After 15 months of stop-and-start, luxury retail is beginning to pick up, but while shoppers trickle in, they are spending more, especially on gadgets and high-end items, which fly off the shelves in a jiffy
Customers queue outside a Louis Vuitton store at DLF Emporio in New Delhi
Image: Madhu Kapparath
Aashna Pareek, a 23-year-old advertising professional from Mumbai, was recently on the verge of doing the usual—browsing the Zara website and ordering clothes—when she did an about turn. “I felt I wanted to step out, since that’s a rare thing these days,” says Pareek, who is fully vaccinated.
She headed out to Palladium mall in Lower Parel for a touch-and-feel of the collection she’d been browsing online. “That must be the first time I visited a mall in around one and a half years,” she says. While she’d hoped that Palladium would have regained its pre-pandemic buzz, it was anything but so.
“Every moment inside the mall made me realise that we’re still in the midst of a pandemic,” she adds. There was an all-pervasive smell of sanitisers, temperature and vaccine status checks at multiple points, queuing up outside shops to maintain social distancing and the ubiquitous masks. “It was like every step was being monitored inside the mall. I stood in queue outside Zara to get in, but once inside I was so worked up that I decided to shop extra as a reward for adhering to the safety protocols,” she says.
Pareek’s isn’t an uncommon experience as visiting a mall today is significantly different from what it was in the pre-pandemic world. The freedom to move around is now limited, especially in the metros where Covid-19 regulations are restricting retail operations. Despite this, people are visiting malls, albeit with a slightly different approach: They are buying more. “There was as long a line at the billing counter as there was outside the store,” Pareek says.
(This story appears in the 08 October, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)