Mall culture slow to return but certain stores see good business upon reopening

CORONAVIRUS | As stores begin to reopen today under the conditional movement control order (MCO), observations from the two biggest malls in Klang Valley revealed that mall culture is still slow to return.

However, business appeared to be doing good for certain types of shops such as electronics and skincare stores.

In both 1 Utama Shopping Centre and Mid Valley Megamall, Malaysiakini observed that many stores were still closed and, aside from food-related and grocery stores, most of the shops were devoid of customers.

While stores selling household products, skincare and other similar products saw a number of customers returning to their business, others were not so fortunate.

Stores selling non-essential items such as clothing, shoes, bags, toys, jewellery and other such products appeared to have no customers at all.

Meanwhile, Malaysiakini spotted around three to four customers waiting in line outside the store of skincare retailer Kiehl's (photo), while some were inside.

The same situation was seen in both Kiehl's in 1 Utama and Mid Valley.

Kiehl's 1 Utama manager Kathy Chen told Malaysiakini that they just reopened their store today and, so far, the business has been not bad.

"A lot of people ran out of skin care products because it has almost been two months (since the MCO started) so they all came to replenish (their skincare products)," she said.

However, in order to adhere to social distancing and best hygiene practices under the Covid-19 pandemic, she said they only allow three customers in the store at one time while the others wait outside.

"This is also new to us, so we are also a bit chaotic now. We cannot just tell customers to stand away from us, so we have to try to stay a bit further from them ourselves," she explained.

Malaysiakini also spoke to the manager of Best Denki electronics store in 1 Utama, who only wanted to be known as Alan.

Just like Kiehl's, Alan said the electronics store has been seeing good business since they reopened today.

"Most of them buy things like mobile phones, refrigerators, washers and a lot of small home appliances," he said.

As the store is about 13,000 square feet, he said they have limited the number of customers in the store at any one time to 120 customers, among other measures taken to adhere to the standard operating procedure (SOP) provided by the government.

Meanwhile, Daiso in 1 Utama was still closed when Malaysiakini went to check today, but the employees were spotted preparing for its reopening tomorrow inside the store.

The employees, who declined to be identified, were seen sticking yellow tape on the ground to indicate to customers where they should stand to get their temperature checked before they enter the store.

They told Malaysiakini they will provide customers with gloves as well before they enter the store.

However, they noted that some Daiso stores in other locations have already reopened today.

While Malaysiakini was speaking to the employees, several people were seen milling outside the store to see if it would open.

A woman was also heard asking the employees when the store would open again.

The conditional MCO was announced by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin last Friday and has received considerable criticism from those who believe it is too early to reopen a majority of the economic sectors.

Defenders of the conditional MCO, however, have said this had to be done for the economy to recover as well as for Malaysians to get used to the "new normal" under the Covid-19 pandemic, which will not go away any time soon. - Mkini