10

There are 10 cell phone stores/kiosks in the Vintage Faire mall in Modesto. That's not counting either Radio Shack or Circuit City, which of course both also sell cell phones.

Douglas Adams loved physics, but in the radio series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he also explained an economic phenomenon called the Shoe Event Horizon. The Shoe Event Horizon is the tipping point in a civilization's economic development when shoe shops overtake all other production, so that it becomes unviable to build anything but shoe shops. As a result, the economy and civilization collapse and everyone who survives evolves into birds.

Obviously he was right, he just had the wrong product at the center of the theory. But to be fair, cell phones didn't exist when he wrote Hitchhiker's Guide. At the current rate, by 2011 every shop in the mall will be a cell phone store, and all anyone will do is work selling cell phones to one another.

I am not a fan. I don't desire an iPhone, or a camera phone, or a Blackberry. We have a pre-paid cell phone we only use while driving to LA, to report on our progress or the smog level in Bakersfield (on a scale from Totally Obscured By Brown Air to Instant Death). But even I felt like I should have a more up-to-date and snazzier phone, passing all those damn stores - all of them busy, by the way.