The great buying bazaar

(bdnews24.com, April 22, 2011)

I was at the mall yesterday and found that almost every store had a huge crowd bogging up the aisles, milling around the checkout counters and trolling through the shelves. It was sale time, a special event that had been announced in every newspaper, magazine, brochure and flyer for many days before the melee actually started. Privileged clients, mainly those with special credit cards from selected stores, had received news of the discounts and deals via text messages on their mobile phones, emails and the occasional pesky phone call.

As all these potential customers, along with arbitrary visitors wander through the mall, they are wooed by touts from various stores, inviting them into their establishments, to ‘just look, madam’, to hopefully spend a few more shekels than actually budgeted for. And the money flows out of wallets and into cash registers, good fly off the shelves, big bags are carried out and cars, autorickshaws, trains and buses head to different parts of the city with loads of passengers, happy and spent, literally and metaphorically. Welcome to the great Indian bazaar!

It is much easier to be truly capitalist and indulge in gratuitous expenditure today than it was a few years ago. Thanks to the unprecedented burgeoning of malls all over the subcontinent, making the good old ‘department store’ defunct, there has been a sudden and drastic increase in not just availability, but also awareness of what is available where, when and for how much. And along the way, there has also been a growing demand for quality, for international brands and for a degree of convenience that was once available only in stores in the more developed and commercially elitist nations. In other words, the power of money has become reality, with everyone asking for more every day, in every way.

Once upon a time, the mall was an elitist concept, a place that people with money went to buy everything from kitchen gadgets to lingerie to toys for the children. Today, just a couple of years after the mall made its debut in India, for instance, there is a distinct divide in the customer base and the kinds of stores in a particular hub. Some are indeed more upmarket than others, showcasing high-street brands and one-of-a-kind products. Designer clothes, couture accessories, fine jewellery, big-name cookware, even mobile phones and sound systems that could cost the same as a small car will be available to a clientele that lives in million dollar homes and considers spending thousands on a simple meal an everyday way of living.

In other shopping malls, bargains will be a way of rolling the cart through the aisles, a huge discount attracting the most customers and pulling in the profits for the suppliers, never mind that the goods may not last too long – as long as they are affordable, look decent, get the job done…for now…it is fine and will be bought.

Malls today are a fact of everyday life. In my own neighbourhood, fairly elitist and suburban, there are three enormous ones within a ten minute walking radius of my home. One has high-end stores, with designer labels and wares that are generally found more in shops abroad, selling dreams and aspirations more than goods. The other is more middle-market, with more local products, some expensive, some not, selling utilitarian products of fairly high quality but not exceptional brand. And the third is a more accessible set of shops that provide service to the huge lower-middle class, the kind who would consider a car a luxury and food more important than interior decor. All these people need to be catered to, their needs fulfilled, but at a price that makes sense to them and delineates a certain consciousness of necessity versus luxury.

It is perhaps the story of a global virus called commercialism. There is a need for more than our parents and grandparents had, an awareness that there is more to everyday living standards than perhaps a few years ago. People want more, rather than merely need more, to be comfortable, to feel that they have a decent standard of living, to live up to their own heightened expectations. Along the way, it becomes a generational aspiration, a desire to satisfy a hunger that the elders did not feel as strongly, to become more than what the parents were, to have more than the grandparents did.

Jobs and salaries reflect that evolution – not necessarily good or bad – and so do credit card company profits, which over the past couple of decades have soared, even through the recession and any bad times that the economy went through. The attitude change, too, is revealing of a changing time, where people are willing and able to spend plenty of money and demand plenty of bang for their spent buck.

And if they can get their satisfaction, everyone goes home happy!