Yeah, but Bowlero is kind of the same thing. At Bowlero you are also paying for the bowling, and the disco lights, and the arcade, and whatever else they got going on. It's not the food, it's the experience.

I miss old school bowling alleys where you just went there mainly to bowl. We used to bowl league at the old AMF by the airport and it was like $3.00 a game and half the time they'd let you bowl cheaper and sometimes for free.

But there wasn't a demand for cheap bowling anymore. That's why AMF had to rebrand themselves as Bowlero and bring out the loud music, blacklights, bars, DJ's and 40 lane entertainment complexes. I remember they had that "Bowling is just the beginning" ad line, which is really just another way of saying "No one wants to just bowl anymore."

The Mills is not particularly "high end" as far as Richmond brunch-ish places go. But Richmond brunch-y places are inherently somewhat high end. Everything is, nowadays. Bars, restaurants, movies, even strip clubs are trying to upscale in their own weird way.

There are no working middle class-ish entertainment options because the working middle class has been steadily drying up in this country in a way that is unsustainable.

You can definitely see that in Richmond. We used to laugh about how the Richmond scene was just Greek/Italian and burgers. There used to be like 20 places in the Fan that would serve you a ridiculously oversized plate of baked spaghetti for $10. Most of them have closed. But now there are 20 breweries in Scott's Addition where you can buy $20 four packs.

Things are gonna go back to being cheaper, shittier, and probably more corporate. But not because corporations are driving prices up, but because big corporations can keep prices down. The local economy in Richmond is an upper-middle class boutique economy mostly dealing in luxury goods and services.