The mood is dark at Shoppers World today

You know, the one about Big Boxes and all. Oh, wait ...

Imagine the old Shoppers World stripped of all charm whatsoever (no more live reindeer at Christmas) and then blown up to about ten times the size and turned inside out so that instead of a mall surrounded by a giant parking lot, it's a giant parking lot surrounded by a series of big-box stores, only with guard towers that make it look like MCI-Framingham North (I covered the Framingham Planning Board when this mall was getting approved in the early 1990s and green pyramids were all the rage for the "esthetic" improvements the board was suddenly demanding after 40 years of letting developers do whatever the hell they wanted, which is why, now, when you drive down Rte. 9 from the Wellesley line into Westborough, you see so many buildings with these stupid pale green, sometimes red, pyramids at the corners of their roofs, only they couldn't get Shoppers World to commit to entire pale green pyramids, so they wound up with these things that look like guard towers, only without the machine-gun turrets).