Marketplace @ Factoria

This mall has been around for a while and it shows. While they have made some cosmetic upgrades and improved the selection of available stores, it still doesn’t qualify as a place you would rather go to over any other shopping center. There’s a few places I will go here for like Goldberg’s Deli, Novhilos, and of course Target, but the overall variety just isn’t there. There’s really nothing wrong with this mall, it just doesn’t stand out in any way.

This is an okay mall. It has an okay sushi place, and an okay dim sum restaurant too. The parking situation is okay. The Safeway and Rite Aid and Old Navy are all okay. The Panda and Panera are alright. The TJ Maxx and DSW Shoes are okay too. The interior is pretty modern, with big chunky wood furniture and plants all over the place.
The best thing this mall has to offer is a Nordstrom’s Rack, the best location in my opinion. Target is also convenient with all of the people that pass through Factoria for school and work. Many people don’t know of the hidden USPS post office across the street from KFC, or the AWESOME asian marking, Jing Jing, right next to the post office. Factoria has really grown around the mall. The AMC Factoria theater just reopened with power reclining leather seats and a gorgeous interior. And the QFC across from the theater is open 24 hours a day.
In conclusion, this mall is nothing exciting. No crazy cool attractions. Really bad traffic around rush hour all around the mall. A solid place to meet up with friends for a burger at Red Robin or ice cream at Coldstone Creamery, but not a mall you’d want to spend the whole day shopping at.

Homeless Shelter or Mall, you make the call.
Where is Mall Security? There are literally Homeless people sleeping on the wooden benches inside the mall and no one is around to stop this, on top of that the odor in the mall is so over powering and makes you sick upon entering.
The only redeeming factors are the Nordstrom Rack, and the Comic book store. Other than that, this place should have been bulldozed when the economy collapsed in 2008.

With Bell-​Square being so close I’m surprised that they don’t tare this mall down and rebuild. It’s very clean and sanitary there’s just not much there. I find my self just walking in one door and out the other. Most of the stores are terribly pricey. Half the buildings are for rent. When it was built it was designed for the high end class of society. As time goes on the stores backed out and got replaced with big box cheap stores. Which I refuse to shop at due to what they’ve done to society. «Thank you Wall-​Mart for the Wall-​Mart effect. I’ve given up on having a decent retail career. Any where!» I’m surprised they put three grocery stores in this location. I’m not terribly impressed with the small stores in this location. I’ve not had the best of experiences with them. Their customer service can vary form excellent to rude.

For a mall, this mall would suck. There isn’t any popular stores worth coming in to shop for. This wouldn’t be a place I would ever mention to tourists because this isn’t the impression I want to leave people visiting this area with. It is a sad, sad empty mall with barely any traffic walking. But because this mall sucks is why I love it. I think the only reason to even stop by Factoria Mall is because of Target, Walmart, Safeway, & occasionally Nordstrom Rack. Because nobody goes here is the reason why I can just park my car, go in to grab something, and leave within a short amount of time. You have no idea how nice it is to be able to not have to fight crowds and lines entering a Walmart. May this mall never renovates so it doesn’t create any more traffic than needed in Factoria because although this mall may not be a hot spot, this area is due to the T-​Mobile headquarter being close by.
Tell me about your experience if you’ve been here or is going to after reading this review:)

My wife went in to Ulta and tried to purchase two products that were «Buy one, get the second 50% off.» The cashier demanded her phone number and email and then refused to honor the advertised price. Only when challenged and asked if the issue was primarily racial and cultural did she offer the discount.
Pity that I can’t review the actual Ulta store, but the probability of us visiting Factoria in the future went down perceptibly after this encounter.

When we moved back to the area in 2008, this mall was sort of a pit — many vacant stores, no upper tier stores, a dingy, run down interior. But recently it has been renewed by great restaurants (a popular Sushi place, Panera, Greek Express, Panda Express, a new Dim Sum place), unusual but great stores (Torrid, Ulta, Old Navy, Claire’s, Rack, DSW, TJ Maxx). Add a PetCo, Target, Safeway and Rite Aid and suddenly it’s a great mall!
I’ll be sad to see the children’s museum move to downtown Bellevue in the next few years. The one big deficit of this mall is no free children’s play area, so the kids end up zooming around and jumping on the nice conversational furniture. Hopefully the mall management is working on that.
I find the front parking area to be stuffed. Parking will surely become a bigger problem. Traffic on Factoria Blvd is nasty from 4 – 8, but compared to BellSquare, it’s not bad. Great I-​90 access.

Wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to go shopping, more like a «oh shoot I forgot something and I need to make a quick stop» on your way home from work kind of place. They have a Target, Safeway, and a Walmart. Other stores include Petco, DSW, Nordstrom Rack, Bath & Body Works, Old Navy. It’s small, layed out kind of funny — some of the stores you can’t get to from the inside of the mall, you actually have to be outside of the mall to get in. There’s a good selection of your basic restaurants around including Red Robin, Old Country Buffet, and then some fast food places down the street.
Very empty. Lots of retail space available. I bet if you stood in the middle part, you could hear yourself echoing throughout the mall. The restaurants I’ve never really seen busy and I don’t see many people leaving the stores with shopping bags. It gave me a outlet mall feeling, without the outlet prices. Not many people go there either it seems like. If you’re trying to have a good shopping experience, I recommend making the extra drive to Westfield Southcenter in Tukwila, or Bellevue Square.

