Does anyone know anything about the back corridors in malls behind the stores?

It's been a few years since I roamed the back corridors of a mall, but the main thing thing about that that triggered my BS detector is smoking in the corridors. I'd have been busted pretty hard for that. ('Course it depends where and when your story is set.) Seems perfectly reasonable that a back stage freight elevator would stop at the parking and loading docs. Every place I ever worked that had a loading dock that was where all of the smokers in the building would hang out. The cool kids all hung out near the industrial trash compactor (which was 90 degrees from the loading docs in my mall). Loading docks were busy and full of adults. The compactor room had a giant dangerous machine that only got used once a day and it smelled a funky enough that kids would hang out there but adults would avoid it.

That wouldn't work--they would probably set off the fire detectors, or at least get into trouble when they were caught. You can't smoke in those corridors. You sure used to be able to. I smoked plenty of cigarettes and grass in exactly these corridors in a mall in the Ozarks in the early 90's. Man, what a sentence that was.

I've seen exits from the aisles/main part of the mall into these sorts of corridors, but rarely from a store into them. Typically the stores exit into some sort of storage area (that is not accessible except through the store, generally) or directly to the outdoors. No, if it's an enclosed mall, there will quite often be corridors that connect the rears of any number of shops to loading, trash and storage facilities, as well as an exit. The corridors will typically be fire rated and is required for the stores to have two exits a certain distance apart, which are generally required by fire code. Whether that exit is external or onto a corridor depends on the climate and how the mall is built. In my area, where there are a lot of exterior malls, there'll be a common courtyard behind a ring of stores; that courtyard will then have a larger exit away from the buildings. If you want your story to get really crazy WRT the 'club house' part, have a look at this link where they found an unused storage room in the mall parking lot and turned it into an apartment of sorts. I used to work for a firm that designed all sorts of retail buildings. Our buildings would frequently include architectural elements, like towers or raised roofs, that could not be accessed from the interior of any of the buildings (there's no point in making them open to below if someone's just going to put in a lowered ceiling anyway). Instead, you had to get in via an access door located above the roof. To get onto the roof itself, we'd usually have a ladder enclosed in a room that also held some other services, like the telephone board, electrical panels, or fire sprinkler riser pipe. We had one building where homeless people moved into one of the towers and were running electricity into it from somewhere else in the building, presumably from one of the rooftop air conditioning units, to power their sweet little setup with a hotplate, a TV, and other items.

In my experience (as a casual stocktaker), the bigger the shopping centre, the simpler the delivery infrastructure. It sounds odd but it's true. A massive shopping centre is likely to have multiple loading docks attached directly to the back end of the shop for each major store, rather than one shared dock linked with a warren of tunnels as you're imagining. Groceries are delivered to the supermarket, furniture goes to the IKEA, clothes go to Target, and they don't meet. In small and medium sized outer-suburban shopping centres, there are fewer loading docks for deliveries and more of the shops share them, and there's far less division between customer parking and the back end of the shops. You get confused lost shoppers being barked at by forklift drivers, and back-end workers watching the spectacle like Romans at a cut-price Circus. Because they usually have fewer levels, smaller shopping centres are less likely to have goods lifts and "invisible" infrastructure, and their loading docks are more likely to be filthy, covered in the refuse of dozens of failed businesses, and taken over by badly-paid, smoking, drug-taking teenagers. Also, to be honest, I always found retail workers far less sociable than storemen and packers in separated off-site warehouses—a very gregarious bunch, as a rule.

What if you http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081016121843AA7FjPQ with a plastic bag and rubberband? Highly illegal, yes, but plausible? A store I used to work at was converted into such from an old mall. A lot of the corridors from the mall ceased to be used (since they didn't go anywhere anymore) and eventually homeless people started living in them.

It sounds about right. In the mall where I work, the corridors run the perimeter of the external walls, but they get twisty and interesting where a newer part of the mall has been added. I go back there as a shortcut to the food court, so I don't have to navigate crowds of customers. I never have my name badge on me and my store doesn't even use the corridors (we're a dept store with our own receiving dock) but no one's ever questioned my being there. Others have said that what jumped out at them as unrealistic was the smoking, but what did it for me is that your characters, mall employees, want to stay at the mall after their shifts are over...Or is it that they're sneaking off on the clock? During lunch breaks? I just don't know anyone who works retail who wants to hang around after. My teenage coworkers like their jobs just fine & are friends with each other, but they are out of there the minute their shift ends. I just hope you have a reasonable explanation for why your characters like the mall so much. There was an episode (the Christmas episode) of Life, I believe, where a couple of kids were found living in a mall. They had modified an unused corridor into a bedroom.

Unless you're writing a story with mall architecture as a theme or whatever, your readers will suspend their disbelief as long as the mechanics and logistics etc seem reasonably plausible.

Ignatius J. Reilly, ozarks? fayetteville's mall by chance? you would totally be able to smoke in those in the 90s. long, slender, white hallways, flimsy locks, dripping air conditioners... good times

I played Santa in a mall here in Japan last winter and seeing the back hallways of a Japanese mall was quite interesting. Might not pertain to your story, but you might find them interesting. Three quick things I noticed. 1. The walls were exposed drywall which was about the same as the other mall hallways I've seen. 2. Even in Japan there is toilet graffiti, although it was only in the grout and some of the comments were people bragging about how cool their stores were. I can't see American retail workers doing that. 3. Smoking was fine in the communal smoking/break room and there was a request form on the cigarette vending machine for any brands wanted.