Top of the Myer centre

[monotonehell]

The thing is though, there are hardly any people around most levels, so not much point in having the fancy software for high traffic areas.

I've never encountered another lift that behaves the same as the Myer Center atrium ones, certainly not one that forces the contents on my stomach further down. Even the ones inside Myers itself behave in the conventional manner. All which makes me suspect the atrium lifts have and 'express lift' setup, that is higher speeds+skipping floors to achieve those speeds, which implies they have software from Asian style elevators as fitted to skyscrapers.

I put it to you, that one reason the 4th and 5th floors aren't used it the elevators, suicides and people falling over the railing. These things have put people off travelling to the higher floors, as there is a sense of risk (which in reality doesn't really exist).

The software works when there's low traffic as well. It adapts to the number of requests and passenger counts across the day.

It's all in your head, due to them being glass. They run on the same software, travel at the same speeds and skip floors in the same ways as the other elevators in the building. It's just that you can see through the walls, so your brain registers it differently. It's a bit like how if you are sitting in a stationary vehicle and another vehicle near you moves backward, you feel like you are moving.

The reasons the upper floors aren't used is that tenants up there (with the exception of destination tenants like Lyncraft and Fernwood) never got enough walk by traffic to stay in business. That, coupled with the state's recession across the 1990s, and the closure of Dazzleland has seen a lot of tenants move out. Centre management's reaction has been to consolidate tenancies and add more floorspace on the lower levels. You may have noticed the continual downward migration of the likes of the ABC Shop and Priceline. Empty stores is not a good look and impacts negatively on foot traffic even further. Centre Management are in a bind as what to do with the upper two levels. Their floor space is an odd, thin, ring-shape that doesn't suit many non-retail tenants. As a result they are still empty.

The Myer Centre experience has been reflected in other similar vertical 'shopping malls'. One that comes to mind is in manhattan and is a very similar layout to the front of the Myer Centre (the name escapes me...). It too is suffering on the upper levels. It seems that the contemporary shopper doesn't think in three dimensions, that's why a lot of malls are only one to three levels and all spread out.

Edit: it's called "Manhattan Mall" Dah! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Mall

Recently they "solved" the problem of the upper floors by removing all but the lower three.

[Omicron]

Thirteen levels? Good heavens; I'm not at all surprised that didn't work.

[fabricator]

I have a question, could the void in the center of the upper floors be filled in ?
I suspect there are enough nearby columns to support the weight of a lightweight floor (eg not concrete).

Maybe they should fill it with lots of $2 shops or something.

[AtD]

It could be, but I'd expect all the tenants below to bitch about the loss of natural light in the atrium.

[AG]

It may be a bit blunt to state that shopping malls with more than a certain number of floors don't function very well. There are some shopping malls in Hong Kong with up to 19 floors of retail, with mixed results of how they are performing. That may also be a result of Hong Kong's unique demographics, planning systems and extremely high density.

In busy Mongkok district which has a population density about 250000 people per square kilometre (no mistake in the number of zeros there!), the Langham Place mall has 15 levels of retail which are all very busy. The success of Langham Place may also be a result from the fact that there are express elevators and escalators to the upper floors (seen in the image below), something that lacks in most other malls more than a few floors tall. The atrium that features in the mall is not located in the centre, but offset to one side of the building. Another factor that contributes to Langham Place's high traffic is its direct connection into the MTR train station a block or two away.



The other massive mall in Hong Kong that opened a few years after Langham Place is the MegaBox which is located in Kowloon Bay, a district that is being redeveloped from industrial to commercial uses. This is a 19 floor shopping mall located almost adjacent to where the former Kai Tak Airport runway is. Like Langham Place, the MegaBox has a series of local and express escalators and elevators. The atriums are unusual in that they run up the middle of the building on the lower floors, but feature at BOTH ends of the building on the upper floors. Also unusual is that the car park runs up the entire 19 floors of the mall for convenient access. However, very few people live close to the mall, few people drive and the population density is nowhere near what it is in Mongkok. Also, the MTR train station is several blocks away and hence it is not so easy to access by public transport (even though a shuttle bus runs between the mall and the station). As a result the mall is far quieter than Langham Place and is not very busy.

