One Mall in Bangkok
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2008
1
20
29
Trip End
Feb 02, 2009
Where I stayed
Ko Samui,
Thailand
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Now, for the longest time I didn't have a cell phone. Why? Because I thought they were badly designed, annoying, and just fed the pockets of greedy companies who didn't bother to really give consumers what they wanted. Then the iPhone came along, fixed all the things I hated about cell phones, and I ran out and bought one (Aidess interjects here to correct me -- she ran out for my birthday and stood in line for six hours to get one for me). Well, in Bangkok on my last day I went to the Siam Paragon mall. If I could, I would now run out and buy one and plant it in Burbank. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to do that and am sadly lacking in contacts in the mall development business, so I'm unable to do this. If anyone knows someone responsible for mall development, please pass this on to them.
Let me attempt to describe the wonder of this mall to you. First of all, it's six floors. The top floor is a movie theater (with IMAX as well). Okay, there's a few malls out there with small movie theaters, but how many of them have IMAX? One floor down was the sort of Thai antiques floor. This is basically souvenir shopping, but a bit higher level, with Thai furniture, silk, all sorts of great stuff. I admit that this might not quite fit in everywhere, but in Los Angeles you could probably figure out souvenir shops to put there. Next floor down is the electronics floor. Picture dropping a Best Buy or Fry's into a mall as its own floor. Yeah, that's a nice picture, isn't it? I mean, think about it. I could spend several hours on that floor while Aidess is looking around on the floor below. Everybody wins! But there's more! On one end of that same floor, for no apparent reason, there were a few car shops. Not just any cars, but if you were window shopping in the mall one day and you decided to buy on a whim a Lamborghini or Ferrari or such, well, they were there. The shop, the cars, everything. I don't know who had the brilliant idea of putting exotic car shops in a mall, but they were a genius! Finally, on this very packed floor, there was a very large bookstore. We're not talking a little Waldenbooks. More like a full-fledged Borders embedded in the mall. So, electronics, cars, and books all on one floor. Moving on down to the next floor -- the Fashion Level. I'll breeze by this one as it's pretty much your standard American mall floor. Moving down was the Luxury Floor. This is your standard American high-end mall. One floor for cheaper clothing, another for more expensive clothing. But all in the same mall! Okay, we're almost done, but there's one big floor to go yet. The Food Floor. This floor is all food. We're not talking a tiny little Food Court. We're talking several full-on high quality restaurants, plus fast food, street food (but cleaner), and even a full grocery store. You can make a sandwich yourself or get a gourmet meal. The floor is even divided into different sections like "Gourmet Section", etc. Everything. Oh, and as if on a whim, they also had a bonus floor somewhere we never went with an Aquarium. In case you were bored and you wanted to see some fish. Oh, and Aidess reminds me that there was a gym, too. Sort of LA Fitness after you've spent too much time on the Food Floor.
I've never been to the Mall of America, so I can't compare to that. What I can say is that I've never been somewhere like this in my life, and I don't understand why in America, consumer-capitalist capital of the world, we don't have something like this. There is an entire target audience out there being missed people! So, if this idea gets back to someone in authority who makes this happen, I don't ask for a giant share in the profits or anything else like that. I just ask for a really, really big gift certificate to shop there many times.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming....
Ernie
P.S.: Picture updates for India and Thailand have been posted.
