Shop til you drop
ArmeniaNow.com reports on the shopping center (mall) opened recently in Yerevan by Robert Kocharyan and Yerevan Mayor Yervand Zakharyan.
According to the Chief - designer of Tashir, Ashot Arshakyan, only GUM’s walls are left to hold up a brand new day of capitalism in the capital.
The fully renovated seven-floored Tashir (also a name of an Armenian historical province) offers a wide range of goods from dairy products and butcher shops to elite watches and suits.
Shoppers are welcomed to Tashir by a comfortable lobby with fountains, cafes, Internet club and escalators to all floors. There’s a playground, where parents can leave their children under supervised care, while the adults go off to spend in any of 285 shops selling local and imported goods.
Tashir director Vahe Karapetyan brags that the new firm offers items from 5 cents to several thousand dollars.
Maybe they could arrange the 5 cents products in one area and the $1000 products in another, and have entrances for ’super-rich’ and ‘the rest of us’.
Is it just me, or are all the big development projects aimed at the richest 1% of the nation’s population? The philosophy of expensive hotels and shops will attract wealthy people to Armenia doesn’t seem to be a sustainable way forward.
This article was written by Arpine Harutiunyan, the author of the article published by Hetq on trafficking that you recently linked to. It’s a pity to see her writing about shopping centers but here’s hoping that she’ll be given the opportunity to write some more investigative pieces in the future. She did a great job writing on trafficking and social vulnerability issues for Hetq until recently but unfortunately, was offered a higher salary with ArmeniaNow.com.
However, one thing I don’t get about this article is the fact that while the owners are identified as being the Tashir Investment Group, ArmeniaNow.com neglected to mention that people on the streets and most journalists consider it to be apparently owned by a member of Parliament, Karen Karapetyan:
http://www.parliament.am/deputies.php?sel=details&ID=78&lang=eng
A bit of an oversight, I think.
Comment by Onnik Krikorian — 10/14/2004 @ 8:58 pm
And you’ll love this one, Matt… Karapetyan is apparently on Sub-Committees for Sustainable Development and also, Tourism Development.
http://assembly.coe.int/Members/Alpha/5220-en.asp
Comment by Onnik Krikorian — 10/14/2004 @ 9:34 pm
I’ll miss GUM. It was a lot of fun shopping there. Is the underground metro department store near Yeritasardakan still there at least?
For awhile after GUM closed a lot of homeless people were living there. What happened to them?
Comment by k8t — 10/14/2004 @ 10:53 pm
Hi Katy, if you mean the closed food market when you refer to GUM that’s still there for now. However, when I visited about two weeks ago, one half of the inside is empty and they’re obviously “modernizing” that as well. Who is doing this, I don’t know.
Outside, the kiosks are being bulldozed (allegedly by force) as a part of the municipal crackdown on illegal construction (well, of those constructions not owned by officials ie. the cafes that have destroyed the parks are still getting ready to look ugly and empty during the winter).
As for homelessness, one elderly mentally-disabled woman who I saw a year ago sleeping in GUM is now sleeping in the underground area of the Paregamutiune metro. Otherwise, I know that there are some homeless people sleeping there (or rather, have been told) but when I went a looking recently, couldn’t find a soul. They are still apparently there, however.
Incidentally, I was told by a Georgian NGO head that when she visited Yerevan a year and a half ago, she saw Armenian police round up beggars and homeless people and shift them out of the very center (can’t have the Diaspora on holiday see them now, can we?). True enough, at the same time, a lot of beggars and homeless appeared around where I lived at the beginning of Komitas.
The underground metro section thingy near Yeridasartagan is still there last I looked. I’m sure some official with more money than he should legally have will get to that eventually.
Cheers,
Comment by Onnik Krikorian — 10/15/2004 @ 1:30 am
I remember going to GUM in the late ’90s to buy a radio/stereo for cheaper than at ZIG ZAG. It was a multistory complex with lots of tables of stuff without order. It was similar to the GUMs (Gosudarstvennyj Universalnyj Magazin) (State Universal Store) of other former Soviet Republics.
Moscow’s GUM: http://www.moscow-taxi.com/sightseeing/red-square/gum.html
(Which is also getting purchased … http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,2763,1149002,00.html)
And here’s the history of GUM at gum.ru:
http://www.gum.ru/==PWR==/_ENGLISH=10/static=1/history3_eng.html=1/static2_english.pwr
Comment by k8t — 10/15/2004 @ 6:07 am
Some of the kids at ORRAN when you first took me there, Onnik, were formerly living in the closed down GUM. I wonder if ORRAN helped the other ones.
I had also heard that the abandoned GUM was a haven for junkies…
Comment by k8t — 10/15/2004 @ 6:09 am
I don’t know why but I always assumed that the GUM shopping center (the one the story talks about) wasn’t functioning so never went in. Likewise, I always assumed that the GUM people spoke about — such as those talking about homelessness — referred to the closed food market. Well, there you go. Six years of being here and I never went in to the what is now history. I assume it was pretty much like the Hayastan Trading Center but bigger.
Talking of homelessness however, what prompted me to go look down there was that recently I made a call on a family I had photographed a year and a half ago. They were living in a derelict house in Agarak (the Aragatsotn one and not the Siunik one) and burning plastic to stay warm in the winter. Anyway, turns out the three kids have been in a Children’s Home since then (so much for the PRSP) and the grandfather in this photo (www.oneworld.am\photojournalism\samples\agarak_0001.html) is now living rough nr GUM / the St Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral. Apparently there are a lot of homeless people there but try as I might, I couldn’t find any (only in Komitas). Maybe I was looking in the wrong place.
Cheers,
Comment by Onnik Krikorian — 10/15/2004 @ 6:34 am
I wandered the 5 floors that I saw (I don’t know what they meant by seven. It is just like Hayastan Hanrakhanut if you ask me. Tiny, tiny 5 or 10 sq meter shops selling pretty repetitive things. The only difference was that it really did look quite attractive overall…
And yes k8t, the underground by Yeridasartagan is still going strong….
Comment by Raffi Kojian — 10/15/2004 @ 1:28 pm
Do you guys have any photos of the building?
Comment by Hakob Gevorgian — 10/15/2004 @ 4:36 pm
There’s one as the main pic on www.armenianow.com.
Comment by Onnik — 10/15/2004 @ 5:15 pm
My best find EVER at GUM was an Arabic Monopoly game.
Comment by k8t — 10/15/2004 @ 11:02 pm