social Classes and Spending Behavior." The Journal of Marketing, 23.2
(1958): 121-130.