Thursday, November 22, 2007
Mall muscle relaxers
More public massage chairs are enticing people by the seats of their pants.
The latest from The Ticker blog
The leather embrace of a cushy electronic massage chair envelops Mike Papenfuse as other shoppers lug packages around him on the first floor of Valley View Mall in Roanoke.
After slipping a dollar bill into the chair's control box, Papenfuse's head and shoulders begin to quiver rapidly, and a smile comes over his face. "Pretty good. This really makes a difference," says Papenfuse, who's in the midst of a Christmas shopping trip.
He turns his head to the right to glimpse his similarly seated friend, Chris Mills, who has also inserted a buck for three minutes of motorized comfort at the invisible hands of First Class Seats. "Not as good as a human massage, but I'd still like to have one of these at home for watching football," he says.
Such lounging and luxuriating shoppers represent a microcosm of the growing demand for vended massages in malls across the nation. One company, Sit Back and Relax, based in Bedford, N.H., which supplies three of the recliners to Tanglewood Mall, has installed 3,200 in shopping centers since November 2004.
"The chairs are the big thing right now. We had been in other mall businesses like photo booths and kiddie rides. We sold off those businesses. We're all massage now," says Michael Habib, vice president of sales at Sit Back and Relax.
The massage chairs are "an especially nice feature for people who are carrying a lot of packages," says Kendall Hurt, assistant general manager at Valley View Mall.
In fact, revenue taken in by the chairs typically increases by 25 percent between Nov. 1 and Christmas, says Habib. To encourage those who have spent their cash, many chairs offer credit card payment, which Habib says is increasingly popular.
"The chair massages are a good deal, less expensive than a human," says Nettie Cale, relaxing in one of the chairs on Valley View's upper floor. Indeed, the Valley View chairs offer 15 minutes of massage for $5 and a half hour for $10. At the mall's nearby Health First massage kiosk, a sign states that the on-duty attendant will knead the aching needy at the price of $20 for 30 minutes.
For the owners of massage chairs, the business isn't without drawbacks. For example, Habib can't make a living that way. He relies on a maintenance force of 350 technicians, most of them independent contractors, to keep his chairs in working order.
More common than a breakdown though, is the hunkering that sometimes goes on long after the customer's purchased massage time is up. There's a tendency for relaxed patrons to become ensconced, even doze. To urge them upward and onward, some companies install recorded voice messages on their massage chairs. One such recording, on the machines owned by a Chicago-area company called Relaxation, sternly advises: "Insert more money."
Charles Burtell, Relaxation's sales director, says that some mall owners don't want the verbal reminders. "They find the voice very annoying," he says.
The Sit Back and Relax chairs at Tanglewood discourage patrons from sitting when a massage isn't in progress. Says Habib, "Our chairs have a roller that sticks out a bit and makes it uncomfortable if the machine isn't turned on."
Still, some mall patrons routinely rest in massage chairs that aren't operating. Habib says, "People can always sit on the edge of the chair, and not lean back. Naturally we hope they won't."
