"This should be its own genre," muses Malachi Raine. He's describing the experience of hearing two different piped-in soundtracks—one from the mall's speakers and the other from an adjacent retail location—at the same time. Binaural aleatoria is just one of the challenges Malachi faces while serving out a 10-hour shift at a mall kiosk, which is perhaps the closest one can get to being marooned in America's sea of retail.

While kiosks are participating in and contributing to the frenzy of the marketplace, they remain apart, isolated, landless. Standing at a kiosk feels lonely. And the mall is not a nurturing host. Malachi, the lone attendant at Alderwood Mall's Rose Vape kiosk, feels that there is an adversarial relationship with the mall management and a strict set of rules governing kiosk operation. (Alderwood Mall did not reply to our inquiry.) Often thought of as being pushy salespeople—inspiring in walkers the same dread as a smiling, sanctimonious sidewalk canvasser with hand extended—kiosk attendants must work their sales tactics within the guidelines of mall policy. For example, Malachi tells me that if a shopper is passing a kiosk more than two feet away and doesn't make eye contact with the vendor or visibly eye the product, the vendor is not permitted to approach them with anything but an innocuous question, like "How's your day going?" The gray area here is self-evident, and one need spend little time in Alderwood to realize that boundaries are frequently pushed and sometimes ignored altogether. Nevertheless, Malachi claims the policy states that if a shopper asks a vendor to withdraw and the vendor persists, the mall may shut the kiosk down. Even signage is strictly regulated, with approval required for each additional posted sign, he says. And if a kiosk is late to open, he claims, its proprietor can be subject to a $150 fine. The locations assigned to individual kiosk renters aren't fixed, either. Malachi tells me that mall management rearranges the archipelago from time to time.

Down the way from Rose Vape, the Palm Massager kiosk offers a number of different physical-therapy products, but the flagship item at this stall is a small, fluorescently colored pad that heats itself with an internal chemical reaction, ominously described as "military grade." At any given time, several of these pads are being boiled in what appears to be a large rice cooker. This process resets the product to its pre-reaction state. The proprietor explains that he's scaled back his mall operations quite a bit. Having once managed almost a dozen kiosks in different malls around the region, he now focuses his efforts on conventions and trade shows. This is his last remaining mall location, and he keeps it open only during peak shopping months. It seems the palms of the Alderwood set—affluent, white, suburban—continue to want massaging.

Back at Rose Vape, Malachi extends a vial of Mountain Dew–flavored vape juice for me to sniff. It's horrifyingly realistic. He inhales deeply from his vaporizer and lets out a thick skein of fog that lingers around his face for a while and never seems to dissipate completely. It seems out of place against the sterile backdrop of the mall, but in a way, so do all kiosks—scrappy variables in a hyperdesigned mall equation that management must put up with for the revenue. Malachi says Rose Vape's monthly rent, normally $3,600, jumps to $7,200 during the peak retail months of November and December, while Palm Massager pays as much as $12,000 a month for its spot.

It's much-needed revenue, according to Malachi, whose portentous visions of Alderwood's coming downfall are found in the minutiae visible only to those who've had the time to study this place. He's noticed watered down hand soap in the bathroom and a switch to inferior paper towels. Even the Windex bottles that hang from the waists of custodial staff seem to him a lighter shade of blue: Everywhere, corners are being cut. "It's all these little things," he says, sounding like a microbiologist laboring to convey the catastrophic importance of a small change in algae count.

Whether these little things are indeed the seeds of catastrophe or merely the alarmist musings of a sailor too long at sea remains for history to determine. You could make the case that the kiosks' very existence is evidence that the mall's grand commercial scheme is untenable. You could just as easily argue that they are a sign of management's flexibility in dealing with a crisis. In either case, the smell of Mountain Dew vape juice is likely to hang in the Alderwood air for the foreseeable future.