A few weeks ago I was driving to a wedding upstate when I realized I had forgotten to bring appropriate pants for the rehearsal dinner. I stopped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and pulled out my phone, hoping to find some retail option to solve my problem. As luck would have it, there was a small outlet mall about an hour out of the way. Thankfully I had left early enough that I had plenty of time to take the detour.
After an hour of driving through gorgeous farmland, I pulled into this tiny little collection of shops. The place was a ghost town, I did a quick lap around to see which shops might have nice pants, and I saw literally zero other patrons. There were like two other cars in the parking lot. It seemed that tons of the shops had closed over the pandemic and never recovered, so it made sense I guess. I found the menswear shop and fortunately it was open. I walked in and at first, it seemed like no one was working the shop. But the lights were on and the door was open, so I figured I was good to look around.