[Aidan]

I've realised what the top of the Myer Centre needs.

It should be obvious, because Brisbane's Myer Centre had one (albeit at the bottom) and Adelaide used to have several of them in the suburbs, though none in the City. Although our suburban ones closed (with the owner claiming they were no longer profitable after the pokies were introduced) the economic climate is rather different these days, and I'd be surprised if it couldn't now succeed.

What am I referring to? (Click to find out)

[The Scooter Guy]

I've realised what the top of the Myer Centre needs.
It should be obvious, because Brisbane's Myer Centre had one (albeit at the bottom) and Adelaide used to have several of them in the suburbs, though none in the City. Although our suburban ones closed (with the owner claiming they were no longer profitable after the pokies were introduced) the economic climate is rather different these days, and I'd be surprised if it couldn't now succeed.
What am I referring to? (Click to find out)

Keep in mind that Sizzler at Modbury Triangle became 'Bells Restaurant', which only lasted for a year and then a Westpac.
I wish Sizzler returned to South Australia!

[Will]

I've realised what the top of the Myer Centre needs.

It should be obvious, because Brisbane's Myer Centre had one (albeit at the bottom) and Adelaide used to have several of them in the suburbs, though none in the City. Although our suburban ones closed (with the owner claiming they were no longer profitable after the pokies were introduced) the economic climate is rather different these days, and I'd be surprised if it couldn't now succeed.

What am I referring to? (Click to find out)

To be honest I was actually shocked to see that Sizzler still exists. I for one cannot understand why people would pay for over-priced 80's food.

[AtD]

They can flash-fry a buffalo in forty seconds!

[Aidan]

I've realised what the top of the Myer Centre needs.
It should be obvious, because Brisbane's Myer Centre had one (albeit at the bottom) and Adelaide used to have several of them in the suburbs, though none in the City. Although our suburban ones closed (with the owner claiming they were no longer profitable after the pokies were introduced) the economic climate is rather different these days, and I'd be surprised if it couldn't now succeed.
What am I referring to? (Click to find out)

Keep in mind that Sizzler at Modbury Triangle became 'Bells Restaurant', which only lasted for a year and then a Westpac.

So did Sizzler at Laffer's Triangle (Bedford Park) - it reminded me of Demolition Man where all the restaurants were Taco Bells!
But that didn't last long either, and became the Lone Star Steakhouse where customers were encouraged to throw peanut shells onto the floor. I don't think that one lasted long either. The Morphett Vale one was a bit more successful as Tuckerland, but eventually that folded too. Nothing could compete with the Pokie Palaces.

I wish Sizzler returned to South Australia!

As do I, but there's an additional barrier now: all the Sizzler restaurants in SA were franchises (though all owned by the same person). But now Sizzler run all their Australian restaurants directly, and don't accept franchises.

To be honest I was actually shocked to see that Sizzler still exists. I for one cannot understand why people would pay for over-priced 80's food.

What do you mean? The food was quite reasonably priced considering the quality. And though the pokie palaces did have much cheaper food, they don't seem to be as competitive any more.

And what do you mean by 80s food? It didn't seem like that in the early 90s when Sizzler was here. Do food styles really date? If so, what decade are pizzas associated with? How about Chinese Takeaway?

[fabricator]

Sizzler was better then the Fasta Pasta, in that you didn't have to wait to get your food.

The Sizzler at Salisbury went in an indigent way, restaurant, to pool hall, to night club until trashed by patrons, boarded up trashed some more, broken into and trashed. Spend a lot of time overgrown, boarded up, between businesses.

The Sizzler at Morphett Vale is still there, no idea what it is now, that site used to be a petrol station years ago.

[Prince George]

And what do you mean by 80s food? It didn't seem like that in the early 90s when Sizzler was here. Do food styles really date? If so, what decade are pizzas associated with? How about Chinese Takeaway?

My word, they do, and there are numerous examples. In the days when all meals were prepared at home and communication was slow and difficult, food styles changed very slowly, but driven largely by the rise of television and the growth of "eating out", tastes change in clear phases.

