Few good choices are ever made in a food court. The very act of entering a food court is the first in a cascading series of decisions that most of us will regret for at least the rest of the day, and possibly longer.
Yet food courts persist in their depressing, greasy, inhuman presence, anchoring a dead-end or otherwise unrentable basement level in some mall or office complex concourse.
Every now and again someone takes a run at reinventing them. Knock out a few walls, let in a bit of sunlight, get a few farm-to-table outfits or celebrity chefs to dumb down their offering enough to compete with pseudo-Thai, and presto-chango it’s not a food court, it’s a culinary experience.
Except it isn’t. Because food courts have never been about food. Consumers know that, mall owners know that and even the food brands themselves know it. Food courts are like public toilets and poor signage: they are a way to keep you from going home. If you don’t have to go home to eat, you don’t have to stop shopping. If you don’t stop shopping then the mall lives to clean the pennies and gum wrappers out of their fountains for another day. At least until their anchor tenant goes buns-up and takes down the whole shebang.
Show me an empty food court and I will show you a mall whose days are numbered. As Sears Canada heads into creditor protection just a couple of years after Target so miserably fumbled, we are seeing the beginning of the end of most suburban malls in this country. Sure, some high-end anchor tenants may persist. Nordstrom and Saks are muscling their way in, and Hudson Bay struggles on, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on the big mall model.
In the mall ecosystem, the top predators, usually one or two department store anchors, along with a movie theatre, are the alleged draw to the local Cathedral of Want. Other brands rent out their little spaces in between the two, hoping to cash in on the foot traffic. A few of them, such as Apple, might be destinations in their own rights. At the very arse end of it all, like an afterthought, someone has stuffed in a food court, where Cinnabon, Sbarro, Manchu Wok and New York Fries compete for the unenthusiastic custom of people too worn down from wanting things to make any more considered a decision than which purveyor of slop has the shortest line.
The absurdity of this comes into sharper focus this week with the news that Amazon has bought Whole Foods, and oh, my, is everyone in a tizzy. What will it mean? Why has it happened? Wither Wal-Mart? Here’s my take: Amazon succeeds as a department store for one reason, and it has nothing to do with size. Amazon succeeds because it tests and learns.
Unlike its lumbering competitors, who are attached to an old model that depends on things they can’t control, like regional economies, Amazon tries stuff, makes notes, moves on. The Whole Foods thing looks to be a way to understand fragile product supply chains, high-net-worth consumers and a nodal model of distribution. Also, probably, bricks and mortar customer experience. Gartner tells us Amazon invests 11.7% of revenue in research and development. The rest of the retail and wholesale industry coughs up 1.5%, on average. That, my friends, is the big differentiator.
Amazon killed off what was left of the mall years ago when it helped us understand we didn’t need to put on pants to buy stuff. Along with Netflix and Apple, it helps us watch movies without getting our feet sticky, and buy music in the middle of the night. Plus, we don’t have to eat in a food court. If those food court brands are still out there, they may want to consider getting into the home delivery business. There might be a nostalgia play there. But I hope not. Food courts are not a high point.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Jonathan Gladstone says
Interesting thesis, and I think you’re right about Amazon’s research-led relative advantage. But what then do you make of the continuing popularity of food-court-like slop (aka fast food) to order in or take out everywhere else?