Shopping left, right and centre

EXCELLENT. Just what they needed. The people of Ballito, hard done by with just three large shopping centres, conveniently located right next to each other, must have been struggling to get by. How have they survived?

It must have been tough for them, for the longest time unable to purchase their daily needs at what is essentially almost every major retailer already in their hood, and having to drive the long, tiring 20km to Gateway to get anything they couldn’t already find in their once sleepy little village. But not any more. Thankfully in the space adjacent to all the above-mentioned malls, and in fact leaning up against one of them, where once there was undulating green lusciousness, a new, bigger, better, shiny mall has sprung up. In a nutshell, it’s almost every big shop that was already in Ballito, but this time just occurring in a different order.

What on earth is going on with South Africa’s obsession with shopping centres? When one shopping centre is built and starts doing rather well, some new developer comes along and says, “Well they like this one, so let’s build another right next to it…” First, long ago, we got the Pavilion. And oh how we loved it. Then the big bruiser, Gateway Theatre of Shopping (which just closed down its actual theatre), came along and said, like Crocodile Dundee pulling out his knife, “That’s not a shopping centre, this is a shopping centre!” All the while quietly next to Gateway and at almost the same time, somebody said, “Wow look at the behemoth centre, let’s build another one right next to it”, and voila! The Crescent was born.

And if it is just too far for you to cross the N2 from leafy Mount Edgecombe, don’t panic, you can save the mileage on your Discovery because a new giant, Cornubia Shopping Centre nears completion as you read this, so close to Gateway that the restaurants could probably share one kitchen and send waiters in between on rollerblades.

According to an article in a recent Financial Mail, trading density growth – which is turnover per square metre – has dropped significantly recently, for some tenants in these big centres it’s even in the negative percentages. The market is being diluted.

Oh yes, you may have your splendid albeit gaudy architecture and your little nuances, but you ain’t fooling me, every shopping centre is a carbon-copy of the one down the road. We are not dazzled by your neon lights. It’s all a bit “same-same”.

I kind of feel for the big guys, like Woolies, Mr P, Pick n Pay, Game etc. They must suffer from Fomo and kind of have to sign up every time a new mall goes up, invariably diluting turnover from their other branches, which are growing ever closer together. I mean, imagine the new Ballito Junction without a Mr P? That would be ludicrous.

And what of the Woolies just over the road at the Lifestyle Centre? Is that a goner, cannibalised by the new shiny monstrosity next door? What ever will become of the Lifestyle Centre, which I rather like, now that everybody simply has to be in the new centre?

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, this retail game. The big developers in the shopping centre world feel nothing about creating a vacuum in the big retail spaces nearby but, then again, that’s business for you. It happened in Hillcrest, also with three shopping centres next to each other, all of them affected in some or other way by the new gigantic Watercrest Mall in Waterfall. Waterfall! Who knew?

I asked what South Africa’s obsession is with shopping malls, but the reality is, I hardly think any residents of Ballito spent their days moaning about the lack of shopping facilities, and rather enjoyed taking the Range Rover on an occasional outing to Gateway for a skinny latté and a salad at Tasha’s.

If you’ve got friends out in Ballito, you may never see them again.

It’s the developers that think we are obsessed, when in actual fact it is them.

If you live in umhlanga village, thankfully you won’t have to make the arduous 1.5km journey to Gateway any more either, what with the new shopping centre in The Pearls. And if you can’t be bothered to walk all the way to The Pearls, don’t worry, Vivian Reddy has said to Anant Singh, “I see your shopping centre, and I raise you one uber-luxury amaze-balls mall just over the road.” I don’t know if Mr Reddy would say “amaze-balls” for real, but I like the idea.

I am not sure really how the likes of the world’s super brands, like Burberry, Armani, Versace and such will cope in Durban, but I’m sure Mr Reddy has done his homework and has seen the need for R20 000 handbags and R500 000 watches is high in the village. Durban prefers the Plastics Warehouse where a new laundry basket and a lunchbox is still a stretch on the old budget, but if you wait long enough, another branch of that shall be coming soon to a new mega-mall near you, no doubt.