I wonder how long department stores will survive. When I was a kid, department stores were still thriving but there were signs that the end was near. In trying to be all things to all people they ended up being of no use to anyone, which is a lesson many people also need to learn. Christmas shopping at a department store that's twisting in its final agony is a singularly cheerless experience, like rummaging through the catacombs, looking for the perfect discount femur for Grandma. You really want an impression of obscene abundance, the hysteria of lusty unbridled commerce, every table overflowing and every shelf bulging with merchandise. When my mother would take me shopping at the department store the sheer scale excited me, it was nearly sensory overload. I got the impression that shopping was one of life's fundamental activities, not a need-driven task but something you did all the time without thinking, like going to school. Christmas at the department store was too much for me, like a fun theme park ride that suddenly turns terrifying and disorienting, a bewildering maze of distorting funhouse mirrors featuring cackling grotesqueries. I can totally understand little kids who momentarily lose sight of their mothers in department stores and get completely unhinged. I remember being bundled in winter clothes, overheating in parka, gloves, woollen hat, and scarf, and wandering in a daze amid all the shimmering chrome and glass thinking I might very well have mere moments to live before asphyxiating or perishing of heat stroke. The smell of holiday candles, the sickening sweet aroma of different colognes mingling in the air, turning a corner to the sudden erotic shock of looming male mannequins modeling underwear, pointedly headless to draw your eye toward their mesmerizing but forbidden genital mounds. Store designers should take into consideration the visual experience of patrons under four feet tall, from that height the already dizzying swirl of delirious capitalist aggression and naked sexual appeals can cause panic attacks or even seizures.