Chapter 5 - Consumer spending in China, aka. Shopping

Dear readers, in spite of its "geeky" first appearances, I hope this post will be of interest to all my readers. After all it is about shopping. So I guess that at least covers the female readers, and since I will be mentioning numbers and news, that should cover the guys as well. (Chauvinist?!? Me??)

Anyways, after having spent a few weeks in China I have gotten many revelations. One is the purely amazing number of Chinese people that excist in this world. Another is the just as amazing amount of shopping centers in the cities that I have been in so far, not to mention the size of each one of them. In Shanghai we went to an enormous shopping center downtown. It was completely stuffed with people, as the Chinese say; 人山人海, meaning, people mountain people sea. And this was just one out of many throughout the whole city. Later, in Nanjing I spent my first few days shopping for light clothes to wear in the summer heat. So I went to all kinds of stores, big and small.

First of all, to clear any confucion or predjudice, all of the shoppers are Chinese. The centers are not designed for foreigners or anything of the sort. They are designed to fit the needs of the Chinese modern-day consumer. The first floor of any shopping center sells jewlery, perfume, and in the cheaper places, shoes. The second and third are the ladies' floor, the fourth, men's and the fifth, sports and youth and the sixth, for home furnishing. This pattern repeats itself, at least throughout Nanjing.

It also seems as though the centers are devided by class. The fanciest is probably your best bet for having some alone-time in China. They have expensive brand-names and seem only to be frequented by the newly- and would-be-rich. In spite of the lack of costumers here, they are perhaps the largest ones in size. How they ever manage to keep afloat I have no idea. Underneath these though, we find the bulk of the shopping centers. But these are also devided into two kinds, one with cheap brand names, and one with cheap Chinese brands. If this means that the only genuine articles can been found at the most expensive malls I don't know. The last "class" of malls are the really cheap places outside of downtown. It's kinda hard to find nice stuff there though. This included giant places solely comprised of stores of the kind you would find in an outdoor street-market in Europe. Beside this whole scale is the smaller stores that can be found along all streets in China. These vary in prices, quality and sizes. Shopping here is like digging for gold...really tiring!

In addition to these places comes the electronic centers, Wal-Mart, and other Chinese versions of various American retail-stores. The electronic centers btw. are cool, it's like 5-6 stories of all kinds of electronics. Very nice:)


Now, the bigger picture.

I have lived in the US, I am from Norway. Never before have I seen a society that have more buying-preassure than here. I don't mean that the whole society is commercialized to the same rate as the American society. It is however, filled with the need to be better than the Jones' that is found in the US. The need to have better, fancier and cooler stuff than your friends and neighbours, have creapt into Chinese society. The fact that you have about 20 people "helping" you to find what you like in each store, really doesn't help on the preassure to buy stuff. Don't take me wrong, I don't mind this developement, I just hope it doesn't turn cultural China into cultural America...

One thing it can do however, is to turn economic China into what the US have been throughout the 20th century; the world's economic engine. The driving force of the US domination of the global economy have been the American consumer. Now, he/she is failing, American consumption is down and the Chinese have achieved a higher standard of living. Thereby, more and more Chinese products are now sold IN China, thereby fueling its own economy, and no longer being dependant on foreign investments. This development might lead China further down the path for the candidacy as the global economy's leading nation.

As you can read in the Business Spectator the Chinese ratail sales are continuosly growing, fueling the economy. Even in spite of the earthquake in May 2008. This fact, and the fact that it has been steadily growing the last few years shows that the Chinese consumer means business. Watch out! ;)