Mall Food Courts: The Modern Watering Hole

By Alex Henderson

Everything in the mall food court is sticky.

Black-clad cleaners—the real heroes here—glide in and out, scooping up food wrappers, crumpled napkins, and abandoned scraps from the tables, then spraying, wiping, finishing with a flourish and tucking in the chairs. They are meticulous, practiced, moving like well-oiled machines… but everything is still sticky. Not uncomfortably so, and certainly not enough to deter any of the hundreds of people piling into the food court over the course of the day. It’s an accepted greasiness, the residue of great numbers of people, a film made up by millions of fingerprints.

At 10AM, the mall (this shopping centre has an official name, but like many of its kind its individual identity is masked beneath its colloquial one, The Mall) is filling up with people. These are the ones that dislike crowds, and come early to beat the rush, and in the process create a rush of their own. Swimming on this tide of irony are power-walking bag-hauling mothers, employees heading towards their day shifts with various franchise uniforms peeking out from under backpacks and jackets, and young families pushing prams and trolleys with equal care. A small girl has decided the best course of action in the chaos is to sit in the middle of the floor and yell.

Her anti-mall public performance art is rudely interrupted as her father begins to move, slowly, in the gait that can only mean this is one of the “If you don’t come now, I’m leaving without you,” exchanges that forms a crux of terror and indignation in every childhood. She opens her gap-toothed mouth in a wail of what I can only assume is philosophical and existential despair that she doesn’t quite have the skills to communicate yet.

She’s alone in her anguish, it seems—everyone else is rolling along the gleaming linoleum halls of The Mall like marbles in a mechanical run, tipped in one direction or another by the mechanics and magnets of the shopping centre. No matter where The Mall’s visitors are drawn to, more often than not they will end up sloping towards one central hub: shopping is hungry work, after all, and the surest way to make sure that people keep doing it and don’t trundle out of the complex in an exhausted, dejected, hungry-angry puddle, is to first roll them towards food.

At 11AM, the food court is floating in a pre-rush lull, a blissful productive-but-unstressful phase for the many uniformed chefs, servers and clerks behind the counters lining the central hub. A strange pattern has emerged: from my vantage point I can see two separate groups of four elderly Asian men and women in casual fleecy jackets having coffee.

In the middle of the grid of chairs and benches, a girl with scarlet-dyed hair is engaged in battle with plastic packaging. Evidently it has a seal that could be approved for space travel. She tugs, pinches, pulls, rearranges it, in search of a weakness in this impenetrable fortress—but stops when her boyfriend returns, and nonchalantly starts braiding her hair, as if her inability to open some McDonald’s wrapping is actually no big deal at all.

Most patrons are families, which makes a trio of teenagers starkly stand out as they tease each other from under flat-brimmed caps. A tattoo-sleeved, scruffy-bearded, imposing bulk of a man delicately pushes a pram. A baby sits in a highchair eating chips, with one hand draped over the headrest like a pint-sized hedonistic Roman emperor. The gourmet wrap shop next to KFC remains untouched apart from a couple of customers; the employee at the register looks like she’s composing poetry in her head.

A coiffed woman in stylish clothing power-walks across the food court with a look that would be enough to bulldoze anyone out of the way, if she wasn’t already moving through the crowd with a figure skater’s precision and a conquering warlord’s raw energy. A few minutes later she’s back, blazing a fiery path in the other direction, looking like she either just has, or is about to, have somebody killed.

At 12 noon, a chirpy voice fills the hall from speakers, announcing that there will be children’s face painting and necklace making in the centre this afternoon. The woman standing outside Harris Scarfe with a microphone looks decidedly annoyed that she’s been not only interrupted but outdone. Once the public service announcement is over, she goes back to advertising full-pelt—there are so many great bargains inside she can barely spare a breath.

There’s 30-40 per cent off something and great value on something else, but the details are eaten by microphone warble and the noise of the crowd. “That’s advertising,” says a bob-haired mum engrossed in a mobile game, without really looking up, to her young son when he points out the shiny lady trying to lure people into Harris Scarfe. “It’s to help sell things.”

“I wish the government would make everything completely cheap,” says the boy, eating his Subway cookie wisely. “And cars would be five dollars. Then that way when I get birthday money from Grandma and Grandpa I could buy a car.”

1:30PM, and the upper food court is packed full, table rows stacked with layer upon layer of people—chewing burgers, struggling with chopsticks, wiping avocado beards off their children’s chins, deep in conversation and gesturing wildly, ignoring each other, staring into the distance as they slurp cola from a straw, trying to manoeuvre through the gridlock of tables and bags and legs and trolleys, holding trays full of food or shopping or small children aloft.

All around is a rainbow: Hoyts cinemas’ great red letters, fiery orange neon above Ali Baba, the beacon of McDonalds’ golden arches, the grass green of Schnitz’s aggressively casual menu, EB Games’ radiant blue entryway, Donut King’s eye-catching and tastebud-enticing candy pink. The food court’s pillars, tables and light fittings are all neutral pale wood or monochrome to balance this out, but they only serve to reflect the kaleidoscope of shops and signage.

“Free Wi-Fi!” signs hang from the ceiling, flapping overhead like seagulls to constantly remind that you can, in fact, spend all day here if you want to. You’ve got food, places to sit, toilets, sinks, and internet—if you were dedicated and sneaky enough, you could bunk in a nice cosy bed in Myer or another furniture shop, and wander down to K-Mart each day to buy new clothes (in lieu of doing laundry) and change in the fitting rooms. It could become home quite easily.

