not a brilliant or seminal insight but if one knows a little about the retail world it is very easy to strike up conversations with women who work at the mall. as a newbie i decided to go to the mall yesterday for as many meet and greets as possible. it wasnt really my plan to talk about the women's jobs but i worked for tommy hilfiger for a month about 15 years ago and this brief experience made approaching many women easy and the conversations flow naturally.

quickly, for those who have never had any low wage retail jobs, a few little details:
the clothing stores change their layouts frequently, often once a week, even if there is no new clothing they must constantly appear to be dynamic and in flux. naturally every woman forced to constantly move the racks around will agree that it is essentially pointless

folding t-shirts is maddening. if one person takes 5 minutes rummaging through a table of t-shirts it could take 20 minutes to refold and neaten the piles

they get paid crap. yes i realize, you all know that but this can spin the conversation in a more personal direction as you ask a woman what she wants to do or, perhaps, for an older woman what other kind of jobs she has had (like us, they all have dreams). for those who think slyly dropping in an ex-stripper girlfriend reference immediately establishes a man as something of a stud this is also a great opportunity for that (i have actually dated 2 strippers). i was talking to one woman yesterday about my poor ex-girlfriend who was an assistant manager at pier one imports and made crap money and had to work sixty hours a week and had to get up every tuesday at 2am so she could unload a truck and blah, blah, blah....she had no choice but to go back to stripping (a marginally fictionalized account of something real for me)

it worked at lots of stores, had several long conversations with women at jewelry stores asking about the particulars of their jobs (do they get discounts, what is the most time they ever spent with one customer who never bought a ring, etc)

alas, as a newbie i didnt have the stones to number close on the four or five woman who i think i could have done this with but i consider this to have been a pretty good day