Saturday, July 07, 2007

What, no Mall-Fi in KC?

After bidding farewell to the Johnson County Library and its shortcomings, I stopped in briefly at the Oak Park Mall just out of curiosity. There is a Panera Bread restaurant there that's lit up like all the rest of their area locations, but I didn't see any evidence of other open access points that were clearly provided by either the mall management or another tenant for customer use.

I wonder why. Of the KC metro's remaining enclosed malls, Oak Park is probably the most viable. Is the absence of mallwide Wi-Fi-or at the very least an unwired food court, which would seem to be a natural, at least to me-because it hasn't occured to local mall managers, or an indication that the era of big enclosed shopping malls is really passing, as some have opined recently?

(Incidentally, I'm deliberately excluding Crown Center here, despite the fact that its atrium-one of the first hotspots this blog reviewed-is lit up. As those of you my age or older remember, Crown Center was built as a combination hotel/shopping center/entertainment venue to redevelop urban blight (anyone else remember Signboard Hill?) and was designed in a manner to distinguish it from the bigger outlying standalone malls that were then in their heyday. As I recall, it's a rough contemporary of the Indian Springs and Independence centers, and predated Metro North and Oak Park by maybe a couple of years.)

What's your take? And if I'm wrong and there is a local mall that's unwired, wholly or partially, where is it and what are the particulars?

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