I wouldn’t be surprised if bleed-over from long lines is helping the very small number of mom-and-pops that are in the mall itself - that might be how a random Uyghur stand has managed to last 3-plus years despite virtually no publicity outside of this board. (I used Silk Road not as an example of “this one specific business in the mall is getting hurt by Japanese pancakes and that’s bad, because this business is wonderful” but rather to illustrate how absurdly false the idea is, both made explicit and implicit in Bitker’s piece, that what diners chasing trends are really motivated by is what is “new” when what they are really motivated by is what is trendy and Instagrammable. )
My larger concern is that everyone outside the mall is getting royally shafted when all diners want to do is go to the mall and stand in line for an hour for the latest corporate chain.
