Some ideas for shopping and entertainment centers

Modern shop­ping cen­ters are more and more becom­ing shop­ping and enter­tain­ment centers.

Have you noticed the trend?

The idea is to keep a person in the shop­ping center (SC) as long as pos­si­ble by turn­ing it into a shop­ping and enter­tain­ment center, an SEC. Let it be a place for relax­ing and shop­ping, a place to meet friends and talk.

The trend is all too obvi­ous; for­give me for play­ing a little Captain Obvious.

I think a good idea for an SEC is to borrow the prac­tice of city cafés’ summer ter­races: a stretch of side­walk gets filled with tables and comfy armchairs. Have you seen how pop­u­lar these cafés are in summer?

So why not put the same kind of ter­races in a shop­ping center, and not in a sep­a­rate area on the second or third floor but right between the shops? Café islands of a sort, instead of meager benches.

I think it’d be great!

And, of course, one more idea that’s very pop­u­lar these days: free Wi-Fi. I sug­gest cov­er­ing the whole shop­ping center with it.

You can let your imag­i­na­tion run here: either the nearby shops pro­vide the inter­net, earn­ing the respect and grat­i­tude of poten­tial cus­tomers that way, or the SEC itself pro­vides the cov­er­age to attract visitors.

Young people love spend­ing time in shop­ping cen­ters, find­ing secluded cor­ners there that secu­rity keeps chas­ing them out of. At least I know of one such center in Odesa.

Why not pro­vide such places when plan­ning the space? Put sofas and arm­chairs there, with suit­ably soft, not too bright lighting.

Sure, they leave litter and so on behind, which has to be cleaned up, and the fur­ni­ture wears out. But maybe part of the adver­tis­ing budget for bill­boards along the lines of “Do your shop­ping at our mall” could be redi­rected to this?

On top of every­thing else, a person in an SEC is con­stantly bom­barded with adver­tis­ing over the in-house radio.

Add some inter­ac­tiv­ity to that: all sorts of inter­ac­tive adver­tis­ing game panels, for example. For details, you can google “interactive advertising”.

This way we create a loyal audi­ence that assoc­iates our SEC with a pleas­ant time, relax­ation and entertainment.

I think that’s the future of shop­ping centers.