What happened to book stores? And why the smell?

My family and I are celebrating a belated Christmas, so I went to the Westfield Valley Fair Shopping Center - a giant mall in Santa Clara/San Jose - to hit the sales.  Some of the kids I'm buying for are really into Abercrombie & Fitch (to quote my college roomates, "MUST BE TRENDY!!!!"), so my husband and I took a stroll through there. We were nearly overcome with the blaring loud music and the overwhelming scent of cologne.  Now don't get me wrong, I like loud music - I worked in two different music stores for a total of about 6 years in the industry. I just don't like it so loud that I literally can't hear my husband shopping next to me, nor the cashier behind the register.  And the smell - it was so over powering! Who would wear so much cologne?!?

Well, off for the next person on our list, we started looking for the book store. Was it Borders? Hrm... where was it again? Unable to find the book store where it used to be, we checked the store directory. No book store. None.  Giant mall and no readers. That's depressing.  Well, more reason to spend money in downtown Mountain View, where we have at least three book stores.

Arriving home, I discovered another disturbing thing about Abercrombie.  All of the items purchased from the store reeked of their cologne. They obvsiously spray the garments in the store in order to encourage people to buy their cologne, too. Now my house smells like Abercrombie. Note to self: don't ever shop their for anyone who has allergies!

On a completely unrelated note, why do the producers of American Idol insist on showing people suffer through miserable auditions, and hardly show any of the people going through to Hollywood?  As someone who has auditioned a lot, and knows when I've had a bad audition, I certainly wouldn't want it televised!