I was out of town yesterday and stopped in an unfamiliar mall to pick up a few things. It was one of those giant strip malls with a Home Depot on one end and a Target on the other. I could see another giant strip mall, with a Lowe’s at one end and a Wal-Mart at the other, across the superhighway. On the third corner was an outlet mall, designed to look the way downtowns used to look before they went out of business because it was easier to drive to the mall than downtown.

But now the traffic around malls is horrendous. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get from the mall with the Home Depot to the mall with the Lowe’s by car, yet I could see both stores. If it hadn’t been for the superhighway, I could have walked from one to the other. I ended up in the fake downtown mall by accident. It would have been easier to drive downtown.

All three malls were surrounded by housing developments, some of them just across the access road and a short walk to the mall. But no one was walking because, one, you’d have to climb over a 16-foot privacy fence.

Two, you’d be taking your life in your hands to walk across a mall parking lot where normal traffic laws don’t apply. Customers drive on the left, they don’t look in the rearview mirror, and they think stop signs are quaint decorations of a bygone era, like old-time street lamps.

Three, if you bought something, how would you get it home on foot? You could always wander away with a shopping cart, but what would the neighbors think? So even if you live across the street from a giant mall, you have to drive there. They’ve been designed for cars, not people.

I spent about $130 on this trip — not hard when the replacement cartridge for my printer costs $60. When I got home, Sue was too tired to cook, and I’m not smart enough to cook, so we ordered a pizza and had it delivered. With the tip, it cost about $20. That’s when I started to wonder what would happen if I called the store where I bought the $60 printer cartridge and asked that it be delivered. Would the store tell me to get lost? Or to buy the cartridge online?