Inflight Magazine of Brussels Airlines

East meets West

When Eastern Europe emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was celebrated as a victory for democratic ideals, but Robert Hodgson suspects that frustrated consumerism may also have played a part

It took everyone by surprise. In 1989, Hungary opened its borders to the West, and shortly afterwards the Berlin wall was breached. One by one the dominoes fell and, by 1990, the countries of the Eastern Bloc, hidden behind the Iron Curtain for four decades, rejoined Europe.

Democratically elected governments were put in place and people no longer had to look furtively over their shoulders for communist party informants. But for the Western European visitor to Budapest, Warsaw or Prague, the most striking thing was the lightning speed with which these cities came to resemble the cities back home.

With the free market came McDonald’s, Coca Cola, MTV, Tesco, Ikea, shopping malls, consumer credit and more types of washing powder than anyone ever knew they needed. It was a completely new lifestyle – literally off the shelf.

It has been a fascinating social experiment: the imposition of a fully formed capitalist consumer economy on a huge and eager population. For the developers of shopping malls as well as the international supermarket chains and manufacturers it meant the opening up of a vast new market. From the consumer’s point of view, it meant a bewildering array of choice and an equally large increase in the pressure to consume.

Leaving aside East Germany, which was quickly assimilated into the Federal Republic, Western investors and developers focused on the capitals of the three wealthiest new democracies: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The pattern was similar in all three, so Budapest is as good an example as any.

It was in the real-estate sector that the change was most visible. The dozens of Western firms that wanted to move into Budapest needed somewhere to set up shop and the office developers came to meet the demand. Swedish company Skanska were quickest on the scene with the East-West Business Center, providing the first 21,000m2 of office floor space. That total had reached 1.7 million m2 by the end of 2006 – one square metre for every inhabitant of the city.

Shopping centre development began about five years after the office market took off, as the spending power of the population started to outgrow the high street. In 1996, the 47,000m2 Duna Plaza shopping mall opened, Hungary’s first full-scale US-style mall. Now there are over a dozen in the Budapest area alone.

In fact, although Duna Plaza was the first US-style mall, Hungary’s love affair with the shopping centre began back in 1973, when the then 30-year-old Sándor Demján, president of the Székesfehérvár branch of the state-run General Consumer and Marketing Co-operative (ÁFÉSZ), opened the first Skála shopping centre. The project was a success: by the mid-80s, Skála centres had a revenue equivalent to 5% of Hungarian GDP, and Demján has since gone on to become one of Hungary’s richest businessmen.

In 1997 he opened the West End City Center – central Europe’s largest shopping mall at the time and still one of Budapest’s most popular. “I consider that as my greatest professional success,” he said in 2005.

All this was possible because, hoping to avoid the mistakes that had led to the revolution of 1956, under the leadership of János Kádár between 1956 and 1988, Hungarian citizens were given a limited amount of freedom. The curious mixture of consumerism and communism that developed through the 60s, 70s and 80s was dubbed ‘goulash communism’.

Shopping centres were filled with products manufactured in Eastern Bloc countries. If you wanted a television set, it would have to be a Hungarian-made Videoton. Your car – if you could put up with a waiting list that was several years long – would be a Trabant or, for the better off, a Lada or a Wartburg. A fridge? Lehel. Shoes? Tisza.

One of the iconic images from 1989 was of Hungarian day-trippers driving back from Vienna with new Western refrigerators strapped to the tops of their Trabis. It didn’t take a particularly keen business mind to discern that there was a lot of pent up consumer demand in the post-communist countries.

Some of the Eastern brands have since been resurrected – Tisza trainers, for example, became a street fashion hit in recent years, especially among Scandinavians. Lehel is now owned by Electrolux and still makes fridges, and Videoton televisions and computer monitors are on the shelves again (albeit made in China). Marketing campaigns appeal to a combination of nostalgia and national pride.

Nor are developers put off by talk of market saturation. Another 200,000m2 of shop space will come online in the next two to three years, of which 65,000m2 will be provided by the Arena Plaza. This will be central Europe’s biggest shopping centre, representing an investment of €200m. Retailers are already signing lease agreements, but still they complain that they can’t find enough large, high-quality shop space to open a flagship store in Budapest.

To the shopping malls, add the hypermarkets. The UK has contributed 12 Tescos, while German supermarket chain Spar has 31 supermarkets, Swedish furniture giant Ikea has two massive stores and Austrian DIY chain Praktiker has four warehouse-sized outlets. All this is just in and around Budapest. Tesco alone has a further 54 hypermarkets in the provinces of a country with a population of only 10 million people.

To what extent the collapse of communism was due to people’s demand for freedom of thought and speech and how much it was a result of frustration at the growing gulf between consumer choice in the West and the East, history will judge. What is certain is that Hungarians, Poles and Czechs have adopted the western consumer model with a ferocity that surprised even many of the developers.

