Read the article. Note down which aspects of modern shops appeal to you, and which do not.

Sellers have embarked on a new crusade. These modern conquistadors are no longer striving for tall mountains and new lands. They are pursuing new souls trying to assert complete dominance of the emotions and desires.

The battle for supremacy is being joined by more and more shops from corner ones to hypermarkets each guaranteeing a level of service and environment unavailable up until now (quite often even in the dead of the night), each searching for identity and yet tending to uniformity.

It won’t be far-fetched to admit our ambivalent feelings about these superdomes of mass consumerism, with a cocktail of rational negativism and irrational veneration.

However from the very first steps in the processed ambience your senses will be rendered supine to the accompaniment of antiseptic Muzak and the glare of fluorescent lights.

The pursuit of aimless leisure here approaches the surreal. It is not the kind of place you drop in to for a bag of jelly babies and a packet of cigarettes. When you visit a mall replete with its avalanche of attractions, there is only one thing to do – to submit.

You could go both barmy and bankrupt in this place and it wouldn't hurt a bit. For as well as the consumer seductions of Ikea, Sears, Athletes' World and several hundred other shops, a plethora of eating establishments, each mall offers far more.

Malls are not so much shopping cities but a fully integrated consumer fantasy that succeeds in being inane, utterly ridiculous and absolutely out of this world. Shoppers will meander among the fountains and plastic mouldings in a condition of ever-increasing gormlessness, simultaneously stunned and seduced by the diabolically manufactured mechanism for parting you from your critical faculties and your cash.

Everything is scrupulously designed to prolong your visit and, in the end, everything is welcome. For example, is there a Western parent alive who, in the middle of a frantic day, would not welcome the oasis of a children's facility like Fantasyland in West Edmonton Mall - a full-scale children's funfair complete with dodgems, miniature railway and stomach-churning repertoire of plunges, slides and spins; the World Waterpark, whose main pool features the Blue Thunder wave machine and a labyrinth of spiraling, high-velocity tunnel rides; the Deep Sea Adventure, an artificial oceanscape containing a replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, six mini-submarines for sub-aquatic sightseeing, or wouldn’t become numb at the sight of a school of dolphins and an entire community of undersea life; a competition-standard skating rink, the Ice Palace; 18-hole miniature golf course; a 19-studio cineplex?

An hour of such blissful respite, followed by coffee and a sandwich at some glitzy pre-fab cafe, and you are ready once again to disappear into consumer daze, blithely coughing up money for things you don’t need at all and would find completely idiotic but for this stupefying sensory cocktail of obsession, ostentation and overkill.

Mall-building is a precise science and the indoor panorama is nothing if not state-of-the-art. It is not that the shopping itself is so very thrilling; as ever with such malls, the stores are plentiful but ultimately banal. Rather, the pleasure is in being part of a quietly lunatic alternative universe where the thin line that divides shopping from entertainment becomes almost totally erased.

Malls will often include a hotel as final confirmation, perhaps, that the mall is not just a place to pass through, but a modern day pleasure dome. Moreover some people are ready to spend their holiday in a glorified shopping precinct. Others simply take the mall as part of bigger package tours. For many tourists no itinerary is complete without dropping in on Disneyland, Disney World and the mall.

With pilgrims descending on it from all corners of the globe, the mall enjoys a status tantamount to that of a sacred monument where worshippers seek solace paying homage with their credit cards.

It’s the Disney World of shopping with a 365-day-a-year summer environment, catering for every whim and caprice. Money is made on everything and love is no exclusion. You can even get married in the Chapel of Love in the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

In the wish to get hold of the coveted contents of the buyers’ wallets dexterous wheeler-dealers are not above capitalizing even on loyalty and patriotism.

Though, witnessing the mass murder of thousands of Americans is unlikely to instigate trips to the malls or inspire optimism about the day to come, a growing chorus is telling Americans that one of the best ways to demonstrate the US won’t be cowed by terrorism is to buy more. According to this market patriotism theory by investing and consuming at least as much as they did before Americans will manifest their resolve to the rest of the world.

The propagators of the new theory advocate the idea that the World Trade Center wasn’t the center of capitalism as the real stuff is guiltless, impetuous consumption, the euphoric pride of acquisition which is taking place at the mall.

Squandering money, however, seems a rather odd way to demonstrate patriotism, which normally suggests a willingness to relinquish luxuries and sacrifice for the good of the nation. And if voluntary restraints don’t work, the government resorts to rationing. Don’t you agree that there is no patriotism in being a spendthrift, oblivious to the challenges of the new day, no heroism in exposing one’s family to unwarranted financial stress?