San Marcos Outlet Mall:
License Plate Survey
Geography is all around us. For a little bit of a closure to our trip to Texas we visited the San Marcos Outlet Mall. Our assignment was to split up into teams and cover the whole parking lot collecting where the license plates were from. The San Marcos Outlet Mall is the third largest tourist attraction in the state of Texas, so we had a large area to cover. As the map illustrates below, persons participating in this shopping experience came from many places throughout North America. Data from 833 cars was taken and took nearly and hour to complete. Not surprising most cars were from people in Texas. With only 8 observances, Oklahoma came in second, followed by Kansas. Though nobody was interviewed, it might be assumed northern visitors were likely snowbirds either still living in Texas for the winter or on their way home. A few observances came from Mexico, with the most from the state of Nuevo Leon, near the Texas border, and a few from the states around Mexico City. The mall was only about half full on a Friday afternoon. If extended to a Saturday afternoon, most likely a greater diversity of places would be represented. Needless to say, consumerism was a consistent theme in this class, with the Outlet mall clearly highlighting this.
While collecting our data we had several curious people ask us what we were doing. They seemed suspicious and eventually we were confronted by the mall security. We were told to stop what we were doing. An interesting discussion point occurred upon completion as to why so many were nervous about this, yet no one ever asked us what we were doing. Would this same thing happen elsewhere in the U.S.? An interesting question that perhaps can be tested in the future. |
Vulgaria: "The emblematic cultural landscapes of contemporary American suburbia. They are landscapes of bigness and spectacle, characterized by packaged developments, simulated settings and conspicuous consumption, and they have naturalized an ideology of competitive consumption" (Knox 2005). |