mall mania in india fading away?

after a long hiatus of almost 2 months, i am back. relocation, new career opportunity and lots of fun things happening have kept me busy and away from blogging for such a long time. anyway, coming back to business:

i read an article today in economic times that a lot of restauraters are going away from malls as they're not doing good business there. i wasn't really surprised though. i keep hearing and reading a lot of stories that many malls around india are closing down, many stores within mall remain unoccupied and that the malls are continuously seeing a decline in foot falls.

what could the reason be? i think the biggest reason is that whatever concept works a little bit in india (and could well be the case with any emerging economy) soon becomes a fad. put tthat together with the crazy amount of monies made in real estate, i think putting up a mall also became a fad thus directly affecting their quality. all you had to do is put together a half baked structure with glossy glass facade and some fancy curves on top of it. get 2-3 big brands to open up stores in the mall, get some good names for your food court and a 2-3 screen movie theatre. you would have a running mall with the rest of space either unoccupied or filled with crap. 

i agree that a whole lot of indians, especially in the tier 2 and 3 cities might have never seen a mall in their lifetime. i'm sure they must have been excited by the entire concept of a fully airconditioned market. but as happens with all things that are done in a hurry, the quality of the mall, the quality of stores, the quality of restaurants, the quality of jarring hindi music that you play at insanly loud volumes, start getting on your nerves and you start to hate it.

of course, i did not mention the most important thing. you might still occasionally step into the mall since you do not have too many other sources of entertainment in your city. but most indians would dare not buy from the stores within malls because they are not ready to shell out so much money for branded stuff yet. it shows that though india is developing at a rapid pace, the malls have just outdone the development pace and now are hurting the entire retail business in india.

i used to think that restaurants / food courts are the only businesses that do well there. but the article that i read today, again proved that notion wrong. of course, if you're not gonna have a healthy footfall within the mall in the first place, how can you expect the food businesses there to do good? they would rather place themselves on high streets and cater to their focussed audience rather than sit in a mall paying huge maintenance costs and hoping that people who come to visit the malls would also stop and have a bite at their joints.

for me, personally, the single big turn off at the malls have been the poor quality of service staff at stores/restaurants etc. it purely sucks. one hears that there is a constant attrition in the staff at grocery stores, at store within malls. i can only imagine. having had the experience of shopping at other places in the world, i am quite convinced that the retail business in india has a long long long way to go. till then, the neighborhood stores, the traditional retail shops and grocery stores have nothing to worry about - since they're able to give highly personalised services - even though their staff is not dressed in some gaudy t-shirts wearing a logo of their brand that they so poorly represent.

what will make the malls and retail outlets in india work? thats the big question that only time will answer.