Shopping Mall Components: Food Courts, Department Stores and Stand Alone Store (2024)

Shopping Mall Components: Food Courts, Department Stores and Stand Alone Store!

Visiting malls and strolling in and around the malls is one of the emerging features of modern day life. Walking around malls is one of the best stress relievers. The facilities available in malls can transform negative thoughts into positive ones and boring people into romantic ones. When you are under stress, visiting malls may be the easiest and relaxing experience.

In malls, people forget about their worries and indulge in amusem*nt and shopping bargain. There are plenty of things in a mall. One can play in arcades, watch movies, eat best of the food, and stroll around the shops after shopping and eating. Today’s most modern shopping malls provide information kiosks, laundry services, public restrooms, gift wrapping services, tours and travel booking counters and supervised childcare besides traditional means of shopping and leisure. All these avenues accessible to visitors are basically the various components of a mall.

Following are the basic components of most modern shopping malls:

(a) Food Courts

(b) Department Stores

(c) Stand Alone stores

1. Food Courts:

One of the most popular components of a shopping mall, however, is a collection of different restaurants known as a food court. A food court offers mall visitors with a collection of diverse eateries, from local franchises to multinational chains. Venues in a typical food court operate side-by-side to each other, with a centralized common dining area to accommodate customers.

The three most widely used practices to operate food courts are (a) close to large “anchor stores”, (b) near a location convenient for truck deliveries and (c) dedicated a separate floor or a larger part of a floor to eateries. Although many shopping malls have full-service theme restaurants, the food court offers customers the opportunity to sample many different styles of fast food.

For instance, one spouse may want Indian food, while the other may have a preference for Continental food. Children usually prefer something different from their parents, so a food court allows each family member to have what they want and still eat together in a shared dining area.

Food vendors, who offer international or exotic items, may find it easier to run a smaller outlet rather than a separate stand alone restaurant in or outside the malls. Even customers find the option of having diverse restaurants grouped together in a food court. To attract customers, especially towards exotic and international taste, employees offer free samples of their products to potential customers walking through the food court area.

It has also been seen that some popular chain restaurants offer customers the same menu items found in their other large sized stores, but others may offer a more restricted menu because of shortage of floor space in a food court outlet. Offering limited menu which can be served in a short span of time, such as burgers, chowmins, rolls, sandwiches, pastries, fried items and pre-baked goods, is common to most of the food outlets.

Food is usually served in disposable utensils (not always). Payment is made through temporary debit cards purchased for this purpose at the entry or exit of such food courts. Customers can buy anything from any place with these rechargeable cards. After dinning, cards are deposited back at the cash counters and balance is taken back.

2. Department Stores:

A department store is a large retail outlet that offers a large variety and deep assortment and is organized into separate departments for the purpose of selling, display and promotion, customer service and control. Each department sells unique products and has its own selling, accounts, packaging and security staff. Not only in India, but this type of format is popular and well appreciated in many parts of the world.

To be defined as a department store, usually it follows following conditions:

(1) It must employ minimum 50 people as store staff.

(2) Most selling goods relate to FMCG and daily used items.

(3) It should have proper balance between home furniture, consumer electronics, apparel and food.

(4) All the departments should generate balance contribution towards sales. For instance, not more than 80% of annual sales can come from single product line.

In India, apparel and furnishing are two common categories in most of the department stores. The major India department stores like Ebony, Shopper’s Stop, Westside, Music World, Globus and Lifestyle deal in women’s, men’s, kids’ clothing, furniture, jewellery, kitchenware and furnishing.

3. Stand Alone Store:

Generally in a shopping mall or shopping centre, most of the area is covered with satellite buildings to be found on the same tract of land or on one adjacent to it, on which will be located stand-alone stores, which may or may not be contractually connected to the common facilities.

These stores may have their own separate entry and exit gates, parking lots, security provisions, or their lots may intersect with those of the mall or center. The existence of the stores may have been planned by the mall owners (mall developers) or may have come about through opportunistic actions by others, but visually the central facility – the mall or shopping center – and the satellite buildings will often be perceived as being a single, ‘unit’ even in circ*mstances where the outlying buildings are not officially or legally connected to the mall in any way.

Therefore, as the name goes, a stand-alone store is accurately how it sounds – a store that has its standing/existence of its own. It is just like a destination store, meaning people know it is there and will come to it. This sort of store allows more space for merchandise display and can be easily to reach. Customers also prefer to visit these stand alone stores because due to separate entities, they don’t have to deal with the crowds at a mall or even a strip mall.