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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Retail therapy
By Aziza Sami
Yet another new mall has opened in Cairo. Only this time -- if you listen to the hullabaloo surrounding the opening -- it is different, bigger, better and more expensive than the rest.
Arkadia covers nine storeys, representing an investment of more than half a billion. It is on the Corniche, almost adjacent to the World Trade Centre, one more project to raise the real estate profile of the one-time popular quarter of Wikalet Al-Balah in Bulaq Abul-Ela.
Middle class Egyptians, it seems, have an almost insatiable appetite for highly priced imported china and tableware, furniture, electronic gadgetry and clothes, which provide the mainstay of the more than five hundred shops that are distributed across the seven floors.
Not an inch of space is wasted. The food court brings together a whole range of fast food chains, together with more specialised outlets, and acts as a positive magnet for adolescents and families with younger children.
At face value, Egypt's burgeoning malls -- which contain a remarkable repetition of the same shops selling the same things -- would seem to indicate that the retail sector is riding high. The investment drive that has effectively led the shift away from the high street appears, on the surface, to speak of the kind of affluence more usually associated with Western cities or else the Gulf.
But what is it that lies beneath?
An advertisement for Arkadia which highlighted the number of government officials attending the mall's opening adopted the usual, advertising hyperbole when it chose, with preposterous naïveté, to describe the development as an "historic step promoting Egypt's economic and trade development and boosting exports."
Even in the self-deluding world of advertising this seems a bit rich. Malls and their commodities, which serve a purely local market, are a world away from enhancing exports. Nor is it likely that malls, which target only the most affluent section of consumers, attracting them with the promise of imported luxury goods, will help overcome the current recession.
Malls represent a consolidation of multinational interests. The tastes they purportedly cater to, the commodities they showcase, are hardly representative of the productive abilities of the national economy. Rather, they embody the glitzier face of globalisation, which if it is fine in Germany or England -- and even there, there exists a growing resentment towards the centralising impacts of the marketing strategy -- is far less fine in Egypt.
Instead of greeting the building of malls with so much fanfare, and insisting that these consumerist cathedrals with their appeal to such a limited section of the population are a triumph of economic reform, perhaps the government should make a leap of faith in the opposite direction.
The government has given more than adequate encouragement, through tax exemptions, to businessmen who can only diversify their portfolios by building more malls. Now it is time to offer even greater encouragement to those who still have the will to invest in production and export. Rather than timidly announcing, as it did last week, that it will allow investors to "pay in installments" the notorious sales tax on capital goods, it should totally abrogate all taxation on export-oriented production.
That the government seems able to provide incentives only for real estate construction indicates a serious flaw in current policy. And until the government makes a U-turn in its taxation policies, the malls will continue to burgeon, undermining the much proclaimed objective of raising already low levels of domestic savings. The malls will stand as a monument to that section of Egypt's population that has developed a truly world-class consumerist habit while the rest of the economy -- the productive rather than consumerist economy -- stagnates.
One need only look at the environs surrounding the sumptuous malls built on the Nile in Bulaq. There, in their backyard, lies unemployment, low productivity, zero savings, dying local industries, a collapsing retail sector. Hardly surprising, is it, that the one thing shopping malls do not provide in abundance are windows.
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