‘The Mall’ is considered a North American invention, the lovechild of post-war commercial boom and the growth of the middle-class suburbs, but if you take it to mean any kind of large, enclosed shopping centre with amenities attached, the concept goes all the way back to Ancient Rome. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul could be considered one of the first and most spectacular ‘malls’ in the world, built in the 15^th Century and igniting a grand tradition of covered markets where people could do all their shopping in one place in relative luxury. Le Marché des Enfants Rouges followed, established in 1600s Paris; the Oxford Covered Markets of 1774; and St. Petersburg’s Gostiny Dvor, opened in 1785 and considered one of the first purpose-built ‘malls’. Come one, come all, wherever and whenever you are in the world—come inside, relax, eat, buy, spend.

These are all still in operation today, competing for grandeur with their modern counterparts—many of which are no longer content with simply being shopping arcades, and have ascended and evolved into worlds unto themselves. Some relatives of mine used to live in Dubai, where the entire family learned to ski. I tried to picture them practicing on sand dunes, until they told me, as if it was obvious, they’d gone to one of the city malls. There was an indoor ski slope there, fluffed full of fake snow.

This suburban hub is quite meek and mousey by comparison (there’s not even an indoor aquarium, for heaven’s sake!) but even the smallest mall is a city within a city, a contained world unto itself, with the same lighting effects that airports employ to make you feel at home no matter what your body clock is telling you. Except for some skylights here and there, there’s no indication of the passing of time or the changing of weather. It’s a sealed ecosystem kept lush and vibrant by the thousands of people who flow in and out like the sea, creating a consumer tidal pool that always feels slightly otherworldly.

Breaking the horizon of this alien landscape, a short-and-spiky-haired woman and the little pigtail-topped girl she’s with emerge above the headline of the seated diners. They stand to wave and “coo-ee!” to someone on the other side of the food court. The girl lets out a happy “papa!” when their semaphore catches his attention, and they both sit back down… only to jump a metre each in the air when Papa sneaks up and passes a cold drink to them through the fake ferns, tapping his unsuspecting partner on the shoulder with it. She places a hand over her heart accusingly and laughs, loud enough to cut through the clamour.

2:45, and a kid with a paper Spiderman mask on top of his head lets out the most unruly and explosive sneeze mankind has ever witnessed. It probably registers on the Richter Scale, or at least, is enough to dislodge his teenaged sister from her engrossed phone call. Spiderman’s superhuman sneeze has startled one of the cleaners sweeping near their table, whose studious face has now crinkled into a bemused grin.

“Agh!” the sister clutches her phone, stare-glaring between Spiderman and the cleaner he may have, to her horror, just loudly snotted on. “I’m so sorry!”

The cleaner just laughs. “It’s alright! Bless you.” And moves on to wipe the next bench, harbouring a little snort-laugh and shaking her head. Spiderman is dutifully dabbing at his nose with a tissue while his sister prods at him accusingly.

3:30: in the afternoon hubbub, a young man with a curly bun sits chewing listlessly on a boxed curry. A bleach-blonde, dark lipsticked girl sidles up beside him and pats him on the shoulder, and he launches to life, plucking out his earbuds and smiling broadly, forgetting about the last dregs of probably-now-cold curry and rolling out of his seat to join her.

Hand in hand, they set off across the food court back into the belly of the mall. He offers to carry her shopping bags, she waves him away saying “It’s fine! I’ve got them” and starts a conversation that’s rapidly eaten by the sound fog, but is there nonetheless.

5PM, and the mall begins to shift—cage doors slide across the mouths of shops, blue cloths emerge to chase spritzes of sanitising spray along the fast food counters, slushy machines begin to slow until they stop turning entirely. The day gives the illusion of winding down, yet the food court is still echoing with footsteps and voices. Trolleys trundle past stacked full of today’s spoils of war: boxes of soda cans, bulging green Woolworth’s bags, an industrial amount of toilet paper, an enormous fake fern, and a flat-packed bedside table jutting out at a potentially dangerous angle. And in one case a toddler in a polka-dot onesie, happily standing in the basket eating an orange.

A little boy is dancing happily around with a red balloon bearing the mall’s logo. Perhaps, to him, it’s a sword to slay dragons with or a wand to shoot spells—to his older brother it’s a beacon, and a larger version of the toddling boy scoots through the thinning crowd at a half-jog to retrieve the balloon warrior from where he’s wandered off to, wearing a smile that’s half relief and half amusement.

6PM, and it’s difficult to believe this place is ever devoid of people. Even as the fast food outlets close down and dim, and the cleaners begin the mammoth task of stacking the chairs atop the tables, the food court is still peppered with families, groups of friends, and couples munching on early dinners—or, in one case, still engrossed in the conversation they started in those same seats an hour-and-a-half before.

The quality of the dazzling lights hasn’t changed since 10 in the morning—The Mall is as welcoming and hypnotic as ever, simply converting to a nocturnal state. A tantalising perfume of popcorn beckons crowds to the cinema. McDonald’s promises to be open until late. K-Mart and other department stores will not, in fact, ever close—so no, there is never a time where this great, mad structure is empty. There will always be a human heartbeat somewhere in this white-lit labyrinth.

And tomorrow, the tide will come in and, as it has throughout history, The Mall will fill with life and laughter and hunger and noise once more.