With the over influx of Malls in the Mall Deprieved Country, it should not be surprising to see a global daily writing a column on India's Malls and its deliveries or rather non-deliveries.
Below is the Article directly lifted from the IHT Website with all due credits to IHT itself.
India's malls pull in people who aren't buying |
By Amelia Gentleman International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2005 |
NEW DELHI A sleepy Tuesday afternoon at the Metropolitan Mall drew to a close, and there were still no takers for the mini-bunjee jump. Rows of arcade games stood deserted, their tinny theme tunes clashing with the bland 1980s U.S. chart hits piped through the building in an attempt to create ambience.
The shops in this flashy pantheon of international brands were mostly empty - the security guards more visible than the customers. Visitors were clustered instead in the American-themed cafes, studying menus offering Mr. Fudgee brownies and Calorie-Heaven smoothies, stoically enduring the headache-inducing acoustics of a public swimming pool.
The Metropolitan is the smartest of the many malls that have mushroomed over the past two years in the satellite city of Gurgaon - a consumer and business haven a few kilometers south of Delhi - but even newly arrived western brand names are failing to lure customers.
Shoppers are spending a lot of time and not much money here, and profits are beginning to fall. In short, India's retail revolution, which began with the arrival of the first shopping mall less than six years ago, is having teething troubles.
All around the suburbs of Delhi, developers have bought up plots of land that are fast being converted into shopping complexes. Drive outside the city center, and there is no escaping the sight of dusty plots of desolate land, each fronted with a billboard showing the gleaming vision of the completed development in all its glass-fronted modernity.
Outside the capital, land is cheap, and companies are convinced that malls represent easy money.
The relatively small community of Gurgaon is witnessing a frenzy of construction; its six shopping complexes, along a stretch of road known as Mall Mile, are to be joined by 17 more within two years. The same gold rush is visible around the edges of large cities across India; by 2010 the number of U.S.-style shopping centers will have increased sevenfold, to 300, under current plans.
This explosion has triggered concern among retail industry analysts who have begun to question whether the Indian love affair with mall culture is likely to survive. A few restaurants and shops have started closing in malls that opened only recently, defeated by high rents and dwindling public interest.
Newspapers have begun to chart the phenomenon of "mall fatigue," emerging only months after the burst of mall enthusiasm that accompanied the opening of these vast shopping centers. Noting the recent spate of shop closings in Gurgaon malls, the Indian Express asked, "Is this the beginning of the end of a new culture?"
"A lot of people come here just for the air-conditioning," said Sadhana Talwar, 23, a student seeking refuge with her friends from the powerful dry heat outside. "Electricity is a big problem."
"The mall doesn't seem nearly as exciting as it did when it first opened two years ago," Talwar said. "If it looks crowded, it's just because there are a lot of people roaming around aimlessly - not many people are shopping. We're just hanging out - I might buy some popcorn or a birthday card, but nothing more expensive than that."
India has not yet manifested any cultural revulsion for this American import. There have been no demonstrations of the kind orchestrated in France by the antiglobalization campaigner José Bové. No one appears dismayed that the food is almost entirely western or that Benetton and Tommy Hilfiger vastly outnumber smaller shops selling Indian fashion designs. Dissatisfaction is price-related, not political.
At a nearby café, Tarang Jain, 26, a call-center worker from another Delhi suburb, said she rarely even sets foot inside the shops, discouraged by window displays advertising shirts for 3,500 rupees (or $39.16, which is 1,777 rupees more than India's average monthly wage). "I do my shopping in the local market - the prices here are too expensive. I've just come to meet a friend."
"Property prices for the average person in the city and around are very steep," said Rahoul Singh, a young architect from Delhi, who is building three houses in Gurgaon. "Families live in pokey flats, with frequent electricity failures. The mall represents an escape."
Despite the waning excitement in Delhi's suburbs, retail analysts remain optimistic that the appetite for this form of shopping is just developing. The statistics look positive: Although 300 million people still survive on less than $1 a day, India's middle class is estimated to number 250 million.
About 65 percent of the population is younger than 35, the right age for the mall experience, and designated as a powerful consumer force, having grown up without the shortages and self-denial that older generations lived through. Just 22 million Indians are credit-card users, but the number is expected to triple by 2008.
Ajay Khanna, executive director of DLF, a development firm, is relentlessly positive about the future of the shopping complex - a business in which his company has invested millions of dollars.
DLF is one of India's largest developers, responsible for building most of the new residential areas of south Delhi and more than 70 percent of the first phase of development in Gurgaon. He said that India's retail development was at a stage similar to that of the United States in the late 1970s, with small shops starting to close down, pressured out of business by large companies.
"India has a huge middle class, 60 to 70 percent of whom live in the big metros," Khanna said recently. "They have large disposable incomes and through television are being exposed to what lifestyle is like in the rest of the world, so aspirational values are appearing. We think that the retail revolution is going to be bigger than the IT revolution in India," a reference to information technology.
With more and more Indians travelling abroad, he said, people are returning home with a taste for the kinds of food they ate on vacation - and looking to the mall to provide it.
"In a way the mall experience is not new to the Indian psyche," Khanna continued. "Like Europe, India always had a lot of village fairs; Indians like one-stop shopping.
"In a mall, you have entertainment, you have food, you have product retail - a very similar experience to a mela, an Indian fair. We see the phenomenon as set to grow dramatically," he said.
Foreign direct investment in the retail sector for the moment remains prohibited, but in the current budget, foreign construction companies were given permission to enter India to build malls, and there are signs that the government is contemplating lifting the ban on foreign investment.
A top executive of Wal-Mart, John Menzer, is due to arrive in India this week for talks, triggering speculation that the world's largest retailer plans to establish a presence in India.
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