Mall tour

Now that it’s vacation time, kids and teeners who were not bundled off by their parents to their respective provinces will surely spend a lot of time in one place: the mall.

I am not exactly a mall rat (I am a stay-at-home person), but I do go to the mall to shop, eat and watch movies and I’ve frequented enough malls to be able to compare one from the other. Beginning with this issue, I will give my impressions of these malls – starting with the biggest of them all, SM Megamall.

There is no doubt that the country’s most popular shopping mall is SM Megamall in Ortigas Center. It’s so important in today’s modern lifestyle that we see here a convergence of both the AB and CD crowds.

In my case, I go there once a week in spite of this love-hate thing I have with it. I love the place because it has conveniently put some (if not all) of my favorite shops under one roof. I hate it because it seems like the entire Philippine population is there every day.

The overcrowding of the place, of course, leads to the next problem: lack of parking space. There had been several instances when I had to wait for at least half an hour before I could find myself a slot in the open-air parking lot. (The waiting is even worse in the covered level parking.) But what I really find unfair about the parking rules in our shopping malls is that the customer has to pay even for the time spent waiting for an available parking space. And these malls are not even liable for the things lost in your vehicle while it is parked in their territory. (Read the fine prints at the back of your parking ticket.)

Of all the malls in Metro Manila, I also find Megamall to be the least customer-friendly. If you need to pass water, for instance, you have to take an FX because the nearest bathroom is practically in Tutuban. Of course, this is an exaggeration. But really if you’re having a snack at Sugarhouse which lies right smack in the middle of Buildings A and B and you need to answer the call of nature (Sugarhouse doesn’t have its own toilet), your cake would have gotten stale by the time you get back from your bathroom chores.

And then, if you are coming from the supermarket at Building B and have to go to Powerbooks at the ground level of Building A, you have to take either the escalator down to the basement and go up to the ground floor again or the escalator up to the second floor and go down to the ground level again before you reach your destination. Now, if you want to go on a straight line, you have to go out of Building B, cross that covered section of Julia Vargas Street and get arrested for jaywalking. I’m telling you, whoever laid out the floor plan of this mall obviously didn’t consider the convenience of the customer.

Of course, Megamall has its good points, too. For one, it has two of the most complete (in terms of reading selections) bookstores in the country: National Bookstore and Powerbooks where private reading till your eyes pop out is allowed.

For clothes (sorry, but I can only talk about men’s clothes), Megamall has a long string of clothes shops that carry both local (read: affordable) and foreign labels.

Bench on the ground floor of Building A (near St. Francis Square) carries reasonably-priced shirts with nice, bright colors. Penshoppe (basically a high-end store for the young) may have limited designs, but once in a while, you can get lucky and find on the rack some expensive-looking, yet affordable shirts – like a bone-colored shirt I bought for P400, but which Rosanna Roces thought cost me more than a thousand pesos.

If you want really cheap (but not necessarily cheap-looking) shirts, the place to go is the SM department store which carries local brands like Paddock’s, Sahara, etc. The problem with the department store is that it’s getting smaller and smaller (especially on the ground floor) as the mall keeps leasing out more space to restaurants like Café Provencal, Superbowl, The Kitchen, etc. Now, take this cue from successful Megamall owner Henry Sy: the food business is obviously more lucrative than selling clothes.

The Giordano store which is almost midway between Buildings A and B on the second floor is well-lit and manned by a very accommodating staff. In terms of prices, it is middle-of-the-road.

One high-end clothing shop (although it also sells toiletries and even wines and confections) in Megamall is Marks & Spencer, which has limited designs (you bump into people wearing the same shirt you just bought from there) and yet prohibitively priced items. (The Guess shirts to me are also very, very expensive and priced way, way beyond the ordinary worker’s budget.) Nearby is Sari-Sari which has polo shirts that may be quite expensive, but definitely unique in design.

G2000 – also on the second floor (near Figaro) – has nice-fitting knitted shirts that are quite durable and come in not-so-common colors and hues. However, don’t jump and buy the first nice shirt that you find there. Wait for the store to go on sale. Last year, I bought a striped shirt there with a collar for P800 and less than four months later, it went on sale at half the original price.

The real bargains are the items (shirts, suits, leather belts and shoes) sold at Linea Italia on the second floor of Building B. Some of the shirts (all imported) in this store are sold at more than half the original price. ( I recently bought an Italian shirt there for P400.) There’s only one problem there though: the sizes are limited. Most of the shirts there are either too loose or too tight. Now, you know why I can hardly breathe in the shirts I wear in Startalk.

(Next: I’ll talk about the eateries and the cinemas in Megamall.)