There is also a new trend in malls today. It is the commodification of nature, or the increasingly pervasive commercial trend that views and uses nature as a sales gimmick or marketing strategy, as is manifest in production of replicas or simulations. Fountains, bubbling brooks, trees, and other elements of nature are reproduced and put up inside malls to make them more enticing to mall goers. Indeed, this is evident in the renovated Greenbelt 3 in Makati. The landscape of which looks like a hideaway with tall trees, rocks and fountains flowing into a stream.

There is also the issue of shopper relaxation, which not only takes on a literal aspect in the physical elements of a mall (seating areas and lighting effects), but also on a more subtle level (Rosales). Comfort is manipulated to give a sense of orientation and belongingness to the mall goer. A climate-controlled environment (with the same temperature throughout the day and almost zero possibility of an inclement weather inside malls) adds to the predictability of finding comfort, which in turn gives individuals a sense of certainty and reassurance. Seats are provided for this purpose, but they are not made comfortable enough that nobody will want to get up from it anymore, because this would stagnate the flow of shoppers and their possibility of parting with their money.

In the Philippines where proliferation of malls is a fact of life, there are certain shops that cater to the needs of the bourgeois and a number of shops that cater to the masses. Perhaps the idea that malling presents an attractive stage to mall goers to be able to hide or make mall goers for a while forget about failures of society is true for the Philippines, it being a Third World country. In the midst of poverty (both a political and economic problem), people have made malling a preferred and prevalent activity probably to escape the ugliness of poverty.

In one ethnographic research done in 1997 in Chaguanas (which is one of the cheapest places in Trinidad) and in a city proper of Spain, local shoe keepers were described to display their products in a way that fit the expectations of the local residents. They avoid the more spectacular forms of window display that connote expensive products. Instead they use a pile-them-high-and-sell-them-cheap kind of aesthetic wherein the residents can comfortably come inside the shop. By contrast, in urban areas, style dominates over thrift. Metropolitan shopping malls utilize eye-catching displays to gain more shoppers. The malls are also designed in a way to appropriate the current holiday season such as Christmas.