At over a million square meters, and with over 1,200 stores, the Dubai Mall is an absolute monster in mall terms. (1) .
As monuments to modern consumerism, such mega-malls could be seen as a natural home for Generation Y, the biggest-spending and most demanding generation of consumers the world has ever seen.
Generation Y is the name given to the group of people born between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Their lifetimes have
coincided with huge changes in the way we spend our money, and members of this group are demonstrating more and more
behavioral similarities across a range of countries and cultures. (2)
While their parents’ generation may well have known many store owners personally, members of Generation Y are more
likely to buy from huge multinational companies like Walmart, which has 8,500 stores in 15 different countries. In 2011,
Walmart made sales of over 400 billion U.S. dollars, which is bigger than the GDP of 150 countries worldwide.
While consumers of the Generation Y era can choose from a huge range of products at shopping malls, they have even
more choices online. Gen Y-ers, as they are known, have grown up with the Internet, and using technology in all areas of their
lives is second nature to them. In just over a decade, internet shopping has seen an explosion in growth. (3) . By 2010,
this had grown to almost £60 billion. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, sells such a wide variety of products they have
to be stored in huge warehouses the size of 10 soccer fields.
Gen Y-ers are prime targets for retail companies because of their spending power and attitude to shopping. In the U.S.,
alone their purchasing power as a group stands at $108 billion. And if they don’t have enough money to buy what they want,
they turn to their good friend, the credit card. Credit cards became a global phenomenon in the 1990s, so they are a normal
part of life for Generation Y. In the past, many people viewed getting into debt as something negative, but now using credit
cards is common. Rather than saving to buy, today’s younger generation happily uses credit to gain instant gratification.
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