All malls in the United States of America should be legally required to have a Cinnabon.

I mean, how can you properly shop if you don’t have the prospect of a warm, gooey, sugary delight waiting just around the corner? It shouldn’t be allowed.

One of my roommates told me last night that the Cinnabon at Fair Oaks Mall had closed. The company’s website still lists the location, but for the sake of argument we’ll take his word for it.

Granted, Fair Oaks is one of three malls I could drive to within 15 minutes. But one of the other malls has never to my knowledge had a Cinnabon, so the shopping-to-deliciousness ratio in this area is taking a huge hit.

While driving home from the grocery store (where we bought ice cream after discovering Chik-Fil-A and its milshakes were closed), we came up with a list of mall must-haves.

Under our proposed legislation, all malls must feature:

-Cinnabon
-Auntie Anne’s
-Sbarro
-Some sort of smoothie place (we’re not picky)
-Sadly these days, Starbucks

That’s the list. You can eat something substantial. You can get a quick sugary snack. You can wash it down with something fruity and cold. You can get a jolt of something with caffeine. That should be enough to get you through the mall experience.

As a former mall employee (thank you, New Balance), I consider myself an expert in shopping-adjacent eateries. At Tysons Corner Center, the New Balance store is just down the hallway from Cinnabon. The second you step out into the mall, you can’t miss the aroma. It is intoxicating.

They frequently offered a buy two, get one free deal, which I took advantage of on several glorious occasions. Before you question my sanity, I didn’t eat all three of them myself.

Except, of course, if you count the one time that I did.

I wanted to eat two of them and got the third one for another employee to enjoy. For some reason, nobody else in the store wanted to partake in the amazingness that is Cinnabon. My hand forced, I plowed through the first two and continued eating until the third one was polished off. Fortunately I weigh roughly 27 pounds and at the time had a job that required me to be moving around all day, so there were no ill effects. I do wonder what would have happened if I had washed that down with a Mountain Dew.

One of the malls near where I lived in Florida had a Cinnabon, so I guess the greater Jacksonville area is safe. But I just checked the mall down the road from where I went to college in Pennsylvania, and they do not have the required number of cinnamon roll establishments.

Time to step up your game, Selinsgrove.

In totally unrelated news, for those of you who like celebrity gossip or “Dumb & Dumber” quotes, I’ll close with this. It looks like Rachel Bilson’s puzzling engagement to Hayden Christensen may be over. “So you’re saying there’s a chance…”