What do you prefer when shopping in SL?

Please forgive me if this is in the wrong thread, but it seemed fairly general to me.

I'm wondering when people shop, WHERE do they shop...

Now keeping in mind things like lag and slow texture rezzing, when you're looking for something specific or when you're just wandering shops for the heck of it... where do you wander? (no need to name places please) Do you choose a large shopping center, a giant store, or small shop.... do you look at things like traffic? etc.

The reason I'm asking this is because I am currently trying to think of how I want to design the shopping area in my sim... whether I want to build one big department store kind of deal.... a big shopping center... or if my current design of a simple small store with a few vendors is right.

I like the small mom and pop. You get in the malls and have to wait forever for items to rez. I try clicking on them and it helps some but eventually becomes more of an annoyance and end up leaving and shopping somewhere else

I hate malls, and never shop at them. Even on the past occasions I've decided to go to a mall, I couldn't have shopped there because everything was a grey box and it took me ten seconds to turn around.

Till real search engines or information finding agents or web on prim exists in world, I'm browsing via the old fashioned web then visiting the stores.

Small very personal done places with service and contact with the designers are my favorite places... customer care...

I remeber when I started in SL.. TP-ed into huge places by friends with rez times that I was not so used to.. lag and slow.. and loads of things to .. ahhhhhh.. fun to remember but now I keep away...

Small oulets can be OK.,.. but that depends on how they are made (styled/designed) and what they sell... I have find some cute places.. that sadly often are gone next time I want to visit...

I prefer well organized shops with a bit of variety. Not quite a mall, but not quite mom and pop either. I love Pixel Mode, for example, and the way their shops are laid out. When I was first in world, my favourite place to shop was Manua Mall because I didn't get trapped and could get around. Also they had a good blend of new and old designers.

When I enter a word into find, and large shopping centers pop up, I avoid those and go to smaller isolated shops instead. The reason I choose those types of stores is because I know that finding what I am looking for will be much easier than wandering around a mall, having to check every vendor.

This is pretty much my stance as well.

I prefer when the designer turns up on request at my penthouse on FIC Towers to display their wares personally with none of this nasty lag (as you know, FIC Towers is built on a special lag-free sim). Of course, since most of my favourite designers live there already, it's not exactly out of the way...

Will the designers do this for all the Siobhan's in SL? There's not that many of us, you know.

Island hopping. Couture to Panache to PixelDolls (not an island I know but worth it anyway) to Threemile to Illusion to Nomine...

Larsen Shops is also great.

I prefer designer's own shops or small general ones so I can easily find what I am looking for and have less lag.

I'd rather shop in a 'boutique', a smaller shop, or in smaller malls, because of lag concerns. I like seeing a decent selection, but I prefer shops that use vending systems that show you one product line at a time, to those that use one prim for every item that they sell, forcing you to see and cache a different texture for every product and color variation!

A larger mall that is laid out so that each vendor has a walled 'shop', rather than a huge room with everyone visible at once, seems to be a bit better in terms of having less lag. At least, it seems I don't have to wait as long to see the trextures around me.

Huge stores or malls with thousands of textures visible paralyze my Avatar within minutes of my arrival. My system can't keep up, and I crash. (Which is a royal pain, since I work for a texture store that has precisely that issue!)

If a mall is large, I prefer it to be a skymall, like Furnation has. Again, much less lag to deal with.

I prefer pieshops.

The problem with malls is not just wandering around to find the thing you looked up in Find, a lot of the time it's not even there. I think sometimes the mall owners don't update their descriptions often enough.

coco

I prefer the boutiques by far, and usually try to hit them rather than the large cookie-cutter malls. The next down on the list would be a small cluster of well-made, complimentary shops. Finally, if a mall is very well made, layed out logically, aesthetically pleasing, and fairly low lag, I'll wander those.

Wow, lots of great input... thanks so much guys! *passes out cookies*

None of the above, I prefer Slexchange, I can search what I want in the database, find several similar objects at competetive prices, and make my purchase. Saves a lot of laggy footwork for me.

I prefer the smaller, one-person (or small team) shops. I also like when several of them are grouped together when the separate owners have similar styles or complimentary products. The shops in north Miramare come to mind. Same with Midnight City.

A mall, even a small one, that takes no interest in who rents there or where the shops are located has absolutely no value to me. I usually recognize these quickly, and when I end up at a shop in one I'll typically leave after looking in the one store I came for.

So I think it's a bigger question than the size of the store alone. You can take the advantages of boutiques and scale them to a multiple-vendor mall if you design correctly.