Chinese Malls, Dependent on Restaurants, Face a Bleak Future
A deserted German-themed mall in Wuhan, China, on April 15. As the city’s lockdown has been partially lifted, people tend to avoid public spaces including malls.
Photographer: Gilles Sabrie for Bloomberg Businessweek
For decades, North Sichuan Road was Shanghai’s answer to Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay—a place where thousands shopped daily for everything including food and designer clothes. But that was before the new coronavirus. Now the local Printemps, a franchise of the glitzy Paris department store, has closed its doors, a nearby shopping center has shut for renovation, and few people were browsing the neighborhood on a recent evening. It’s an ominous sign for a once-vibrant segment of the world’s biggest consumer market: restaurants and the malls that depend on them.
Food, whether daily essentials or haute cuisine, has been a people magnet in China’s malls since they started to take off a decade ago. Landlords have welcomed restaurants, which Changjiang Securities estimates account for about a third of mall tenants, safe in the knowledge that e-commerce rivals can’t replicate the experience of dining out with family like they can with buying a sweater.