Nobody Drives to a Mall for a Shirt Anymore — They Drive There to Eat: Why F&B and Entertainment Decide a Project's Fate
Updated: 1 day ago
Ask yourself when you last drove to a mall specifically to buy a shirt. Now ask when you last drove to one to eat with your family. That reversal — quiet, gradual, and now complete — has changed what decides a commercial project's fate. Food, beverage, and entertainment are no longer the filler between shops; they are the reason the visit happens at all.
The old model treated F&B as an afterthought: a food court by the parking level, identical fast-food counters, a play corner squeezed into leftover space. That model made sense when shopping itself was the magnet. It no longer is — the purchases a phone can deliver have moved to the phone. What cannot be downloaded is dinner with friends, a child's afternoon at a play park, the family outing. Projects still designed around the old model are competing for a visitor who has stopped coming.
A real F&B and entertainment strategy works differently. It treats dining and family entertainment centers (FECs) as anchors in their own right — selected, positioned, and curated with the same rigor once reserved for department stores. It engineers the dwell-time economics: a family that stays three hours instead of one passes more storefronts, makes more unplanned purchases, and returns more often. It balances the dining mix — quick service, casual, café culture, destination restaurants — so different visit occasions are all served. And it places these magnets deliberately, pulling footfall through the project rather than letting it pool at one entrance.
Malls worldwide have been reallocating space in exactly this direction for a decade — shrinking fashion floors, expanding dining terraces, adding cinemas, edutainment, and attraction-grade FECs. Our region is arguably the best-positioned market on Earth for this shift: young populations, family-centered social life, hot summers that make indoor leisure a necessity, and dining as the default form of gathering. The demand exists. The question is which projects are designed to receive it.
Here is the constructive criticism: too many regional projects still lease F&B last, at whatever rents remain, to whoever applies. The result is interchangeable food courts that give no one a reason to choose this project over the next. Treating F&B and entertainment as strategy — studied, curated, anchored — is how a project stops renting meals and starts owning its community's social life. That is also a public good: these are the region's most reliable creators of first jobs for young people.
At RETAILBIG, F&B and FEC strategy is a core pillar of our Strategic Positioning & Leasing service — built on 16+ years and 600+ delivered projects across the Levant and GCC, including the restaurants and entertainment concepts we have planned, designed, and launched ourselves.
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
