Begin again

For the next two weeks I went decided that it would be prudent to observe the site where I initially began observations, which was at greasy petes. Much to my surprise when I sat to observe none of the original crew was working a shift that day. I assumed that there had been some schedule rearrangements. I also looked around for hairspray, however, I hadn't seen her since the initial day of observation and today was no different. Surprisingly enough, the only person I saw that I recognized was buzz cut, who gave me a knowing smile as I walked past the jewelers to post up in front of the pretzel stand.
Most times during this investigation, I found myself wondering if the people around the mall were observing me more than I was observing them. It was kind of a strange thought knowing that those people might have saw me as a pattern more than I saw them.
Needless to say, I did my best to act more casual as I observed the food stand. This time around though, I tried my best to watch the different ages of people that attended the stand. I found it to be mostly older people, teenage and up.
I will admit I hated myself for not seeing a trend in ages that approach food vendors sooner. At the start of this investigation I found myself trying to focus on everything as opposed to specific trends, and towards the end I realized that age differences is one of the most obvious differences between vendors. Most small children don't want pretzels or Chinese food, they want candy and snow cones. Most older adults or teens tended to direct themselves more towards the takeout route and indulged in less sweets and more foods. Thats not to say that some adults didn't take advantage of snowcones or candies, but from what I saw children were more drawn into the prospect of sweets. This was only solidified by the observations I made today.
Doing my best to focus on age differences, I realized that the placement of  the candy place and the pretzel place was genius. They were RIGHT next to each other. While parents got suckered into greasy little dough balls, their younger children were attracted by the bright vividly colored candy right next door.
I do not know if this placement was intentional, but it sure seemed to make a lot of sense once I started paying attention to what ages in specific approached which vendors. I also noted in todays observations that parents or grandparents that stopped to purchase pretzels were a little more likely to let the children in their care candy. It was sort of a weird thing to watch. Perhaps it was a guilt thing? Sometimes the parents tried to offer their kids pretzels, but sometimes the kids would have nothing of it as they had been suckered in by the candy instead. I found that most times parents were a little more flexible. I couldn't say why, though.
After realizing how important age was in attraction to certain foods, it made it easier to distinguish patterns and compare them, today especially. It's starting to become more and more apparent that certain age groups sort of gravitate towards certain types of food. Since it's stink valley mall not really any of the food options available are healthy, so for the sake of the investigation I've categorized the food groups into two.... sweets and cheap and easies.
The cheap and easies are things like pretzels and Chinese, sweets are things such as snow cones and candies. I am starting to find that adults prefer cheap and easies where as kids really don't care much about anything besides the sweets.