The French retail megastore Carrefoure faced a public relations nightmare after three people were trampled to death during a cooking oil sale earlier this month at a Chongqing outlet. The five-liter bottles of oil were marked down 20% for a total savings of about $1.50 per bottle. People began to line up around 4AM and hastily swarmed the racks when the doors opened – three dead and 31 injured were left in the wake. The embarrassing incident prompted Chongqing officials to call for an immediate investigation into supermarket safety standards and their, “arrangement of product displays.” The Carrefoure sales pitch sunk the hook too deep into the consumer’s mouth.

While many pundits attribute this tragedy to substandard store design or base materialism, the heart of it lies in desperation. Over the past year the Chinese state singled out Chongqinq to be a frontrunner in a national campaign to urbanize the interior. Even though government subsidies abound, they do not trickle down to the lower rungs of the social ladder. Chongqinq remains a precarious place to make ends meet. Getting ahold of discounted cooking oil, a bare essential in any Chinese home, thus represents a wish to avoid the privations of winter and not low-minded greed.

In any case, retail outlets continue to attract shoppers in large droves. The economies of scale are too big to resist and dominate the increasingly consumer-oriented mentality of Chinese urbanites. Multinational corporations fall over themselves catering to this acquisitive upsurge. Ikea just built its largest store in the world in Beijing. The garagantun space boasts over four floors of housewares and furniture – everything a new homemaker could possibly imagine. Unfortunately I fall into this category and lined up with the rest to indulge the guilty pleasures of my nesting impulse.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Society, VoM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.