Our local failing shopping center in Costa Mesa, Triangle Square (love the name), has been flailing for years. Their rent is high, they put the supermarket in an unattractive basement, and they’ve been shedding tenants including: The North Face, Whole Foods, several restaurants, Virgin Records, and their anchor Nike Store. It’s a ghost mall now with the exception of a couple of remaining stores, a pretty good sushi place, and a beer bar for assholes called The Yard House.
Since the only people who can afford to remain there are selling retail alcohol, they’ve decided to fill the whole damn thing up with bars and restaurants. The place is pretty much a block of concrete between three streets, with layers of retail spaces on top of layers of parking lot. How to set this up?
I have an idea!
Towering above the complex will be a huge water tower-like structure. This will contain tens of thousands of gallons of top-shelf alcoholic beverages, probably setting some type of Guinness record. There will be a permanent rotating light on this structure, and ad logos for the liquor companies. It will be called something whimsical like “The Drunk Tank” or “Well Well”.
On the top floor of the mall there will be some very swank bars, like the horribly named “Sutra” night club that’s there already. High cover charges, velvet ropes, mortgage brokers and their trophy girlfriends. Drinks will be $10 or so.
Each floor below will have a less expensive and less fancy set of places: a TGI Friday’s and a National Sports Grill in the middle, a Red Robin and a Shooterz further down, and at the bottom a shitty beer bar with bad pool tables. On one corner of the bottom level there will be a hipster bar that will be just as bad as the beer bar, but will charge as much as as the top shelf places.
The genius part is this: every level below the top is actually drinking the urine produced one level above. As the rich bro’s and ho’s piss out their Grey Goose and Dom Perignon, it gets filtered and realcoholized and served as Absolut and Sam Adams down below, before finally turning into Jim Beam and Coors Lite at the bottom. The hipster corner of the bottom level will get it as PBR.
I’m off to get venture capital now.
Be My Blog 
They tried this here with a failing 3-story fancymall downtown, minus the urine idea that is. Fill the whole thing with sin and vice: alcohol, tobacco, dancing, etc.
It flopped harder than I have ever seen anything flop, except maybe Matt Johnson’s traumatic high dive attempt in 4th grade.
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I think you have been scooped on this: see The Grove, or Hollywood & Highland…
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Gump, you’re a god-damn genius
It’s about eatin’
Babies
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brilliant
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The Yes Men developed a similar scheme for Third World McDonald’s.
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I was under the impression that it was actually the top of a gigantic Masonic spacecraft.
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Drinks at Sutra may average to about $10 per drink, however the only sure way to get in there is to have bottle service which is a minimum $500 charge. Anyone just wanting to go for a few drinks is considered a loser and forced to stand outside in a line that never moves. I have a friend who has tried to talk me into going several times (usually on someone elses bottle service), but there is nothing I need to experience in there.
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