Mall owners treating patrons like criminals

It’s always enjoyable to come home from Singapore and Thailand where the shopping experience is pleasant and we are not frisked, confronted and made to feel like criminals before entering a mall. The Asean integration in 2015 has many business people from countries around us thinking of entering the Philippine market and riding on our economic upswing.  If you are wondering why condominiums in the Bonifacio Global City are being snapped up, a lot of these high-end units are being sold to our neighboring country’s businessmen as they position to establish a “beachhead.”

When I read in the newspaper that even developers of Paragon and Central malls are starting to think of expansion in the Asean region, I was elated (with caution).  If they bring their open mall culture here, then I am all for their coming in. It would take our shopping experience to another level which the local dominant mall owners would have to be compared against.

I really cannot get my head around the attitude of local mall owners who, with their security procedures, treat the very people who made them very, very wealthy like criminals. Martial law happened a while back, yet they even heighten uncivilizing security procedures that somehow show their small mindedness. They open malls abroad. Do they frisk the people there? Are they trying to tell us we are a lesser and more untrustworthy people? If so, are they saying they got rich despite us, the people who patronized their malls?

I have friends both local and foreign who have voiced as much. My response to them: You have been effectively brainwashed! The responsibility to foster a civilizing atmosphere is incumbent on the one with the capital. My experience is that the Filipino is innately too polite and good and will not rock the boat but follow the rule as established by people he considers his superior who should know better. So who is at fault for creating this insecure poverty consciousness?

If the pork barrel mess says anything to us, it is that we are actually a rich country with enough money to make progress happen. The attitude of small-minded mall owners and politicians are similar in that they underestimate the people terribly and act accordingly.

—JACQUELINE CANCIO VEGA,

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