We’ve all noticed how dull malls are. A strip mall at best has a little greasy-spoon cafe next to the drugstore and the 7-11, and larger malls are all full of clothing or shoe stores.
I’ve decided that when I win the lottery, I’m going to fill a mall with interesting tenants, like a video store specializing in animation, foreign movies and film noir. Clothing? Just a costume store. Food? A spice-only store.
And I’m sure we can come up with more interesting places to shop. Help me out here!
Oh, that’s a great idea!!
Some stores I’d love to put together:
Why are the anchor stores always department stores? I’m tired of JC Penney. One of my anchor stores needs to be a Borders.
The mall I frequented in my childhood had a public library branch right next to the pizza place. I want a public library branch.
Regarding <b>HelloKitty</b>'s suggestions, my favorite mall actually does have a pen store. It’s very cool, though way out of my price range.
More art galleries.
Stores that sell clothes that aren’t marketed to 16-year-olds.
Tea shop.
A batting cage where passersby can watch the hitters.
A sports bar where the guys can hang while the women shop. It probably needs a sports book too.
Periodic flying objects going through the mall at about 9’ (think radio-controlled blimps with coupons dangling from them).
Simulated SWAT team raids every afternoon. Or maybe just a fake six-gun shootout.
Hey, we’re brainstorming so no idea’s too wacky!
A roller coaster.
A place where you can take a nap - whether it’s ‘sells’ a 15 or 30 minute nap or for free.
Seeing as how my favorite is a sofa in front of the television (with the weather channel on), that’s what you get. Blankets provided, on customer per sofa please.
An occultic type store filled with books containing things Men Were Not Ment to Know, an Evil petshop(where all the pets and employees are Evil), and a gunstore.
Strip club.
Next door to a store that sells nothing but porn, porn, porn!!
hmmmm…maybe a cupcake shop?
The ‘Q’-permarket:
The place you go to buy any gadget that’s been in a James Bond movie.
Yes, that includes the submarine car.
I’d also like to see the “Mad Scientist’s Laboratory Supply Store”, where you could stock up on Tesla Coils, glassware with green, bubbling stuff in it, etc.
Has anyone mentioned magic stores? Add one or two of those - proper, classy ones, not just the novelty & joke item ones.
Some shops could be re-designed as mazes or like a ‘house of mirrors’. They could also disguise the size of some shops so that you enter thinking that it’s a tiny little place, but it turns out to have about twenty levels, with elevators, tunnels and slides for getting around.
The really cool shops would be closed to anyone who couldn’t solve a particular riddle or treasure hunt.
There’d be random laser shows, balloons dropping from the ceiling and in-mall movies which you could just sit and watch for free.
Two or three very old fashioned, vaguely creepy, stores.
A haberdashery store way up above the top level. You reach it by climbing a wrought iron spiral staircase. The door is small, and always closed. It rings a brass bell when you open it. A tall, elegant, handsome, and very elderly woman dressed in black is waiting behind the counter. Polished floors, high ceilings in darkly painted pressed metal with elaborate patterns, and a highly varnished wooden counter; there is only standing room for a maximum of two customers, and nothing is on display. You need to ask. But, whatever you need will be in stock. The woman will silently sweep out to “the back of the shop”, and bring you what you need. Usually, you don’t even need to ask. She’ll know. Prices are reasonable. She is very stern in apearance, but there will be a faint, yet genuine, smile as you bid her good day.
A shop selling traditional Chinese medicines. Even smaller than the haberdasher’s, it is way down in the bowels of the complex, near the carpark. It is very hard to find. An extremely old, white wispy haired, Ho Chi Minh lookalike will greet you in comical fractured English (He actually went to Oxford, and just likes having fun). Behind him stands a bank of hundreds of tiny drawers full of mysterious dried plants. On the counter is an array of large glass jars, full of the most revolting looking stuff the guy has (he put them on display specially). He has a cure for anything and everything.
An old style barber shop. The barber’s name is Zoltan. He is very, very, drunk on vodka. He is also very rude. The soup nazi of the hair cutting universe, he happens to be the best barber in the state. He plays the local easy listening station a little too loud, and slightly off the signal, so that every S sound scratches gratingly. He has black and white glossy photos of the hairstyles he can do. These are all thirty years old. After your haircut, if you thank him, he just says, “You good man, ok? now GO!”
Yay for creepy stores!
Have the entire mall made into a paintball arena from time to time. Or Laser Tag.
No wooden benches! None! Just lots ‘n’ lots of nice, comfy chairs. Foot stools would be nice, too.
Because I hate shopping in general and would really like a place to sit while my shopping mates ooh and aah over the crap I don’t really care about.
