Food Courts.

After last Thursday's class, I walked over to Coffman with plans to eat and sit around for three hours until my next class. I was really hungry, but I didn't want to spend too much. I had eaten fairly little the previous day, which seems to happen pretty often, and it made me worry that I hadn't been getting adequate nutrition. Sadly, even when I eat plenty in a day, I probably am very far from a generally healthy diet. I never really worry about fat, grease, salt, etc., but I do spend a decent amount of time worrying that I'm not getting all the vitamins and nutrients I need. To make myself feel better about my nutritional intake, I bought a 16oz Jamba Juice with a daily vitamin shot. But the smoothie was clearly not enough food to satisfy my hunger, and it alone cost over $4.00. In order to fill my stomach without breaking $7.00, I bought a large fry at Chick-Fil-A and ate that too.

By simply being located in Coffman, restaurants know that their target customer is typically on-the-go, and they play to this by providing many different options that can be purchased individually; it's a similar mentality to the itunes store providing single song downloads: I walked into the food court and bought only what I wanted, rather than spending money on the entire album (meal). If Jamba Juice and Chick-Fil-A weren't located in the same building, I'd have never bothered to go to both, which I think speaks to an interesting dynamic that the food court plays off of. For better or worse, the food court provides more opportunity for meal customization than any other eating environment that immediately comes to mind. In regards to the prevalence of building an individual meal from several different competing businesses, I'd be interested to know whether being located in the direct vicinity of so many other eateries would ultimately increase or decrease revenue for each individual stall: does the consumers' magnified ability to buy less from each company increase the frequency of purchases to the point of making up for the lost profits caused by decreased revenue /per/ purchase? Is there some sort of fiscal arrangement between the restaurants and the venue in which they're all located? Lots o questions here.