Ah, the 80s. It’s safe to say many Generation X-ers have certain movies inexorably etched in their minds. 1983’s Valley Girl, featuring an as-yet-to-be-discovered Nicholas Cage as ‘Randy’ is surely one of them. While there is little doubt Director Martha Coolidge found inspiration in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, there is equally little doubt that the highly successful film’s most ardent fans never made the connection. The plot is simple enough: perfectly popular high school girl from the oh so right side of the tracks falls for the ultimate bad boy from the equivalent of San Fernando Valley’s oh so wrong side of the tracks.

In one particularly memorable scene, Julie, played by Deborach Foreman, approached her bizarrely former hippy father for guidance in navigating the closest thing to an existential crisis she’d ever experienced, as in falling head over heels for the taboo Randy. Before Julie can begin to explain said dilemma, her father cuts her off with, “That’s easy. Take it back and get the more expensive one. The expensive ones always fit better.”

No words could better capture the vapid materialism that put the 80s on America’s pop culture map. Teenage girls, armed with daddy’s Amex, lived to troll the malls and set the next fashion trend, self-actualization be damned.

It’s safe to say, mall owners and the stores within, pine for those halcyon days that preceded Amazon’s forever altering of the American retail landscape.

The dichotomy between the most recent batch of retailers’ earnings and the Commerce Department’s monthly retail sales data have set off a firestorm of a debate: Is the American consumer hitting a rough patch or have they embraced the world of e-commerce for good rendering traditional brick and mortar trends so yesterday?

As was widely lauded, April retail sales were so robust as to be characterized as “blockbuster” by the economists at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofA). Not only did headline retail sales jump by 1.3 percent, the so-called ‘control group,’ which excludes autos, gasoline and building materials and feeds into gross domestic product (GDP) math, “surged 0.9 percent.” In the, “But wait, there’s more! category,” the February and March data were revised up to such an extent BofA raised its estimate for second quarter GDP by a half a percent to 2.5 percent as well as that of the first quarter, to 0.8 percent from 0.5 percent.