At The Oaks shopping center in Thousand Oaks, community health education seminars are being presented twice a month by Los Robles Hospital and Medical Center in cooperation with the mall’s owner.

“We thought this might be monthly, but there’s such a great demand for health information, especially in the senior category, we had to go to twice a month,” said Kris Carraway-Bowman, the medical center’s vice president of marketing and public relations.

About 60 to 120 people are in the audience for most of the classes, up from 20 who participated when the sessions began earlier this year at the mall, which is undergoing renovation and expansion.

On a recent morning, a health seminar was under way in the lower-level courtyard as mall construction workers in hard hats sipped coffee, moms pushed strollers, a teen hobbled on crutches and a man talked on his cell phone.

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Order up a double macchiato with a side of debate. On Thursday, Starbucks will begin offering a free paper from the magazine Good in its stores. Called the Good Sheet, each week it will tackle one election topic, like carbon emissions, health care or education. And Starbucks hopes it will get people talking.

“We had been looking at ways to bring a little bit of those conversation-starters into the Starbucks environment,” said Terry Davenport, the senior vice president for marketing at Starbucks.

Good, which was founded two years ago, has an editorial emphasis on philanthropy and activism. Some of that is translated into the Good Sheet, a folded piece of newsprint that presents information and statistics in a big graphic. The sheet on health care, for example, gives a history of government health care programs, statistics about health care spending, and suggestions about solutions, including notes on those that John McCain and Barack Obama endorse.

Starbucks has timed the introduction for election season, and will feature a new Good sheet for 11 weeks.

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Mall owners often talk about trying to find sources of ancillary income. I don’t think this is what most of them have in mind.

Agents found more than 200 marijuana plants inside a building at the Mall of the Americas in west Miami-Dade late Friday. Now they want to know who was cultivating them, and who set up the hydroponics lab that could have lit the mall on fire with flimsy wiring.

The Drug Enforcement Administration discovered the plants growing on the second floor of the mall in what agents said was a 400-square-foot storage area. An official with the D.E.A. told CBS4′S Shomari Stone that she’s never seen anything like this before.

The ‘grow house” had plants growing from three-to-six-feet tall in an air conditioned environment along with camera surveillance in a storage area on the second floor of the mall. The wiring was flimsy, and could have sparked a fire in the popular mall.

Some estimates put the value of marijuana as much as $3,500 per pound on Miami streets. Overall, officials say millions of dollars of pot was found, since each plant could be harvested four times a year.

The mailboxes of Shoreway Shopping Center owners Marc Levin and James Ratner should soon be stuffed full of mail from Sheffield Lake.

Postcards preprinted with their addresses were passed out to hundreds of Sheffield Lake residents who flocked to the shopping center Monday in an effort to convince the owners to sell what many called a defunct “eyesore” ravaging the city’s economy.

“A lot of the signs you’re carrying make reference to slumlords holding the city hostage,” said Sheffield Lake Mayor John Piskura from atop a flatbed semitrailer. “The truth of the matter is they’ve been playing games with this city for over 30 years.”

Piskura asked residents to fill out the cards, supplied by a city resident, to help spur a reaction from the owners.

“It’s one of the last things we haven’t tried,” he said after the rally. “We need to raise awareness because I don’t think the beneficiaries of the trust (who own the shopping center) know what’s going on here. I think when they do, they’ll take interest and do something.”

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I posted about the secret apartment at Providence Place before. The couple behind that was the subject of an extensive article at Salon.

The Rhode Island couple awoke one morning in 1998 to find the name of their street changed: Kinsley Avenue was now Providence Place, which happened to be the name of the 1.3 million-square-foot mall rising on 13 prime downtown acres. Townsend and Yoto were among the Providence residents objecting to the mall — the cost to taxpayers, the colonizing presence of the structure that dominated the skyline from the highway. But Yoto, a scholar, and Townsend, a public artist, expressed their outrage in an unusual way: They decided to live with the mall. Literally.

In 2003, inside a 750-foot storage space, abandoned since construction days, they crafted a secret apartment within the mall from which they could study its allure. Why do so many of us flock to the mall’s sanitized hallways? Why do we love the sameness of mall life, identical shops and structures across the country? Why is the mall the site of our grievances, the place where gunmen go to inflict maximum pain? Earlier this year, a man set off an explosion in a mall in Exeter, England. The week before, a woman was shot in one.

Clearly, we have complicated emotional relationships to malls, and Townsend and Yoto figured one way to comprehend all that they critiqued was to embrace it, to live it so they might understand it. The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn’t been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they’d still be camping out there today.

The Chicago Sun-Times has an interesting story about how dollar stores are coping with rising inflation.

The sign at Frankfort’s Dollar Central reads: Most Everything Everyday $1.10.

It’s literally a sign of the economic times.

When owner Cindy Stuart hand-painted the “.10″ during the first week of January, she said it nearly killed her. Adding the “Most” a few weeks ago was just as distressing.

“It was very difficult,” she said. “I really tried to keep it at a dollar. That was always the plan. Unfortunately, the economy changed that plan.”

But in 2005, when Trademark began planning a large mixed-use center, Watters Creek, for a 52-acre site in Allen, Tex., near Dallas, it decided to consult a group it had never called on before: women.

Terry Montesi, the company’s chief executive, first hired two female retail consultants: Claudia A. Sagan and J’Amy Owens. But Trademark also invited two dozen women from the Allen area to pick apart its plans for the center. They included Kirsten Fair, a stay-at-home mother of two, and Debbie Stout, a City Council member, who runs a company that sells business forms.

The women weighed in on dozens of features, like the center’s layout, landscaping, parking options, pedestrian walkways and outdoor art. The developers “asked us about every detail, and then they listened,” Ms. Stout said recently.

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A lot of people have heard of the South China Mall because it’s commonly referred to as the largest mall in the world. It has 7.1 million square feet of space and is one of a handful of truly gargantuan malls that have been built in China.

There’s just one little problem. The thing is virtually empty.

A report from The National details the mall’s misfortunes. more

There have always been audiophiles that worship vinyl. It’s not every store where you can still get those records. They are around if you know where to look. According to this story, more people are catching the vinyl bug and some mainstream retailers have started stocking vinyl once again. This is extremely interesting in an era of mp3s and ipods and where it’s just as easy to buy CDs online as go to the mall. But there’s something about vinyl records that’s more tactile. People want to hold them and touch them when buying. Moreover, they’re fragile, so shipping them can be problematic. So in a lot of ways it does make sense for vinyl records to return to brick-and-mortar locations. Now, if only companies would start carrying record players too.

It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.

This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.’s latest release ‘Accelerate’ inadvertently entered the ‘LP’ code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.

Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles ‘Abbey Road’ album. But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

‘It’s not just a nostalgia thing,’ said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. ‘The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound.’

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Alongside carts with candles and cell phones, mall kiosks are offering everything from teeth whitening to hair removal - all performed in the middle of the shopping center for all to see.

“People are happy to spend more money on personal care in order to feel good,” said Laurel Sibert, portfolio vice president of marketing for Simon New England, which owns 18 malls in New England. “The neat thing is that kiosk carts in the mall allow the vendor to demonstrate their services to people walking by while promoting their product.”

Teeth whitening, eyebrow threading, mineral makeup applications, skin exfoliation, hair extension, henna tattoos, massage tables - if it’s in the realm of “personal care,” it’s ripe for a public mall procedure.

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