Making Things Easier for Handicapped Shoppers : Disabilities: Los Cerritos Center plans to ease access and train salesclerks in sensitivity.

Riding in a wheelchair, Shannon Forest kicked her feet in sheer happiness as her mother pushed her toward a dress shop in Los Cerritos Center.

“Shopping is my life,” proclaimed the 22-year-old Norwalk woman, who has cerebral palsy.

Forest finds the mall a glittering wonderland, but she is wary of its obstacles.

Dressing rooms tend to be too small for her wheelchair, so she can’t try on clothes. Tight spaces around merchandise racks prevent easy maneuvering, as do thick carpets. And most demeaning are salespeople who look as if they wish she would go away--some have even told her to leave a store.

“I hate it when that happens,” she said.

Forest is one of 130,000 disabled people in the Southeast/Long Beach area who are being targeted in a program announced Thursday by managers of Los Cerritos Center. Called Easy Access Shopping Experience, the program is designed to encourage handicapped customers to use the mall and is believed to be the first of its kind in Southern California.

Nora Levy, marketing director for the 159-store center, said improvements would range from providing disabled shoppers with clipboards so they can easily sign credit card slips to forming a network of volunteer shoppers for handicapped people, particularly the blind.

Dressing rooms will be enlarged and aisles widened by moving display racks. Specially equipped phones for the hearing impaired will be installed, as will a store directory in Braille.

The major focus of the program, which Levy said will initially cost about $10,000, will be educating store employees on the needs and feelings of the handicapped.

“People aren’t comfortable when a disabled person comes in,” Levy said. “They don’t know what to say or do, so it’s easiest not to say anything.”

Training of the employees and assessment of what physical changes will be needed in the stores will start in October.

Assisting in the project will be the Dayle McIntosh Center for the Disabled in Anaheim. The Cerritos mall was referred to that service organization by Bob Molinatti of Huntington Beach, a disability activist and a champion wheelchair racer.

“Overall, this mall is pretty good,” said Molinatti, a paraplegic for 13 years, as he wheeled into the mall’s pedestrian traffic last week. “There is one level here, and that’s a real convenience.”

To help handicapped shoppers, the 20-year-old Cerritos center already has two automatic doors, one near Nordstrom, one near Robinson’s; handicapped restrooms; 57 handicapped parking spaces (out of 6,630); lowered telephones and drinking fountains; rental wheelchairs, and, in the department stores, wide main aisles.

“It’s as good as any other mall, but it could be a lot better,” Molinatti said. “Every store could use a dressing room that could fit in a wheelchair and be big enough to allow the chair to make a 360-degree turn.”

Molinatti, who won the wheelchair division of the Los Angeles Marathon in 1986 and ‘88, said he is less likely to be rebuffed by store clerks than is someone with a more severe disability.

“Nine out of 10 times the person behind the counter is between 16 and 20,” he said. “I think at that age they will go to a back rack and hope the disabled person goes away. Young (clerks) are real intimidated by that.

“I get around very well. . . . But if someone comes in with cerebral palsy, and he’s 100% OK mentally but he’s drooling, God, that 16-year-old girl’s going to freak out and run to the bathroom before she will want to wait on him.”

Molinatti passed Helen Grace Chocolates and went into the G.HQ. men’s store, where his narrow wheelchair just barely made it through the dressing-room door.

“I could (change) in here, but this is really rare,” he said. “Every time I try on a pair of pants I have to take them home, which means two trips to the mall, a waste of gas.”

Brenda Premo, executive director of the Dayle McIntosh Center, said the mall program is innovative because it looks at people with disabilities as a market rather than a group that has to be isolated and taken care of.

“The mall sees this as an opportunity to increase sales,” said Premo, who has seen stores lose sales because of their attitude toward the disabled.

“I’m legally blind but I like to play Nintendo on my 40-inch TV,” she said. “When I go to the store to get Nintendo cartridges, they are typically in back behind the cash register and I can’t reach them.

“I (once) went into a store and asked for assistance, but the person didn’t want to help me. I left and went to another store where the salesperson was willing to spend time to help me find what I needed. I spent $65.”

Store officials were given details of the new program at a meeting Wednesday at the Sheraton Cerritos Hotel.

“I’m excited to find that the mall is interested in this,” said Buckleh Reynolds, manager of Nordstrom. “I think it makes sense. We want to make the mall to be as accessible as we can to all customers.”

Reynolds said one of his employees, who uses a wheelchair, made him aware of the problems the disabled face. As a result, there are fitting areas and restrooms in Reynolds’ store that can be comfortably used by the handicapped.

Mall officials hope that a talk that was given at Wednesday’s meeting by Bill Demby will inspire the retailers to join the program.

Demby, known for playing basketball on artificial legs in a television commercial, told the store managers what Shannon Forest might have, had she been in the room:

“When people make eye contact with you and then turn away, it’s an incredible, horrible feeling.”