The Mall-eria is Here to Stay
Tirna is not intimidated any longer…
She recalls, back in 2002, still in college, she stood with her friends in front of Forum Mall’s Elgin Road entrance, wide-eyed and wonder-struck, soaking in the splendour of the gleaming façade and the enchanting brand exposition patterns, a kaleidoscope of colours she had hitherto seen only in Hollywood movies.
That day, the group of youngsters couldn’t summon enough courage to step inside. “Perhaps we will have to pay some entry fee to just get inside and enjoy the bliss of the central AC and look at the shop windows?” asked her friend Sayanti. Their instincts told them to scoot and that’s what they did.
Fast-forward to the 2020s. Tirna is a regular at Forum and South City Malls with her friends and family, sailing past the entry-point metal detectors without even breaking stride. These days, Kolkatans are not daunted by swanky malls and hip high-street destination stores any more. They are at peace with the changing face of the retail and entertainment industry in their backyard and crave more of the same.
True, Kolkata fired the ignition later than maybe a Delhi NCR or a Mumbai, and Forum Mall was the city’s first large-format modern retail rendezvous and a watershed moment in organized retail in these parts. However, since then, the retail revolution has gone zip, zap, zoom, as Kolkata continues to burn plastic and paper on the tarmac of modern retail.
Till 1999, there was only 22 Camac Street. In the next 3 years, more than 10 new malls were already planned, offering almost three million square feet of retail space, not to mention over 30 multiplex screens and allied entertainment options. The industry was already turbo-charged.
Yes, the outlook has been tempered by adverse global events and of course, the devastating pandemic, but there’s no denying that Kolkata has embraced new-age retail and entertainment fondly. Today, on a Sunday or a public holiday, the likes of South City Mall or City Centre Salt Lake or Axis Mall in Rajarhat all see footfall records being shattered week on week. These shop-stops have kind of replaced the Alipore Zoo or the Victoria grounds as Sunday magnets for the modern urban family.
For a vast majority of these families, a Sunday is best spent in a swanky mall with shopping, dining, pubbing, movie and other entertainment options, something for everybody, all under one roof. People are often seen paying parking fees for over 5 hours of stay in the mall facility. That’s the face of modern consumption pattern in Kolkata and for a city traditionally known as conservative with its spending, this transformation has happened remarkably fast.
“The mindset of the typical Kolkatan had always favoured denial over consumption. But there has been a quiet revolution in attitude over the past few years and the visible end of the consumption spectrum is retail,” Sanjiv Goenka, chairperson, RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, who gave us Spencer’s and Quest Mall, had told me a few years ago.
The CII Eastern Region services sector sub-committee ascribes this recent spending spree to the new-found “confidence” factor, with “a clutch of enablers like availability of credit, better options in goods and services, higher salaries and increased media impact”. Thus, from the value-seeker to the promo-grabber, the monthly grocery and annual garments shopper to the impulse buyer, the consumer behaviour pattern in the city is changing radically.
And there are strong fundamentals to sustain the displacement from the conventional trader-run standalone shops to more organized and large retail formats, CII maintains. According to a report by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the disposable income in the city has been on the rise and with a median age of 24-25, today’s Kolkata shopper has high aspiration levels. The motto is pretty much – “Have money, will spend”.
Experts in the retail sector concur that the future of retailing in the city lies firmly in new-age shopping malls providing variety, value, and convenience in a more comfortable environment. An industry stalwart sums up the scenario: “It was the city’s inherent pessimism which prevented it from celebrating its success, but now there’s so much more optimism in the air.”
