Just a couple of days back I got the chance to stroll down Orchard Road and realised how much have changed. I’ve been to ION Orchard a couple of times already so it’s really nothing but I haven’t got to walk down to look at what comes after Ngee Ann City that was newly completed. I walked through the Mandarin Gallery, 313@Somerset, and Orchard Central.
Most of these malls are very standard. An Apple retail outlet seem like a must-have in these malls and they’ll have a big jewelery boutique and high-fashion (usually Forever 21 or Zara) sort of shop in the ground floor. They’d have fast food, maybe more of Burger King and Long John Silvers, both of which are more high class sort of fast food rather than the standard KFC and McDonald’s. They’d have a cafe too, Coffee Bean or Starbucks in addition to a whole spate of other small eating places in the basement areas. Most would have a CD/Music shop somewhere on the higher levels too.
As we shop around places we complain that every mall offers somewhat the same things but then it is seeing familiar stuff that comforts us when we are overseas. More often than not in Singapore different places are just different configurations of the same old stuff. There’s this tension between the search for novelty and the fear of the unknown and the mall designers and developers will all have to work to balance these forces in the minds of their patrons. Tapping on popular brands help draw the usual crowd that makes the malls less cold to those genuine customers even if the rest of the crowd spends little money. While it is the big names that establishes the mall in the minds of the people, it is actually the small unique shops that defines them.
