Development

I’m in Lampang at the moment. A largish town in North Thailand, about 100km south of Chiang Mai. We moved here from Chiang Mai in 2008 and I must admit, at that time, it was quite a shock to the system. You see, Lampang was rather, shall we say, ... rural. It has the unique, if somewhat dubious, distinction of being the only town in Thailand that still uses horse-drawn carriages. Well, the tourists use them anyway. The reason it was a shock to the system is because the entire town, with a population of approximately 160 000 people, had but one large supermarket, which stocked very basic goods. I had business in Chiang Mai about once a month and I would use that opportunity to stock up on “luxury” goods, such as chocolate that was made from milk, not wax, baking ingredients such as vanilla extract, jelly beans, and from time to time, clothing. On the rare occasion that the whole family went, we would splash out and go to a restaurant that served Western food (the closest thing that Lampang had in that department was a Pizza Company, which was more Thai than Western). Going to Chiang Mai always made me feel like a country bumpkin going to the city for the first time. I used to walk around with my eyes bulging and mouth hanging open at what the “big city” had to offer. If time allowed, I would go for a really big treat — an English movie at the cinema! And it was always with a sense of relief that I would retreat to the quiet country backwaters of Lampang after a hectic few hours of retail therapy in Chiang Mai.

But that has all changed! In the 2 years since we left, Lampang has shaken off its sleepy hollow image and has become a retail mecca to be reckoned with. There is a new, ultra modern, 3-story mall, complete with Starbucks, high-end clothing stores, numerous restaurants and even a 5-theatre state-of-the-art cinema, with English movies. But thats not all, in addition to the high-end mall, other large shopping centres have sprung up. A Macro, a large warehouse hardware store (my favourite kind of shop) and a few others. Lampang has rushed headlong into the 21st century at a dizzying speed, and in the process has lost something of the charm that it had before.

Now, far be it from me to deny the denizens of Lampang the pleasure of first-world shopping experiences and Starbucks coffee, but as far as I can see, there are no new corporations, factories or office buildings in Lampang. So I cannot help but wonder where these simple, country people have suddenly got the money from to spend at these high-end malls and shopping centres. I’m sure the marketers have done their research, but I sure do hope that the malls, the clothing stores, the restaurants and the coffee shops are sustainable in the long run, and I hope that hard-earned savings aren’t being frittered away, drawn by the lure of materialistic hedonism. And I hope that credit cards aren’t being maxed out in pursuit of worldly delights.

Sadly however, I suspect they are.

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