The Food Courts are Expanding

I am back from home and am back in Saudi Arabia. In the malls both here and there the food courts are expanding.

We have all talked about the collapse of American manufacturing, but we are seeing the dark days of American retail. Nothing seems left but places to eat, get your nails done or sell your scrap gold. Why is there a massage place in the mall? Why is there a bathroom refinishing place?

The mall seems increasingly to be a place “to be” rather than a place to shop.

There was a piece on the local news just yesterday on this very topic. The current thinking seems to be that malls should rely on activities rather than anchors to bring in traffic. Also, lots of malls are being converted to “Town Centers” - more open air than hermetically sealed.

I don’t know how many people are like my husband and me, but we haven’t been inside a mall for longer than I can remember. It’s partly because the nearest mall is more than 25 miles away, but mostly because we don’t like dealing with parking and crowds. There’s also the perception that malls attract groups of kids looking for trouble - it may or may not be the case, but if a lot of people think that way, they’ll avoid malls.

Interesting. My local mall has rebounded a little since it went on life support about a decade ago (it has five actual anchor stores, selling retail goods year-round, for the first time since then), but the food court is still dead. Only maybe half of the food court stalls have anything in them.

The mall has a church, though.

heh here’s the state of the us mall MSN

Probably been 20 years since I’ve been inside a mall. They are a dying business model.

Absolutely. In my hometown mall, a JC Penney closed recently, and part of the space is going to be taken by Dave & Busters (a restaurant/bar/video game parlor for grown-ups). And I’ve never been to Los Angeles, but I’ve heard that The Grove is popular, partly as a place to hang out, as much as a place to shop.

And what stores remain try to sell the personal experience, since anyone can go online and buy stuff.

I was in one mall recently where the ambient music was so obnoxiously loud that I went to the mall office (it was a challenge just finding it) to complain about that. A receptionist there polite took my complaint, which I suppose was as far is it ever went.

I’m sure they do that on purpose to drive people away, so that people will come, do their shopping or whatever business, and promptly leave. I think the ear-splitting loud music is done deliberately to discourage people from just hanging out there.

Music in restaurants, especially fast-food places, is there for the same reason I’m sure (even if it isn’t quite that loud). You can’t have lunch there with someone and have a conversation because of the ambient music.

I pity the workers who have to listen to that all day. Must drive them bonkers (or cause ear damage) eventually.

Come gather round people, wherever you shop
And admit that you’re hungry as your money you swap
And accept it that soon you’ll be starting to drop
And you’re heading for a crash landing
You’d better be grateful there’s a place you can stop
For the food courts are expanding

Keep that shit up, Johnny, and you might get yourself a Nobel freakin’ Prize.

Which defeats the purpose, imo. The last time I spent an entire day at the mall was me and a gf for my first time at Old Orchard just north of Chicago - in January. Braving 20-degree weather to go from store to store seemed idiotic to me.

And I’ll concede some disappointment. As I kid I wanted the future with domed cities and malls seemed like the gateway drug that would lead to everything being indoors.

I think it’s obvious that businesses that provide services face less competition from Amazon and other online competition than businesses that sell goods.

I definitely prefer the indoor mall experience to walking outside from store to store (or driving from one set to the other in a larger complex). That said, one of our malls died years ago as affluence moved east, and the other is not in great shape (with several stands in food court empty and the sit-down restaurant part closed). The outdoor shopping center (not a strip mall, but big place) is two decades newer and closer to the wealthier people.

But, I admit, I only go to either a few times a year. Several times during Christmas season, and for a couple birthdays during the year. Mother or father’s day if I can’t find anything online (I have to see clothes and jewelry in person and if buying for self, try on clothes and shoes). I know it doesn’t keep money in the local economy (though chains are not great for that, either), but it easier to comparison shop and much easier to find what you want. Saw two toys I liked online, and didn’t see either at any of the stores I went to this weekend. For video games, if you order online you don’t have to hunt down someone to open the glass case or go through two lines or such. And so on and so on.

Thirty-some years ago when we were first married, my husband and I used to go to the mall a lot, just to walk around and maybe get supper. We were broke, so it was close and cheap and (in Florida heat) comfortable. Sometimes we’d even take a longer ride to other malls in the city for a change of scenery.

I don’t remember the last time either of us said “Let’s go mall-walking.”

You should see the stuff I don’t post! :stuck_out_tongue:

I am curious whether anyone has ever seen or heard of an old mall turned into housing?
It seems to me that an old mall that is no longer viable for shopping could be turned into a sort of super-condominium. Strip out the interior walls and rebuild where the stores used to me into nice apartments, maybe turn the anchor stores into 2 story apartment buildings, etc. You could put additional townhomes in the now no longer needed parking lots, etc. As a draw to the tenants, the hallways and food courts and some stores could be maintained as a “town square” where it never rains or snows. But I am not an architect and I am already aware that repurposing buildings is rarely cost-effective. It seems like a good idea in areas where buildable real estate is in short supply.

Here in Silicon Valley, they’re trying to repurpose the Vallco Mall into a building with a combination of retail, housing and entertainment. But the citizens of Cupertino voted that down, and things are at a stalemate.

The building is within walking distance of Apple’s new spaceship campus, so it’d be a goldmine if they could just figure out how to best repurpose it.

Well, they had that same idea, but: Vallco Shopping Mall - Wikipedia

There’s also Santana Row, designed from the ground up as mixed use:

Some have been repurposed:

Yes, for one big reason: Big box stores, which anchors are, were massively over-built and are now contracting, especially in the face of competition from Internet sellers. Some are dying, such as Kmart and Sears, but their decline has nothing to do with “trends” and everything to do with grotesque mismanagement from the very top.

This is much less exciting in Montana than it is in California.

A lot of people around me don’t think that way. Here in Missoula, MT, we have a thriving enclosed mall (Southgate Mall) with a variety of stores, a food court, a couple sit-down restaurants, and multiple anchors, plus smaller stores outside of the main mall but in the same parking lot.

I always though an anchor tenant in malls should be government agencies/services. I think it would be a win/win as far as operating costs, it would centralize services for people and bring in a lot of foot traffic during weekdays.

I don’t see the food courts in the malls around me expanding. In fact, the mall at the Prudential Center in Boston axed theirs altogether. It used to be a pretty good one, too. Other malls locally seem to always have at least one and often several restaurant shops closed. Some are the same size they ever were, but not expanding.

New malls aren’t being built, but now these mostly-outdoor things they call “Lifestyle Centers” are opening up * . They don’t have Food Courts – they have individual separate (and often pricey) restaurants.
*My theory is that by eliminating that clean, heated, rain- and snow-excluding interior (which has to be cleaned, with restrooms that must be maintained) the owners are removing the environment that attracts the idle and the non-spenders. If you make them slog through the weather to go from store to store you eliminate the unprofitable people from your environment.