Also I tried using the approach "hey do you have any ideas for a birthday present for a girl?" Then in a minute " She got me a whole basket of stuff." Make up and age etc and build your story from a bunch of approaches
This was my core approach in stores. I would be pretending to buy a birthday gift for a female cousin. I would approach women who were not employees to get an unbiased opinion on a gift for my female cousin. I would show my target some pictures of my best looking female cousin on my phone. While this is a great idea in theory, in practice it seems to work less than one might think. I found that a person really needed to linger in stores for a while to find a target worthy of this approach. Additionally, few women have the patience for doing that interaction, followed by personal questions then an ask out.
But I stop girls when they are walking the opposite direction than me also. It took a lot of tries to get good at it though. I got a lot of **** offs at first or girls just walking past me. A LOT
More of my mall approaches were random stops of women walking the opposite direction in some corridor. I had similar experiences.
I also avoid women that work there so that people don't remember me.
In the mall, I generally avoided approaching employees. I did it for different reasons, though your reason is good.
1. It's generally a bad idea to approach women who work in a public facing job while they are at work. It reduces your odds for success. Women while working are not as concentrated on their personal lives. Then, in some occupations (stripper, waitress, bartender), the woman are hit on all the time and they don't think much of men who hit on them at work. Retail workers don't get hit on as much at work as the occupations I just mentioned, but they get hit on enough. They are annoyed by this, especially by men who do it at peak periods (weekends or any time between Black Friday-January 1). You might be able to get away with hitting on a retail employee mid-day on a weekday but there are still better tactics in day game than hitting on a Dillard's employee on Tuesday at 11:00 AM.
2. Since graduating college in the mid-2000s, I have tended to work Mon-Fri, 8:30 AM-5:30 PM type jobs. Retail workers don't have that type of schedule. So, even if I hit on a Dillard's/Nordstrom's employee on a Tuesday at 11:00 AM, the likelihood that we will have similar schedules for getting together regularly over time isn't that high. In short, they aren't good prospects for white collar workers with day jobs. However, they can be decent prospects for men who work a less conventional schedule.