Actually the coolest thing that I think I’ve ever seen in a mall are the fountains in Tower Center in downtown Cleveland. They’re laminar-flow streams of water that emerge – then disappear into a hole several feet away. The effect is one of flying columns of water – which then disappear without a splash:
http://www.wetdesign.com/client/tower/tower.htm
But a plain old water slide in a mall would be cool too.
(Great Idea/OP! Well done)
My ideal ‘mall’ (we call them ‘shopping centres’, which is probably about as dull a name as is possible)…
One McDonalds. A ‘military’ (guns, knives, targets etc…) shop owned by a stuttering exxentric military man who calls himself an expert. ‘Spiritual’ shop containing (amongst other things) incense sticks, small electronic indoor water fountains, lava-lamp type things, expensive rustic ornaments, rustic furnature. A computer game shop that is a) large, and b) very good at keeping up to dat with the latest games and hardware. A good music shop. A ban, punishable by extreme torture and eventual death on mobile phone shiops. A high-teck gadget shop. A shop that sells underpants that dont chafe.
I want to go to TheLoadedDog’s mall.
WiFi access points would be nice, as well as laptop rentals for those who didn’t come prepared. The access points can run NetBSD for stability and security, the laptops will run Red Hat Linux or Slackware Linux to cater to the widest audience.
Comfy chairs, too. Leather sofas, maybe, but only if nobody’s going to splatter them with blood and/or red paint. Plenty of electrical outlets near each chair, no matter where it is.
VR Quake games going on in parts of the mall and some stores. Imagine wearing goggles with semi-transparent lenses that have three-dimensional images projected onto them. Imagine carrying around a (fake) weapon and finding (fake) ammo and (virtual) powerups lying around. Imagine fighting (real) people and (virtual or fake) monsters (heh, cosplay can take on a new meaning). We could blur the apparent distinction between gaming and psychosis even further! It’s a Good Thing! 
The Caffeine Shack: All things caffeinated. Penguin mints, Jolt cola, coffee, and all other caffeine delivery methods will be sold here. Caffeine-related items will also be sold, such as t-shirts bearing an image of the caffeine molecule and freestanding models of Everyone’s Favorite Alkaloid. As the piece de resistance, it will sell pure caffeine to those who have finally gone utterly nuts (or just want a new and exciting food additive). Remember the spate of GQ threads about freebasing and injecting caffeine? Time to test those theories… (I know it’s immensely stupid. It’s my fantasy, aight?)
Custom hardware shops. Want to create a PC from menus of parts? Have at it, techie! Expert systems will guide creation and prevent clashes (such as bus speed mismatches and RAM issues) because expert systems are inheriently cool. Watch the (possibly automated) creation of your dream machine from behind glass, a la Jurrassic Park. Case mods extra, of course, and we sell individual pieces of hardware, too. (Free RAM with every n dollars spent!)
Geekbooks. Want Knuth? Get all three volumes attractively bound and at bargain pricing. Need a reference on an obscure *nix? We’ve probably got it in stock. Barnes&Noble-style, with plenty of comfy chairs and otherwise browser-friendly.
Freshtunes. Every kind of music, ever. Both CDs and MP3s are sold, and MP3 samples are free to browsers who pick up cheap players (essentially just RAM to hold the MP3, ROM to hold the decoder and communications protocols, and headphones). Kind of like Freshmeat, in that it will encourage outsiders to contribute work and showcase the newest and the best, in addition to the more standard fare. Freshtunes should be more like a head shop than a Sam Goody’s, to reflect the outsider mystique.
Nice Hotel. Think Case’s digs in Cheap Hotel, in the beginning of Neuromancer, but cleaner and with better connectivity. Coffins with great graphics and sound built into the walls, and T1 lines leading out. It would be interesting to design a computer around a human, instead of simply inside a box. Rentable by the minute, hour, day, or longer, with larger coffins for more than one person. (heh HEH :D)
A more mazelike architecture for malls. Instead of a bright, open central area, a labyrinth so complex that when you find a shop, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to find your way back there next time you come. Even the standard set of mall shops would be improved here. I think a sprinkling of junky souvenir shop kinda stores like they have on every beach in Florida would help, too, exp. if they’re a bit run down and carry oddball meerchandise, like the old postcards of bikini gals being menaced by alligators.
Whatever happens, there needs to be a restaurant that has a daily special of babyback ribs, cheese sticks, onion rings, and fresh from the oven chocolate chip cookies for dessert. I want to get my yearly fat and cholesterol limit in one stop, and consume four perfect foods while doing so.