Should your mall have a phone charging station?

A dead phone ends the visit

Almost everything a shopper does in a centre now runs through the handset. The parking app that will let them out of the garage. The loyalty code at the till. The cinema ticket. The photo of the shoes sent to someone at home before the decision is made. The rideshare that takes them away at the end. The list of what they came for in the first place.

When the battery goes, none of those are available, and the shopper does not shrug and keep browsing. They go home, or they sit somewhere and stop spending. A centre that has spent years engineering dwell time loses an hour of it to a problem that takes twenty seconds to solve, and loses it silently — nobody files a complaint about a flat phone.

What a station actually changes

A rental station holds portable power banks. A shopper scans the code on the machine or uses the app, takes one power bank, and carries on — to the next floor, into the food court, into the cinema, out to the car. They return it to any station in the network, which may or may not be the one they took it from.

Three things change for the centre. The visit does not end early, because the reason it was about to end has gone away. Nothing is tethered to a wall, so nobody is camped beside a service outlet in a public walkway. And it gives guest services an answer to a question they get constantly and have never had a real answer to, which until now has usually been a borrowed cable behind a desk.

It also reads as an amenity rather than a fixture. Charging is one of the few things a visitor uses at the precise moment they were about to be annoyed, and a centre that solved it gets credit for it in a way that is out of proportion to the space it takes up.

Where it goes in a centre

A mall is unusual in this category because it has more candidate locations than any other kind of venue, and most of them are wrong. The test is not footfall. It is whether people are stationary long enough to notice a machine and decide to use it.

1. 1The food court — the defaultThe longest seated dwell time in the building, and the one place a visitor is already sitting with a phone on the table in front of them. If a centre only ever gets one machine, it goes here.
2. 2Guest services and the concierge deskThis is where the question already lands. A machine within sight of the desk turns a request your team cannot solve into something the visitor solves themselves while standing there.
3. 3Cinema and entertainment lobbiesPeople waiting on a screening are stationary, early, and about to spend two hours somewhere they cannot charge. A strong location wherever the centre has one.
4. 4Soft-seating and lounge areasThe partners, the pram-parkers and the people waiting out a fitting room. Lower volume than the food court, but long sessions and very little competition for attention.
5. 5Mid-concourse, between anchors — noHigh footfall, zero dwell. Everyone walks past it and nobody stops at it. A machine where nobody pauses is furniture with a logo on it, and it will read as a failure of the product rather than of the placement.
6. 6Back-of-house corridors and staff areas — noNot a customer amenity, and it removes the thing you actually bought, which is the visitor seeing that the centre solved this.

The three ways to get one

Vendors describe these differently, but almost every arrangement in this category is one of three things. Know which one you are being offered before the meeting ends:

1. 1HostedThe operator owns the machine, installs it and services it. You provide the space and an outlet, and share in what it earns. No capital from you, and the least control over the unit.
2. 2PurchaseYou buy the stations outright and keep the rental income. Highest return per machine, and the money is yours at risk if a court turns out to be the wrong place for one.
3. 3LeaseA fixed monthly cost with no revenue-share arithmetic. Predictable, easy to budget, and you are paying whether the machine is busy or not.

There is no universally correct answer, and the right one usually follows who signs. A single centre trying the idea in one court does better hosting it. An owner with a portfolio, who already knows where people sit in each property and would rather own the amenity than share it, does better buying.

What it costs you in practice

Beyond the model above, the real costs to a centre are about a square foot of counter or a small patch of floor, a standard power outlet, and the internal decision about who owns the arrangement. There is no construction, no floor work, no electrical job and no connection to centre wifi — these machines run on cellular, which also means your IT team and your network are not being asked to approve anything.

What it does not cost you is staff time. If a vendor’s answer to “what does guest services have to do” is anything other than “nothing”, that is a different product than the one described here — and in a building where the same desk handles lost property, wheelchairs and gift cards, that difference is the whole decision.

Seven questions to ask any vendor

Including us. A vendor who is uncomfortable with these is answering the question anyway.

1. 1Who owns the hardware, and who services it?Get the answer for both, in writing. They are not always the same party, and in a centre with a facilities team it matters who is allowed to touch the unit.
2. 2What happens if a power bank is not returned?Specifically: is the centre ever liable for it? The answer should be a clear no, and it should be in the paperwork rather than in the meeting.
3. 3How long am I committed, and how do I end it?Ask about removal and relocation, not just term length. Courts get remerchandised and anchors change; a machine you cannot move is a fixture you did not agree to.
4. 4Can I see the actual unit first?In the finish I would receive, because it is going in a public concourse next to national brands. Photos of a different model do not count.
5. 5What runs on the display?Every one of these machines has one. Find out how it is used, what of your own can appear on it, and whether third-party advertising can show up in your common area without you agreeing to it first.
6. 6Does it touch our wifi or any centre system?It should touch neither. If it does, your IT team needs to know before it arrives rather than on install day.
7. 7What does the install day look like?Who turns up, how long, whether it happens in trading hours, and what has to be signed before it does.

When the answer is no

A charging station is not right for every property, and it is worth saying so plainly. If your centre is a strip of in-line units with no common area, if there is no seating anywhere in the building, or if the only places you could put a machine are walkways people pass through at speed, you will not get much out of one.

The centres where this works are the ones built around people staying: a real food court, cinema or entertainment traffic, soft seating that gets used, and a guest services desk that already fields the question. If your leasing team can name three places in the building where people sit down for twenty minutes, the product fits.

How Ampz does it

Ampz supplies the stations and runs the network behind them. Shoppers scan the code on the machine or use the app, take one power bank, and return it to any station in the network. We install and service the machines; your team does not manage batteries, troubleshoot the unit, or add anything to the guest services routine.

There is no service area and no waitlist — if you want a station, that is where one goes. Terms are set per property rather than off a rate card, which is why we would rather talk about your food court than send you a brochure. Start at hosting a station, see the mall and shopping centre overview, or own a station if you are thinking about running machines across a portfolio yourself.

Want one in your food court?

Tell us about the space and we will tell you straight whether a station makes sense in it — including when it does not.