Ask the Little Bald Bastard

 So there I am,
puttering around my surrogate bookstore, when the store's security guard comes over. She's not charging, exactly, but she's moving with more urgency than I've ever seen her exhibit. She motors over, looks up and me and says, "I have to talk to you in the back."
 We'd been listening to a jangling alarm from the second floor, and watching mall security block off the escalators, with a sort of amused, speculative, no-ever-tells-us-anything curiosity. I assumed that she'd finally gotten someone to give her a straight answer about what was actually going on. I somehow managed to miss the depth of anxiety apparent in her wide eyes and clenched teeth.
  Once she'd dragged me to the back room, she blurted it out. Someone had found a suspicious package, and the mall was being evacuated. She hadn't been able to get much more information, but the stores were closing, and we had to get all of our customers out.
  We proceeded to inform all of our customers that we'd been told to close. We were hot, man. A calm exit, no panic; we handled it like we'd been facing the possibility of being blown up daily for years. As we were getting our evacuation on, a mall guard on her way past the store shouted at us that we could stay in our closed store, once we'd gotten all of our customers to safety. I called my District Manager to tell her what was happening, and she and I agreed that we could close everything up, put all the money in the safe, and go home, foregoing the last hour of business in favor of not being trapped under three collapsed stories of retail rubble.
  To make a long story slightly less long, it turned out that it wasn't going to be that simple. As we were preparing to beat it, we were informed that the mall was planning to reopen in 20 minutes. I was relieved, since 20 minutes seemed like an awfully short evacuation if anyone was really concerned about the package in question. However, my relief was somewhat tempered by the fact that I was facing having to go through the trouble of getting my store running again to do business for another half an hour.
  So, I didn't die. Yay, and such. However, I was treated to an incompetent, lopsided response to a potentially serious problem,a disturbing lack of concern for the safety of myself and my co-workers and further proof that people are just not as highly regarded as the chance to make a few bucks. Sometimes, knowing what's going on is really depressing.