Microcosm

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There’s something just a little desperate about eating alone in a mall food court.

I’ve spent my share of time in those great empty halls of flatulent consumerism, and I’ve developed a theory on why that is. I always like to have a theory. Here’s my current one.

Mall food courts are a microcosm of North American consumer society. To eat alone at the food court is to evoke the fear of being alone in our cliquish culture. For many, a fate worse than death.

Love it, hate it, or revel in your ambivalence, but the mall food court, with all its blank-eyed convenience, mirrors consumer culture. And you know what mirrors are good for. Looking at things that we can’t normally see. How can we pass up an opportunity to stare at the disquieting underbelly of our world, jaded nomads? I don’t know about you, but I can’t. So let’s strap on our hairnets, slip on our sanitary gloves, and lean in for a closer look.

Skimming in along the tile and Formica surface of the beast, there are the obvious similarities. The food court is built just like our commoditized society. Some lights and flashy colours to get our attention, some easy to clean surfaces that can be hosed down at the end of the day. Efficiency, baby. Efficiency to keep the costs down and boost those margins. And of course, it’s designed to be fast. It’s a volume business – high mall floor space costs mean you need to keep the customers churning through in order to survive. A sociably slow meal is for those lazy Europeans. We need people to spend, fill up, and clear out to make room for others. Conversation with friends and family isn’t making anyone richer. No one who’s got a stake in the food court anyway. Failure to purchase enough makes you an unwelcome burden on the system. Go be philosophical somewhere else.

Right, right, very interesting you say – a retail space that mirrors consumer culture, what’s unusual about that? Why is this worth discussing? Here’s why – because the food court also illustrates a darker, less obvious principal of our society. That things must not change.

A sociably slow meal is for those lazy Europeans...Go be philosophical somewhere else.

Preservation of the status quo. Is there anything scarier than things always staying the same? I shudder to think of it. Of course, in our high-turnover world, change is constant. Change is accelerating. We manage change, we plan for change, we adapt to and embrace change. We run as fast as we can lest we be left behind. But nothing really changes.

The secret of our little world, which the food court unwittingly reveals, is that the content can change. But the structure never does.

Think about it for a minute. Trends come and go, restaurant chains rise and fall, but the food court remains what it has always been. Restaurants are jammed into boxes that line the walls. People line up and get their food in a hurry, then they go sit in the middle of the food court in seats that are designed to push you just a little bit forwards, so that you can’t lean back and relax. So that you eat and get the hell out. If you want to spend some quality time talking with your friends or just thinking, do it somewhere else, deadbeat.

The types of restaurants change. Nowadays, healthy eating is all the rage. Smoothie vendors, frozen yogurt shops, and a dozen other forms of health-conscious cuisine also accompany our usual compliment of fast food restaurants. But they all fit the mould. They serve up food fast and pump people through quick. The food they serve changes, but the structure cannot change. If you allowed people to eat slow meals in the food court, if you encouraged them to linger and chat, then they wouldn’t be out spending. And they’d be taking up precious retail space – sitting. Which would mean that more square footage would need to be allocated for seating, at no increase in revenue. Increase costs without increasing revenues? Heresy. Can’t be done. Not for long anyway.

I even recently noticed a new food court entrant here in my city by the mountains. A newcomer that appeared, on the surface, to buck this trend. Ricky’s Old Fashioned Diner. They do away with the service counter lined up into the food court. Instead they offer a tiny restaurant, closed off from the general seating area. It’s all done in 50’s diner style, complete with private booths. It completely breaks the model.

But look a little closer.

Those little booths, the seats are cambered forward, making sitting for longer than 10 or 15 minutes, unexpectedly unpleasant. But there’s no need to worry, because your food will be out almost immediately. And you won’t exactly find a full diner menu to choose from. That wouldn’t be efficient enough for the circumstances. You can come in and avoid all the horrors of food court eating, but you’ll get assembly line food spun out to your seat. To be consumed in minutes. Your check waiting to go so that you can get out quick. So that you can go buy yourself something nice. Because you’ve had a tough week and buying something will make you feel better. Right?

Trends come and go. Changes occur all the time. But while the particular contents of our individual trays may continually shift, the structure of our society does not. Economic necessity enforces conformity to the model and punishes those that deviate from it. Our society is designed to not change. To make sure that things keep going the way they have been. Because this is the way we like it.

Right?