Saying Goodbye to the Downtown Sacramento Mall

After shooting photos of a new listing yesterday afternoon, I stopped at the downtown Sacramento Mall to visit Macy’s to see if I could pick up a new pair of shoes, as I have not been shoe shopping in person at a department store for almost a year. I work too much. The problem with Macy’s, of course, is it has downgraded its inventory so it tends to carry a lot of cheap-ass crap nowadays because it thinks that’s what Sacramentans want to buy and who knows, maybe they do.

Much of the downtown Sacramento mall is deserted. It won’t be long before the men’s store and furniture division of Macy’s will move out, too. This is where the new stadium for the Kings will be built. I owed it to myself to give it one more quick walkthrough before everything changes.

Fortunately, I did find two pairs of shoes I liked, but they were very similar to each other. As I stood there admiring them on my feet and prancing about, I decided I did not have all day to ponder the pros and cons between the two pairs, and I could not easily make up my mind, so I just bought them both. That seemed like the most cost effective way to solve my dilemma. The salesman saw that I had been struggling in my predicament and undoubtedly noticed how I resolved the issue by grabbing both pairs. He suggested maybe I would like the same shoe in a different color. Well, maybe he should go into real estate and stop wasting his talents in the Macy’s shoe department?

Macy’s now has WiFi so my cellphone worked all over the store, which was great! I chatted with buyers looking for homes, an agent in Phoenix sending me a referral, and a possible new listing for a seller in East Sacramento. But I knew I had to get back to my home office and upload photos for my new listing before it went live in MLS at midnight. That was a pressing deadline. I had allocated an hour for shopping and my hour was over.

I dashed for the elevator. The door opened, I got on and reached into my pocket for my cellphone. Just then a heard a guy yell HOLD THE ELEVATOR as he sprinted across the parking lot, his face beet red from puffing and huffing. I pushed CLOSE. Rats. He stuck his magazine into the door and jammed it open. I am nice all day long, darn it.

Foiled. He got on anyway.

Karma gets you, you know. Sure enough, I zipped into the middle exit lane, the one without a dude in the box who can take your ticket, and I ended up having to back out while some woman in a sporty red car yelled at me because she thought I was going to hit her.

As I drove up 9th Street with the top down and hair flying, leaves whirling around me in gusts of wind, I thought about how different it is to be working from my home office today versus what it was like in the 1980s. Almost nobody back then worked from home, and if you did, you didn’t tell anybody about it. Nowadays, it’s very common place. Few top-producing real estate agents work out of an office. You meet clients at the office, but you work from your home office.

If you haven’t been to the downtown Sacramento mall yet to say goodbye to the old place, this might be a good time to do it. And tell that guy in the shoe department at Macy’s, the kid with the red hair, he should go into real estate.