After a hectic week in Grenoble – a small town in the French Alps, of about 150,000 people, which also attracts several tens of thousands of students every year, two young people from Bucharest, who were attending college in France, realised they had almost no food left in the fridge. They decided to go to the Carrefour hypermarket on the outskirts of the Grenoble, one of the two big shopping centres of that town the next day, on Sunday.

When they got there they saw the car park was empty and the hypermarket was closed. ”I was shocked maybe. I thought I was in a movie, I couldn’t understand what was happening,” one of the two remembers today, almost a year after that incident. As they would later find out, the hypermarket was rarely open on Sundays, like other big stores in France. The legislation in force in several countries in Western Europe until the end of the nineties prohibited large stores to open for business on Sundays, partly for religious reasons and partly because of the negotiating power of the unions, which wanted Sunday to be a day off for employees.

Fiercer and fiercer competition among store chains and developers of shopping centres led to the dropping of such laws in many places, while in others a special permit is still needed to open a large store on Sundays – something that can seem at least surprising to a Romanian used to see the supermarket or the hypermarket allow them to do their shopping on Saturdays and Sundays, when the rest of the stores are closed. What happened to the two young people is relevant precisely because of this: after almost half a century of communist regime, when those who could not get out of the county, namely most of the people, actually, had only general stores to deal with instead of malls and hypermarkets, the opening of the first Western-type shopping centres stimulated a consumer spending appetite that almost defied economic conditions.

The desire to adopt the Western cultural model and the pleasure to set foot into a ”temple of consumer spending” as abroad, turned the first malls in the country into an instant attraction. The willingness of a consumer sometimes fresh out of the grey retail (in the true sense of the word) to shop and spend their free time in modern shopping centres has encouraged developers to announce project after project, and retailers to expand at the same pace, driven by the good results in Bucharest and in the first such centres opened outside the capital city. The mall-mania, if we can call it that, both in terms of consumers and in terms of frantically announced plans by developers and retailers, has also led to poorly thought out projects, as they are considered today or to unrealistic rents paid for a retail space.

Such times, when the newly opened shopping centres would become genuine pilgrimage places for consumers are gone, both because of the economic crisis, and as a result of the novelty of the mall concept wearing off, after such centres mushroomed, even excessively in some places. ”A great deal of money has been made in Romania without actually producing something – from real estate, from foreign investments. An atmosphere where everyone made profit was created but now everyone must suffer,” comments Ali Ergun Ergen, the man who coordinated the building of Bucuresti Mall and then of Plaza Romania and later supervised the development of the shopping area in the Baneasa project. He admits the market has developed like crazy over the last few years because all retailers had the same constant increase expectations for consumer spending. ”It’s like a balloon that you keep inflating; it will eventually burst.”

Traducere de Loredana Fratila-Cristescu si Daniela Stoican