I have a friendly suggestion for retailers looking to salvage what’s left of a less-than-stellar holiday shopping season.

    Turn down the sound.

    Turn down the volume on that mind-numbing urban rap or alternative rock music and some of us might come back. By “us” I mean we middle-aged baby boomers and our big fat disposable incomes.

     I made every effort to avoid those maddening musical interludes this year until three days before Christmas, when, with just two gifts left to buy, I made my first foray to the Valley Plaza Mall.

     I got there early to avoid the crowds, but there was no avoiding the atmospherics, those visual and auditory elements of retail stores that supposedly sooth the savage shoppers and subliminally encourage them to spend, spend, spend.

     The idea behind atmospherics is to manipulate shoppers without them actually noticing, being subliminal and all, but a number of stores apparently decided to skip the subconscious and go straight for the spinal column.

     Victoria’s Secret is one such store, where the music is techno edgy, predictably sensual and, at least during the holidays, really loud. I’m guessing the music was selected for its ability to make shoppers feel sexy enough to justify spending their Christmas bonuses on bras and jammies.

     On the upside, I had to raise my voice only slightly to be heard by the sales clerk.

     I left the store nursing the beginnings of a headache and finished my shopping at PacSun, where the thumping base of punk rock was stupefyingly loud.

     Really, middled-aged customers wandered around looking shell-shocked, as if they weren’t quite sure where they were or what they were doing there. The music, however, seemed to have no effect on the store’s youthful staff, who, nonetheless, had to get nearly nose to nose with some of their customers in order to be heard.

     My ears were ringing as I rushed from the mall, a condition friends say they’ve experienced as well, citing PacSun, Abercrombie and Fitch and other youth-oriented stores as the worst offenders.

     So, don’t store managers know how irritating such music is to adult consumers?

     Of course they do. They just don’t care.

     After all, it’s not our money they’re after, it’s our teens,’ whose annual spending habits at the mall may add up to a great deal more than the relative pittance we grown-ups spend there in the month of December.

     You can’t fault the stores for knowing their audience, even when the money teens are spending comes from Mom and Dad. A recent Mississippi State University study found that 75 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 spend an average of four hours a week shopping and “hanging out at the mall.”

     Teenagers, the study found, make nearly 40 percent more trips to the mall than other shoppers.

     American teenagers, about 10 percent of whom now carry their own credit cards, spent $159 billion last year on everything from movies and clothes to MP3 players and Starbucks. With numbers like that, it’s unlikely retailers will turn down the volume any time soon.

     But considerate and savvy retailers might at least consider it, if only for the month of December, when we indulgent oldsters go shopping for the brands our kids and grandkids want most. 

     If they refuse, we can put on earplugs and put up with the Christmas clatter or do what unsatisfied customers have always done: take our holiday dollars where they’re wanted.