Leigh Witchel

It's easy... just follow the teenage girls carrying several shopping bags around and eventually they will lead you to an exit.

Better to follow a man with a shopping bag; having bought what he came for he will now want to leave. The girls may keep shopping until the place closes.

Besides, it can be risky to be seen following teenage girls around.

In general, the parts of the floor that are paved with tile or aggragate (with something hard) will lead to an exit -- soft surfaces will not.

And most anchor stores (Macys and the like) will have doors going directly outside as well as doors onto the inside passageways of the mall. Smaller shops usually do not.

Just call me Sacagawea.

Excellent tips, but you also have to make sure that you find an exit that is reasonably close to your vehicle, if you have one, or you'll have another long trek to find your car.

I once agreed to meet some friends at a Cheesecake Factory located in a mall with which I was unfamiliar and I wandered the floors like a homeless person until I found it by accident. (There was a mall directory, but it was of Byzantine complexity and I quite failed to understand it.)

In my area malls are rapidly being superseded by gigantic box stores all built on a ‘commons’ and accompanied by equally vast parking lots (forget about parking garages). Getting out of the store is no problem, although you have to walk a mile or two within the store and then another mile or so to return to your car, but exiting those enormous parking lots can be quite a trick, not to mention fighting the traffic to get out on the road and back onto the freeway. Ah, the suburbs.

That's why I do my shopping downtown. Malls are like casinos: no windows, no clocks, no exits means shop til you drop or run out of money.