Clifton Park Center — Attraction in Town of Clifton Park

The strip mall portion is very nice and has a good combination of local stores and chains, and a lot of the local places like Ta-Da, Primal, and Mr. Fuji (in the Hannaford area of the plaza) were successful enough here to open locations in Stuyvesant Plaza as well.

That said, the strip mall area is split up into the strip gutted from the Clifton Park Center/Clifton Country Mall, the cluster of stores anchored by the NBT Bank and Uncommon Grounds (formerly Starbucks,) the strip where Borders used to be (RIP,) and the strip anchored by Hannaford and Toys R Us. There are also a few other "islands," like the new Starbucks location, that don't connect to the sidewalk, and JC Penny's is still hanging on for dear life after being cut off from the mall, so you see pretty much the whole exterior of the building, and even if inside it's quite a nice place, from the parking lot it's a bit of an eyesore.

What I'm getting at is it's not the kind of strip mall you'd want to go to if you want to walk around. This is Clifton Park, drivers here suck/don't care, the mall is literally right outside of the intersection we call "the belly of the beast" because it's so awful (in the center of 3 strip malls and right off a major interstate.)

You may have noticed I didn't mention the mall... With good reason, the mall is basically an old alcoholic's liver - ugly, dying, tumorous, and hanging on out of sheer will alone. It's had chunks excised out of it to make up the strip malls you see now years ago, and now mostly survives because it's got the closest movie theater to people who live in the suburbs here. The food court near the movie theater is symptomatic of pretty much all the issues with CPC - it used to have a beautiful fountain, and while the fountain is long since gone, that area now has a massive childrens' playplace with a bouncy slide and so forth, so you can enjoy sitting in the often unsettlingly empty, kind of grimy feeling food court and eating your pizza, chinese food, or hot dogs while listening to the sounds of wheezing machinery and screaming toddlers. Most wings of the mall are sad and dead anyways, there's a a few nice local places (Ta-Da and Time Square are both awesome, and there's a nice boutique at the edge of the food court at the time of writing) and a few of the preppy teen/adolescent clothing stores around, in addition to a Gamestop and Bath and Body Works that are decent (and Boscovs & Marshall's as the only remaining anchor stores)... but much of it is dead, empty shells with "rent me!" signs, or minimum wage Shenendehowa graduates putting stuff away and hoping someone will come in.

What I'm saying is CPC needs to either go full strip mall or remake itself into some kind of cultural center, which aside from the library, the town is sorely lacking. It keeps trying to add things onto the mall to attract people - currently there's a Planet Fitness, last time it was a big hotel, which I assume serves traveling businesspeople - but it should just die already. We already have enough malls in the area, and all the ones between Wilton and Colonie have been on their last legs for a while now.

Anyways, if you're going here, it's probably because you live in Clifton Park or Halfmoon, in which case, why are you reading this? You probably already know everything I just said. If you're not a local, check out the small businesses and then go outside to freedom before you catch the middle class apathy that permeates the mall...

I like the mall. I liked it better when everything was inside years ago when it was called Clifton country Mall. In the early 80s that's what it was called. Some contractor came in cut up the mall interior and made malls outside where you have to go from store to store probably outside in which is called a strip mall. why would they make a strip mall in New York when we have four seasons who the hell knows but it's been it's being done more frequently in this Upstate area of New York and it needs to stop. People are more comfortable shopping inside going to store to store such as Colonie Center and Crossgates they ruined Clifton Center mall by chopping it up into a strip mall. but I still like them all cuz they're still good stores there that I love to go to boscov's JCPenney's Marshalls and a few of the stores inside the mall bath & body works but those are in the mall and the end of times square and in the movie theater is still inside you don't come you don't get to it from the outside you go inside to get inside to those stores other than that the rest of those stores I would even bother to go from store to store such a pain in the butt when it comes to winter time or it's raining out who would ever do that complete...

This mall has good stores but ABSOLUTELY NO CHRISTMAS SPIRIT! Even today, December 2, 2017, not an outside wreath in sight, no familiar seasonal lights, no decorations...nothing. Just another day in America, nothing special in the eyes of the shopping center ownership. They want your money, of course, and that is all they want. They want no part of traditions or anything which sets the holiday mood. Just a bland and sterile shopping center contributing nothing to a time of the year held in esteem by millions of American Christians. Thus, we have the politically correct America of 2017, with celebrations of diversity and political correctness, but care must be taken to avoid offending one group of people and showing what might be perceived as a preference for another. Will I continue to shop there? Of course, but for the record, I think this shopping center should get the Grinch award for being the least decorated and most bland...