This past weekend I went to a popular mall in Orange County, California. On a Sunday in December. And yes, it was pretty packed. BUT, what I noticed were a couple things.
- There were a lot of people walking around with no shopping bags.
- A lot of the stores didn’t have customers in them.
- The busiest places, with the longest lines, were food and snack places.
There’s no doubt that e-commerce has altered the behaviors of mall-goers over the years. So what I think is this – most people, like me, were there for the experience. To get out. To walk around. I found myself often saying, I’ll check to see if I could find items cheaper online when I got home. So clearly, I wasn’t there to shop. With that said, there were lots of times I was craving a coffee or a snack, but chose not to get anything because the lines were too long. And they were really long – the longest of any lines in the entire, large mall.
So this got me thinking. Why aren’t there more food and snack places? Which led me to asking the question, “Why don’t malls include more ‘experiences’ to draw the casual mall-goers out more frequently? I have to think that a mall doesn’t have to be 95% retail anymore – this isn’t the 80’s and 90’s. Add some interactive things. Experiences. Things for people ‘to do’. Or even ‘see’, like crazy, over-the-top decorations. After all, this is what it seems people are there for. But then again, I may be wrong.
The point is this – why don’t organizations cater more to their customers? And by that, I mean, why don’t organizations do more to find out what their customers like, and don’t like, about their organization? I think its better to find out what they like or don’t like ahead of time, before they make a decision to stop spending money with you.
Its all about customer satisfaction, isn’t it?