Shanghai: Super Brands Mall

This is a pretty terrible place, but I'm glad I went. If you've ever seen a picture of Shanghai, you've probably seen the giant tower that looks like a bunch of golf balls right on the river, across from the Bund. The egregious tower is the Pearl River Tower and the area of town it is in is called Pudong. Now, at the base of that tower is  a massive traffic roundabout and around the roundabout is an elevated pedestrian walkway which makes a giant floating ring. It's a popular place to take photos of the skyscrapers around Pudong, and its also right on the metro stop. Continue around the ring and you get to a massive mall.

While its difficult to walk 50 meters in Shanghai without seeing a Zara, an H&M, or a Haagen-Daz, this is one of more upscale malls in the city. The key word here is 'aspiration'. It's all about getting the Chinese to the middle class, and the middle class to consume at American levels. The mall has 11 floors, huge, spiraling atria, a movie theater, restaurants, and almost every luxury brand store I can think of, a mix of European, American, and Japanese. Muji and Uniqlo next to American Eagle next to Zara. The grocery store in the basement is also a foreign import- when I lived in Beijing, locals shopped at small markets, stalls, or small stores, and only the westerners went to the few 'big box' western-style supermarkets. Now, shopping at the supermarket is the modern, middle class thing to do.

And these aren't Fry's Marketplaces, either. These are meticulously organized, carefully presented, elaborately finished in upscale materials. The experience of these places are like someone described the functioning of an American supermarket to a luxury developer who had never before been to a real supermarket. Tellingly, the prices were very high. Actually, quite higher than typical American supermarket prices. Considering that the cost of living in Shanghai is relatively low for the US and relatively high for China, these grocery store prices would be astronomical for most Chinese. If I was working and living in Shanghai as an expat designer- which is a high demand/high paying job for Shanghai, I could not afford to shop at this grocery store. This is less about stocking up on groceries and more about the new consumer lifestyle.

Actually, in all of the stores, the prices for the goods were higher than what I'd seen in Europe and in the US.