Bhagwad thinks malls are expensive, but very little of the money spent there goes to the employees. And then he says products sold at malls are  ‘profitable because we don’t pay the full cost of products from the mine to the dump’. Now, which is true? That the malls are expensive or the products are cheap?

He also sees malls as inefficient employment generators: most of the products sold are imported so money spent at malls supports overseas employment more than employment at home. That sounds very similar to the arguments put forth by Americans opposed to outsourcing from India. An interesting post, offers a lot of old issues to think about anew.

You see, high end malls are…expensive! The week before Diwali, Mint ran a big spread on holiday gift ideas. It included things like a Boombox for Rs. 4,199, an iPod for Rs. 11,200, and playing cards in a crocodile skin holder for only Rs. 36,000. This is the kind of stuff you will find in a high-end Delhi mall, and it is terrible for a number of reasons. Aside from the obvious issues of bad taste and dead crocodiles, there is the fact that much of what you find in a mall is imported. From an environmental point of view, that means that a whole lot of stuff had to be shipped a very long way–and shipping is a major source of global CO2 emissions. From the point of view of old fashioned economics, there is another problem caused by all those imported goods: a large part of the money spent at the mall goes straight out of the country. Which means it does very little in terms of creating jobs here. By contrast, when you buy locally grown food or locally made products in your local market, nearly all of the money you spend stays right here in the local economy.