There's No Smoke Without Smoke

I went to the mall the other day, and spent a perfectly lovely afternoon idly watching consumer spending slip into oblivion.

After a few hours of trawling the retail walkways of capitalism past, I began to feel sorry for all those stores acting as if the economy hadn't thudded to a stop like an Aunt Annie's pretzel dropped from the roof of the mall to the floor of the food court.

But if things were bad for the shop owners, they were exponentially worse for the slightly obscure retailers you find hawking their wares on those carts cluttering the mall avenues. You know, the ones parked in the areas between the real shops, selling face cream you've never heard of, or pushing violent kick boxing video workouts designed to make you tough and fit. This particular afternoon, I noticed a deathly sales pallor at the moccasins cart - the one that sells only fluffy moccasin products - and at the cute-but-overpriced children's sweater cart. Maybe the market for snuggly footware will bounce right back soon, but somehow, it didn't seem that way when I was at the mall.

Most alarming, though, was the smokeless cigarette stand. Activity over there had been all-but-extinguished, but somehow, I feel that it wasn't just the recession to blame. An imitation smoking product? Hmm. Whose smart marketing idea was that?

Unsurprisingly, the product is aimed at smokers. It's designed for smokers who really, really need to hold something in their nicotine-stained fingers when they want to smoke but can't. The video playing at the moribund mall cart showed a man in a restaurant being asked, in full view of a "no smoking" sign, to put out his cigarette. He took offense momentarily. And then he pointed to his cigarette . . . the smokeless cigarette.

The product is basically a stick of stainless steel that emits a smoke-like vapor. A little red light on the end completes the illusion. It reminds me of something you'd find in an old-fashioned magic shop. Yikes! He's on fire! Oh no, not really. It's a trick cigarette. Ha, ha. I was fooled.

The funny thing is, the video promoted how "cool" it was to smoke . . . it showed movie stars from the forties and fifties, sucking away, all film noir. Really? It's cool to pretend to suck on a fake cigarette? Kids at my elementary school used to do that with pens, and it wasn't really cool back then. In fact, the pens often leaked, and the cool kid pretending to smoke a pen ended up with an inky stain around their mouth.

Maybe the smokeless cigarette is really an anti-smoking subterfuge: if you think this looks stupid, try the real thing. Totally stupid.