Pizzas are a great example - you can hardly find the pizzas that I grew up with in the 70s (a rare example is Toto's Pizza on the corner of Daws Road and Winston Avenue), back when practically the only meat option was shredded ham -- even in their "lasagne" -- and the advent of the chicken Hawaiian was cause for celebration. In the '80s they got muscled out by the industrial pizza of the big chains who combined expensive marketting with cheap product. Come the 90s and the craft pizzarias are making a comeback; now you have a host of options that weren't available back in the day. The oven may be wood burning, or even coal (for New York style); the dough may be a slow leavened sourdough or perhaps it's gluten-free; the topping may be deeply traditional -- potato and rosemary was unheard of when I was a kid -- or an upscale fusion like at The Good Life. The others still exist, but they're throwbacks.

Same with Chinese takeaways. If it's serving up the same sweet-and-sour pork (which always had canned pineapple and was luminous orange/red) or steak-in-black-bean for the last four decades, it's very dated. Much more contemporary are the places that are region specific; is it Szechuanese, Northern, Cantonese, Mandarin or any of a thousand other styles; have the flavours been westernized (simplified and scary ingredients taken out)? Even the idea of "Chinese takeaway" is something that I really associate with the 70s, when this hazy idea of "Chinese food" was the thing that represented Asia (it was hard enough to find Japanese or Indian, let alone Thai, Vietnamese, or Malay) to most of us and when the idea of buying food to take home became really prevalent.

And there are many others even just from specific foods, when something becomes wildly popular and then suffers a backlash. The quiche only arrived in the English-speaking world in the 50s but by 1960 it was almost universal, by the 80s quiche eating was the domain of the retiree. In the 80s, every haute cuisine chef was serving up a bizarre range of exotic mousses (especially savoury ones - oyster mousse anyone?), and by the mid 90s you couldn't see them on a menu anywhere; they remain something of a laughing stock even when their kissing-cousins the bavarois and panna cotta started to become more common.

Have you ever been to a barbecue or party where there was a big orange-jelly mould filled with crushed pineapple and grated carrot? That was de rigour in the mid-70s, along with Thousand Island Dressing made by mixing a little tomato sauce in mayonnaise. The prawn cocktail almost totally vanished, as did Bombe Alaska, each seem to be making something of a comeback.

And this process is far from over. In years to come, today's food will seem passe. Or, in the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson - "I used to be with it, but then they changed what 'it' was, and what I was with was no longer it"

[The Scooter Guy]

Sizzler was better then the Fasta Pasta, in that you didn't have to wait to get your food.
The Sizzler at Salisbury went in an indigent way, restaurant, to pool hall, to night club until trashed by patrons, boarded up trashed some more, broken into and trashed. Spend a lot of time overgrown, boarded up, between businesses.
The Sizzler at Morphett Vale is still there, no idea what it is now, that site used to be a petrol station years ago.

Morphett vale's Sizzler became '5 Star Buffet' probably in the late 90's.

[Aidan]

Sizzler was better then the Fasta Pasta, in that you didn't have to wait to get your food.
The Sizzler at Salisbury went in an indigent way, restaurant, to pool hall, to night club until trashed by patrons, boarded up trashed some more, broken into and trashed. Spend a lot of time overgrown, boarded up, between businesses.
The Sizzler at Morphett Vale is still there, no idea what it is now, that site used to be a petrol station years ago.

Morphett vale's Sizzler became '5 Star Buffet' probably in the late 90's.

Before that (up until at least 1999) it was Tuckerland. I don't know how long it was 5 Star Buffet, but ISTR there was no restaurant there in 2004 when I next checked - even though nobody had taken the sign down (it's still visible on Google Maps streetview).

The Glengowrie Sizzler building was demolished, and I presume the Parkside Sizzler became something more upmarket, but I've no idea what happened to the rest of them.

[The Scooter Guy]

The Glengowrie Sizzler building was demolished, and I presume the Parkside Sizzler became something more upmarket, but I've no idea what happened to the rest of them.

Where was the Glengowrie & Parkside Sizzler?