Stop Malling Me

On my favorite food forum (of all places) there has been an ongoing discussion about the new expansion of one of the large shopping malls in the area. Specifically, Tysons Corner Center (the middle-of-the-road mall, not Tysons Galleria, the pricey one). They’ve added some new stores, restaurants and a movie theater. The reason it has been a topic of interest with the foodies is that it was rumored that some of the restaurants would be of the more up-scale variety.

But (and, apparently, quite shockingly to some), the restaurants are a disappointment. With “The Cheesecake Factory” being the most popular place at the high-end Tysons mall across the street, the lack of fine dining at the more pedestrian mall did not really surprise me much. But what I did find notable was how some of the folks on the forum think that the malls at Tysons Corner are known across the country. Ha!

With the exception of people such as my uncle Joe, who worked for a mall management company, and a shop-o-holic, frequent-flyer who I worked with back in California, I know no one who knows about any malls outside of a one hundred-mile radius of their home. Sure a lot of people know the best place to go for a day of clothes shopping or where the nearest Williams-Sonoma is located, but outside of a reasonable driving distance?

And why should anyone? A mall is a mall is a mall. They are all pretty much the same thing. Sure, there are super-large malls like the Mall of America (the only mall I’ve never been that I can name, but since it is considered the “biggest”, it does get a lot of press), or the outdoor malls (I’ve been a couple of times to one in Corte Madera, CA, but I cannot tell you anything about it other than there is a J. Crew located there where RWT’s little sister worked one summer and it is really, really hard to find parking there during the holiday season), or the malls with really cool and artistic fountains (such as Newport Fashion Island), or the malls that smell of mildew (which can be found in Guam, Houston and Austin). But whether they are indoor malls, expensive malls, mediocre malls, decidedly down-scale malls, small malls, hard-to-get-to malls or whatever malls… go to enough of them and they all pretty much blur together.

To me a mall is somewhere you go when you are on a mission to purchase something. A mall is not a destination in itself. The only exception to this is when visiting a friend in a faraway city and there is nothing better to do. But such trips are not the result of a specific mall – any mall will do. We go to look and comment on the merchandise (and the other shoppers). We go to try on clothes that we’d never think of buying when shopping by ourselves and then get the giggles at how we look in them. And we eat at the mall restaurants only because if we don’t consume some calories ASAP, we will pass out (or get incredibly grumpy and then no one has any fun).

Now don’t get me wrong. I love to shop and going to a mall is a great way to squeeze maximum shopping into a minimum amount of time and effort. But the reasons I go to the Tysons Corner malls are simply that they have a good number of stores where I like to shop and are reasonably close to where I live. Any other mall amenities… décor, layout, dining options, movie theaters, skating rink, carousels and so on… they are just things to walk past when getting from one store to the next.

So, other than having a few more stores to peruse on my next shopping quest, for me, the best thing about the new addition to the Tysons mall is the possibility that, for at least a little while, everyone will park in the new parking garage near the expansion and I’ll be able to easily park at the other end near the Bloomingdales!