top of page
Search

When Did You Last Drive Somewhere to Buy a Shirt? Why F&B and Entertainment Are Now the Reason for the Visit

Ask yourself when you last drove somewhere specifically to buy a shirt. Now ask when you last drove somewhere to eat with your family. That reversal — quiet, gradual, and now complete — has changed what decides a commercial project's success. Dining and entertainment are no longer the filler between shops. They are the reason the visit happens.

What e-commerce could not take

Everything a phone can deliver has been moving to the phone for a decade. What remains physical is what cannot be downloaded: a meal with friends, a child's afternoon at a play park, the family outing that fills a Friday. Projects still designed around the old logic — shopping as the magnet, food as an afterthought near the parking level — are competing for a visitor who stopped coming.

F&B and FEC as anchors, not amenities

  • Curate, don't fill. The dining mix needs quick service, casual, café culture, and at least one destination operator people travel for — each serving a different visit occasion.

  • Engineer dwell time. A family staying three hours instead of one passes more storefronts, buys more unplanned items, and returns more often. Dwell time is the real currency.

  • Place them to pull. Dining and entertainment on upper floors give visitors a reason to climb; placed at the entrance, they trap footfall instead of distributing it.

  • Design for them early. Extraction, drainage, power, and structural capacity for FEC equipment must exist in the base build — retrofitting kitchens and attractions is brutally expensive.

  • Plan the operator relationship. Strong F&B operators negotiate hard for fit-out contributions and rent structures. That trade is worth making — but it must be modelled, not improvised.

Why our region is unusually well positioned

Few markets on earth suit this shift better: young populations, family-centered social life, hot summers that make indoor leisure a necessity rather than a luxury, and dining as the default form of gathering. In the Levant, Egypt, Turkey, and the Gulf, the demand exists in abundance. The open question is which projects are built to receive it — and which are still leasing food courts as leftover space.

The criticism worth hearing

Across our markets, F&B is still commonly leased last, at whatever rents remain, to whoever applies. The result is interchangeable food courts that give nobody a reason to choose this project over the next one. Treating dining and entertainment as strategy — studied, curated, anchored, designed for from day one — is how a project stops renting meals and starts owning its community's social life.

There is a public dividend too: F&B and entertainment are the region's most reliable creators of first jobs for young people. Building these sectors well is commercial and civic at the same time.

A note from the field

Restaurants and entertainment concepts are among the spaces we have planned, designed, and launched ourselves across the Levant and the Gulf — which is why we treat them as commercial engines rather than decorative additions. That is the work we do at RETAILBIG: building the F&B and entertainment strategy that carries a project's footfall. You can read how we work on our About page.

Is your project's dining and entertainment plan an afterthought or an anchor? Send us a brief and receive a complimentary 15–30 minute consultation: Contact RETAILBIG

Images: Pexels (free to use) — photos by Uğurcan Özmen, Rachel Claire, and Lywin.

Read also from RETAILBIG

 
 
bottom of page