Golden Resources

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I was supposed to spend the day studying Chinese, but once again found something more interesting to do! A short taxi ride from our dorm is the Golden Resources Shopping Mall, which according to an article on November 24, 2004 in the Christian Science Monitor was built a couple years ago as the world's largest mall. So Diana and I went to check it out today. It is 6 million square feet, whereas the Mall of America is only 4 million square feet. The mall has lots of escalators and many high-end stores, but very few people. It was extremely difficult to navigate if you didn't know how to read Chinese, so we didn't walk through the entire mall and were too frustrated to think about shopping. Walking through this gigantic mall was like going through a ghost town. There were about as many people in the mall as you would see in the mall in Bowling Green (which only has two anchor stores). The many restaurants were each built to seat about 100-200 people, but at 1pm were holding only a handful in each. Store attendants were not visible as you passed through the halls, I think they have become so used to noone coming to see their goods over the past two years that they don't even stay out front on the merchandise floor. I cannot believe that this huge mall is still open. It seems it was located on a side of town that has very little to draw people to the mall, the many stores are out of the price range of many Chinese, and it is not foreigner friendly. It is not as if there do not exist people with disposable incomes in Beijing, because Wangfujing holds one of the nicest, largest, and most expensive malls to which I have ever been and is packed with shoppers. There are plenty of expats, business people, and tourists to buy the high end merchandise at these types of high-end stores, but the difference is that the Wangfujing mall has a Hyatt hotel connected to it and is a short distance from Tiananmen Square. Also, an important feature is that the mall is very easy to navigate if you know English. The Golden Resources mall is on the west side of town, which has a lot of universities and is outside the 3rd ring road, not where people with money hang out. I cannot imagine how this structure is continuing to function after such a low turnout for the past two years, someone must be losing a lot of money. The Christian Science Monitor article, written a month after the mall was opened, pointed out that on a Friday afternoon they counted only 20 shoppers during a one hour period. So it does not seem that this mall, even when it was new and exciting was ever as huge of a success as was probably intended.

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