I think the best way to show someone who has not been to Marketplace @ Factoria just how run down and vacant this mall can come by saying the following statement. Marketplace @ Factoria is classified as a mall in the Seattle metropolitan area that even Starbucks will not rent in. (The one in Target is not a real Starbucks).
If you want shoes though, this mall is the place to go. It has DSW, Famous Footwear and a Payless. Factoria has a lot of shoes but no coffee, what a wonder.

I am a fan of this mall. Not very big at all but has great anchor stores Target, Wal Mart and even a Safeway. The malls hallway is nice and clean. Im a card collector and they have card shows here every couple months which are fun event to attend. Best of all this place doesnt get too crowded nor busy. Parking is plentiful and access going in and leaving is a breeze. Complete 180 of bell square, which has tons of stores and may look nicer but is a overcrowded super headache t0 navigate through. Factoria is my go to mall in the Bellevue area.

I feel like the Factoria Mall is always overlooked as a mall being between Bellevue and The Landing. And you know what? It’s really not that bad. It reminds me of a clean, pleasant ghost-​town. There are, however, a couple of places I feel like everybody else forgets are in the area, too. Like: Nordie’s Rack, The dirty bird (a.k.a. Red Robin), Target, Old Navy, and a DSW. It is usually fairly quiet in these stores, maybe except for Target, and I find it a pleasant area to shop. It’s very clean inside, and although some of the small shops don’t interest me, the large stores do.
It’s easily accessible from the highway (both I405 & I90) and I usually get pretty close parking because, we’ll, it’s like the forgotten city there.

It’s kind of a sad rundown mall. To get to other stores you have to go outside and walk.

This mall has a lot of potential to be awesome but the empty storefronts and the weird placement of the stores (most of the main stores main entrances are way in the back) make the mall fall short of a place to be.
There are some nice stores: Nordstrom Rack, TjMaxx, DSW, Target, Walmart, Petco, so it’s good for the basics. The rest of the mall seems eerily empty, although there are a few scattered food places and whatnot.
There’s an Old Country Buffet, Jamba Juice, Panda Express, Greek food, bubble tea, and a Panera.

This mall is so bitter-​sweet!
Bitter:
Always dead, there’s barely anyone in there.
Lots of closed retail spaces that should be filled.
Inconvenient parking; you park by the Nordstrom Rack sign outside the building and you actually have to walk across the mall to actually get to Nordstrom Rack.
Poor lighting makes it seem like an abandoned strip mall.
Sweet:
They have a Nordstrom Rack, Kohls, Jumba Juice, Coldstone, InSpa, and Old Navy.

Factoria Mall has the potential to be a decent mall, it really does. I like the Nordstrom Rack there and there’s a Bath and Body Works, Old Navy and a Target being renovated. I like Old Country Buffet sometimes, but that probably won’t do miracles for the mall image.
This place is always just so sad and deserted. I never see people come here for anything besides OCB and the Rack. I think if they put in a good store or restaurant or two, they could totally revitalize this mall. Come on Factoria– you can do it!

Oh no.
I could probably just stop there, as although I was warned by my family, I wasn’t quite expecting an Elephant Graveyard of Lion King proportions to await. But as my old stompin’ grounds of 20+ years ago, I felt like there must be *some* redeemable factor to this epicenter of economic disaster.
What I found was a $ 2.00 «Experience A Hurricane» Machine inside what looked like a phone booth. In front of an entire row of boarded up storefronts.
You know, there’s a Jack Handy quote that comes to mind:
«One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-​out warehouse. „Oh, no,“ I said. „Disneyland burned down.“ He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.»
Pondering this deep thought further, as one is only apt to do, I realized that Factoria Mall would make said «old burned-​out warehouse» look like Disneyland. Don’t get me started on Factoria Cinemas…

Any mall that has a Nordy Rack, a DSW, a TJ Maxx, and a Target is a-​ok in my book.
Sure, the inside still looks a bit sparse, but it’s so much better than 5+ years ago.
It is set up a bit weird — the main entrances to the cool stores aforementioned are all in the back… Some of them can be accessed from inside the mall, but some, you have to enter from the outside. Kinda doesn’t help with foot traffic inside the mall if you ask me.

This mall is ‘okay’ — there are some great places in it for the ‘under 6 set’ as I regularly travel with but not much else.
I see they have really improved the entrance area near the new Panera Bread and it shows, but it stops there.
I would love to see this mall reduce the rent of all the stores by 20% for current tenants and 30% for the first year for new tenants and get some more businesses in there!
Look at me, I’m Donald Trump with the money ideas!

I remember back in the 80s when Factoria was actually fully occupied. There was an arcade inside and I loved this mall. Now, well… It’s pretty desolate inside. This isn’t a mall where you’d go if you were just interested in browsing. It’s more like an indoor collection of storefronts. For example if you needed to get alterations, shoe repair, watch repair, embroidery, etc. There’s a store for those in the mall. High fashion? Um, you’ve got Old Navy and Nordstrom Rack.
Factoria Mall is a weird spot. It seems like they are building up the back side rather than the inside/​middle of the place. TJ Maxx and DSW can only be accessed from the back. It creates an odd mood inside the mall. It looks shiny and clean inside, but you can just feel that everybody there is all a little depressed. The gleams of hope are only for the stores with access in the back.

What is wrong with this mall!?! It’s deserted. There are no stores here. It’s run down. And a let down.
The only reason why I come here is for Target and Nordstrom Rack. Otherwise, there is no reason to venture this way. Sadly, there aren’t many great places to eat here either.
All in all, not worth it.