Page 74 - The Disneyization of Society

HYBRID CONSUMPTION

The shopping mall has become a major location for hybrid consumption. This
occurs in numerous and fairly well-known ways, whereby malls seek to incorpo-
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rate many types of consumption and functions so that there are as few reasons as
possible for the shopper to leave the mall. Indeed, the mall frequently becomes a
venue for activities other than shopping as such and in the process becomes a
destination in its own right.
Malls now incorporate a wide variety of restaurants, snack bars, and coffee
shops. In addition, they often have banking facilities in the form of actual bank
branches or ATMs (automatic teller machines). Cinemas have become an increas-
ingly common component of the standard mall combination of elements. At the
large malls, designers have built theme parks and other leisure facilities. At Mall
of America is a seven acre theme park called Knott’s Camp Snoopy, which features
23 rides. There is no entrance fee and visitors pay for each ride. In the first six
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months of operation, the park had more than four million riders. Early research
showed that the average visitor spent 3.1 hours in the mall which includes a half-
hour visit to Camp Snoopy, although since then the average visit to the mall has
been calculated as 2.6 hours. 19 West Edmonton Mall has similarly incorporated a
giant water park and theme park attractions in ‘Fantasyland’ and now also incor-
porates a mini-golf course and a chapel.
Most shopping malls do not have the extraordinary extent of combinations of
hybrid consumption that are found in West Edmonton Mall and Mall of America,
but they are able to follow some of their leads. The MetroCentre in Gateshead,
England, contains ‘an enormous fantasy kingdom of fairground rides’. 20 The
Trafford Centre just outside Manchester, England, includes a tenpin bowling alley,
a virtual reality games section, and dodgem cars. Figure 3.2 shows one of the
restaurants in its food court area next to the centre’s games section against a back-
drop of Aztec and ancient Egyptian images. The developers of Bluewater Mall in
Kent, England, have promised regular concerts and performances as part of the
range of leisure options available. 21
One journalist has written in connection with the Trafford Centre: ‘The shop-
ping centre as theme park, appealing to all sexes and ages, is the key to the
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Trafford Centre’s marketing policy’. It is likely that this process is only partly to
do with the theming of areas of the centre in terms of parts of the world or the
changing sky that it borrowed from the Forum Shops in Las Vegas. It is also to do
with introducing a wide range of leisure facilities that can increase the range of
family members wanting to visit the centre and the number of reasons for keep-
ing them there. Like some other large malls, the centre also has its own hotel
within the complex, a strategy that has been especially significant at West
Edmonton Mall. Ontario Mills in California has over 200 stores, an indoor zoo,
two ice rinks, and a motion simulator ride, as well as an entertainment setting in
the form of a Dave and Buster’s (see the following section for these venues). 23
Several new large malls have been built in Bangkok and several of them have