And then there's Imelda Marcos, wife of the Phillipines' Ferdinand Marcos, who according to a 2004 study embezzled the second-largest amount of any dictator in the last twenty years: a cool $5-10 billion. Who stole the most? None other than Indonesia's Suharto, at $15-35 billion. I bet his wife got some nice shoes too.
3 comments:
Wow - Who builds these shopping malls? Who shops at them? I guess the Gucci, etc. mall is after the high end market...are there enough elite to sustain that? Do any of the shops seem to be priced reasonably? Or are we Americans the only ones lucky enough to buy sweat-shop clothing at rock bottom prices? (relatively speaking).
and so the Senayan City mall joins the legions of shopping centers in the US and around the globe that are unafraid of assinine marketing strategies.
consumerism: giving meaning to our lives in the 21st century.
There are certainly some wealthy people here, but I do think it's questionable whether there's enough to sustain all the glossy shopping malls. All the developers seem to think as long as their new mall is the biggest, the glitziest, has the most bizarro escalators or whatever, it'll be a money machine.
There are surveys that suggest wandering around malls is an even more entrenched hobby in Asia than in the US. But I have to wonder how much this has to do with actually buying stuff, and how much is because in the big cities, shopping malls are one of the few places where you can walk around in nice, cool, clean air, without getting menaced by motorbikes, cars, bicycles, buses, etc.
There's definitely sweatshop clothing at rock-bottom prices, too ... for that you can go to the lower-end malls or your local traditional market, which usually has some clothing kiosks.
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