Ordinary Gweilo

The long-established electrical chain Tai Lin recently closed down, apparently a victim of the current financial crisis.  I’ve only bought one item there and I had to take it back again and get a refund, so I suppose that doesn’t really count.  Their stores always seemed much less crowded than Fortress and Broadway.  Ah, yes, now it all makes sense.

Other retail chains seem to be reducing the size of their stores.  Not the number, but the size.  It’s not a new phenomenon – I remember when Marks & Spencer had huge two-level stores in Festival Walk and Plaza Hollywood, both of which were cut back to one floor.  Toys R Us have similarly reduced the size of several of their stores, including the ones in Festival Walk and New Town Plaza. 

Now it’s happening again – last time I went to the IKEA store in Sha Tin I noticed that there was a lot of renovation going on, but only realized at the end of my five-mile walk that they appear to have closed the upper floor altogether.  Meanwhile, over in New Town Plaza, both the bookshops (Popular and Commercial Press) have been slimmed down by roughly a third.  Presumably there will be no shortage of retailers happy to take over the space they have vacated, and so everyone’s a winner.   Especially shopfitters.