tim's experiment

Our nearest shops are the small mall surrounded by Sui Wo Estate. This was an early Home Ownership estate and the mall provided does not have the luxurious appointments found in later models. There is no airconditioning. but an elaborate two-storey structure on vaguely Moorish lines. It provides shade and ventilation but does little for you in heavy rain. There is a wet market, a supermarket, some eateries, a hardware shop and so on. The shops seem to do quite well because there is no competition in Sui Wo Road and not much in Fotan, the nearest town with a small shopping centre. The mall is also a bit of a social centre. Old folk sit under the trees, buses and minibuses discharge their loads, the shopkeepers know each other and many of their customers. The upstaits part, which you would really only visit if you wanted something in particular, is home to a curious combination of music shops, tutorial centres and doctors’ clinics. The whole thing is about 30 years old and, it must be said, looks it. But it works all right.

Like many other similar spots, a few years ago it fell into the clutches of the Link Reit. A certain amount of mythology has collected around this which we may quickly dispel. It is simply not true that under the management of the Housing Authority the malls lost money. On the contrary the authority’s commercial properties always made a profit, which was used to subsidise the housing account, which did not. There was a certain justice to this because the tenants had, in many cases, little choice but to use the commercial outlets which came with their estate. No doubt the authority was to some extent subject to non-commercial temptations to keep its tenants happy by running the commercial properties in a way that maximised residents’ convenience rather than proprietorial profit. And what, one wonders, is wrong with that?

Anyway the arrival of the Link is Sui Wo did not produce a great deal of change. The car park lady who stamped your ticket and took your money was replaced by a machine which takes Octopus. Unfortunately the car park entrance requires a rather complecated regime, because the machine has to distinguish between delivery people, who pay nothing, shoppers – who pay if they stay longer than half an hour – and residents who pay by the month. This may explain why the tentacle occasionally breaks down. So the car park is still attended. At one stage a few signs appeared complaining about rent increases. But most of the shops have survived.

The notable exception was our bakery, a local enterprise. This disappeared, to be replaced by one of the two chains which have bakery shops everywhere. This is something of a recurring theme. We have a convenience story run by one of the two chains which have such stores everywhere, a chemist by one of the two chemist chains, an ETC machine from one of the two networks you find everywhere, a supermarket from … well you get the idea. It is difficult to believe that all these duopolies run on a basis of ferocious competition, especially as the more numerous oil companies have no difficulty in tacitly coordinating fuel prices. So while distant dimwits hail Hong Kong as a shining example of the merits of free markets we are left at the whim of a variety of virtual monopolies. Of which of course the Link Reit is one. You want to let out a shop within a mile in any direction of the Sui Wo mall and you can’t. Planning regulations do not permit it.  

I am not sure which parts of the Hong Kong economy really display the freedom which makes us so popular with teh Chicago school of economics. The stock market, perhaps. Which explains why it is so easy to get robbed there.