Mall Booths

Every time I go to SouthPark, I feel like I am bombarded by sales people working booths trying to sell me a flat iron, a massage mechanism or some miracle hand cream.  I do what I'm supposed to in order to avoid them (look down and pretend like I'm on a mission) but they don't seem to get the hint and they continue to embarrass themselves by asking me if I'd like to try a sample. 

Listen, I get it.  We live in the South, it's humid outside, my hair is frizzy and could use a touch-up, but who knows whose hair that thing has been on!  And that "miracle" cream?  I'm pretty sure that if it was that great, you could afford an actual store front, or at least a spot in a department store instead of this sketchy booth.

At the risk of sounding snobby (what else is new?), what I really don't get is how these booths survive at SouthPark.  This is Charlotte's high-end mall filled with stores like Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Burberry.  If you're going to set up infomercial style booths, you need to move it on along to Northlake or Carolina Place where you can set up shop outside of Spencer's Gifts.

Ticketmaster

Carrie Underwood's summer concert tour was announced last week on Good Morning America and one of her stops will be Time Warner Cable Arena right here in Charlotte. As I set a reminder for myself so that I can get online right when the tickets go on sale, I then wondered why I should even bother. Everyone knows what happens. Corrupt individuals and/or organizations go online and snatch up as many tickets as possible so that they can then sell them for five times the face value on websites like StubHub.com. Then people like you and me are asked to pay $200 per ticket for a seat where you just end up watching the concert on the big screen any way. With the Internet dominating concert sales, ticket offices have become obsolete. Remember the good ol' days when your mom actually had to drive you to the Ticketmaster office in Hecht's department store at SouthPark so that you could wait in a real line, with real people, to buy tickets for Center City Fest? I miss that. I miss telling an actual person that I need two tickets, best seats they have available. Now by the time I figure out the cryptic code that websites force you to type in, the "good" seats I had are gone, sold, no doubt, to someone with plans to re-sell them. So here's to hoping that I can get in there quick enough to get Carrie Underwood tickets for the actual cost. And if come November, something else comes up and I can't go to the concert, I will be selling my tickets for face value.