Posted on 03/05/2013 3:08:52 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Dongguan, China (CNN) -- They built it, but the shoppers didn't come.
New South China Mall in Guangdong Province opened in 2005. With 5 million square feet of shopping area, the mall can accommodate 2,350 stores, making it the largest shopping center in the world in terms of leasable space -- more than twice the size of Mall of America, the biggest shopping center in the United States.
At the outdoor plaza, hundreds of palm-trees blend with a replica Arc de Triomphe, a giant Egyptian sphinx, fountains and long-stretching canals with gondolas.
Only problem is, the mall is virtually deserted. Despite the bombastic design and grand plans, only a handful of stores are occupied. "Most of it empty, with little consumer traffic and a high vacancy rate," according to a report last year by Emporis, a global building data firm.
"It has been classified as a 'dead mall.'"
Walking among shattered shops -- its dusty corridors and escalators covered in soiled sheets -- is a walk through a ghost mall. Rubbish piles up along the sides, paint is coming off the walls and store signs and advertisements have faded.
The mall's indoor amusement park, staff lay half asleep over counters or kill time chatting with each other while the 1,814-foot rollercoaster roars above.
Opened for the public in 2005, developers expected to attract some 100,000 visitors a day. But eight years later, the few people that visit the mall today typically hang out at the American fast food restaurants near the entrance or at the IMAX cinema outside the mall. Some parents bring their children to the Teletubbies Edutainment Center.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
Put in a casino - they’ll come.
10,000 terra cotta shoppers, coming right up.
One billion people! Don’t they need someplace to go?
"It's so crowded that nobody goes there anymore."
That don’t matter... they still hit their target of 20% growth in construction... that’s the MAIN thing!
Empty storefronts? Zero shoppers? Looks just like our own mall, in the Age of Obama. :)
Terra Cotta Shoppers...
Has a funny but nice ring ot it...
Malinvestment is a concept developed by the Austrian School of economic thought, that refers to investments of firms being badly allocated due to what they assert to be an artificially low cost of credit and an unsustainable increase in money supply, often blamed on a central bank. This concept is central to the Austrian business cycle theory. Austrian economists such as Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek advocate the idea that malinvestment occurs due to the combination of fractional reserve banking and artificially low interest rates misleading relative price signals which eventually necessitate a corrective contraction—a boom followed by a bust.[1]Mall looks nice though...
Central Planning at its finest.
Looks like a cool place. I wonder if all of their clothes are made in China like ours.
RE: they still hit their target of 20% growth in construction... that’s the MAIN thing!
I have a better idea for more growth ... hire a lot of unemployed youths to smash thousands of windows.
You create a lot of jobs for window and glass makers.
Good videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbDeS_mXMnM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLnR2JIW3pA
Look up “ghost cities” on youtube.
Exterior design by George Jetson.
The fallacy of “central planning.” China has squandered over $1 trillion on the construction of huge ,vacant,deteriorating ghost cities. China sits on the world’s biggest, most unstable real estate bubble.
China: collapsing (according to popular propaganda) every week or so since December, 2007, in every time of fear that the dollar might go down commensurate with decreasing manufacturing on US soil.
Those in the know, know that gigantic commie nations build whole cities before eventually populating them with commie party favorites. Before doing so, they probably welcome investments from western foreigners. Let the funny money game go on.
Yes. But it all shows up in GDP [which should illustrate what a silly number that is] and causes many FReepers to clutch their throats in terror at the Chinese economic "juggernaut".
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