Almost every Central European resident now shops or is entertained in hypermarkets and malls. You can eat, drink and dance in them and the mall developers and retailers have even enriched the inscrutable Hungarian language with new colloquialisms.

A ‘Plaza cica’ (Plaza kitten) is a disparaging term used to describe a certain type of modern Hungarian woman who can be found in shopping centres across central Europe. She has a large disposable income and an addiction to brand names and the solarium. Her gym-toned body, where clad at all, is wrapped in skin-tight designer gear, and she clicks around the mall in spike-heeled boots.

Plaza is not the only brand name to enter the slang vocabulary. Hungarian teenagers will call a cheap Chinese bicycle a ‘Tescós’ bike, after the phalanx of €50 machines with unheard-of brand names that every hypermarket contains. Hungarian landlords trying to rent out a flat will proudly describe it as ‘Ikeás’ (Ikea-style), Scandinavian home- assembly furniture having become a benchmark of affordable chic.

All this is happening in countries where the average salary still lags well behind the EU-15 average. In Budapest, the average take home pay is around €600 per month (it is considerably less in the provinces). In Warsaw and Prague, it is slightly lower.

As the gradual process of levelling up, impelled by EU convergence criteria continues, wages will rise. As Central and Eastern Europeans become more like their Western counterparts, their disposable income will probably rise too. There will be plenty of new retailers to help these new consumers part with it.

Le Centre commercial du Communisme

En 1989, la Hongrie ouvrait ses frontières avec l’Occident. Lors de leur visite à Budapest, tous les Européens de l’Ouest ont été frappés par la rapidité déconcertante avec laquelle la ville a fini par ressembler à toutes les autres grandes villes européennes.

Dans le sillage de l’économie de marché est arrivé un nouveau style de vie élargissant le choix des consommateurs, mais représentant aussi une pression consumériste. Pour les industriels et les entrepreneurs, c’était également synonyme de nouveau marché.

En 1996, était inauguré le Duna Plaza, le premier centre commercial hongrois d’une superficie de 47 000m2 conçu dans le pur style US. Aujourd’hui on en recense une douzaine dans les environs de Budapest, ce qui n’arrête pas pour autant l’ardeur des promoteurs, qui restent sourds aux rumeurs de saturation du marché. Au contraire, les commerçants se plaignent de ne pas trouver d’espaces en suffisance à Budapest.

Le concept du centre commercial n’est pas nouveau pour les Hongrois.

En 1973, ils furent introduits aux centres commerçants communistes. Ce mélange de consumérisme et de communisme a été surnommé ‘Communisme Goulash’ et même si ces centres n’existent plus, certaines marques ont survécu. Les chaussures de sport Tisza, par exemple, ont récemment refait fureur dans le monde de la mode.

L’implantation de ces ‘malls’ aux normes occidentales a également apporté un nouveau vocabulaire associé à l’univers du consumérisme. Ainsi une Plaza cica (’Châton du Plaza’) est un terme dépréciatif pour décrire une femme hongroise moderne accro à ce genre de shopping.

Dans un climat où la prospérité continue à gagner du terrain, les niveaux de salaires en Europe centrale et de l’Est suivront le mouvement. Cette hausse de revenus se traduira en dépenses plus conséquentes au profit des sociétés, qui ne sont certainement pas à cours d’idées pour aider les consommateurs à écouler leurs deniers nouvellement acquis.

Van communisme tot commercie

Toen Hongarije in 1989 zijn grenzen opende, waren toeristen vooral verbaasd hoe snel Boedapest de gedaante van een westerse stad aannam.

Met de vrije markt kwam ook een nieuwe levensstijl. Voor consumenten betekende dit veel keuze en extra druk om te verbruiken, voor projectontwikkelaars en fabrikanten een nieuwe markt.

In 1996 opende Duna Plaza zijn deuren, een eerste winkelcentrum naar Amerikaans model van niet minder dan 47000m². Ondertussen volgden er in de omgeving van Boedapest nog 11 andere. Toch geloven ontwikkelaars niet in een marktverzadiging. Integendeel, handelaars klagen dat ze in Boedapest onvoldoende ruimte vinden om flagship-winkels te openen.

Toch zijn shoppingcentra niet nieuw voor de Hongaren. In 1973 ontstonden de eerste communistische winkelcentra. Communisme met een tikkeltje vrijemarkteconomie noemde men ‘goulashcommunisme’. Die centra zijn ondertussen verdwenen, maar een aantal merken bestaat nog steeds. Zo kwamen Tisza-sneakers de laatste jaren weer voluit in de mode.

Ook de nieuwe winkelgewoonten leidden tot nieuwe woorden. Zo is een Plaza cica (vrij vertaald een ’shoppingcenterpoesje’) een minachtende term voor een moderne Hongaarse vrouw die haar tijd in shoppingcentra doorbrengt.

Samen met de welvaart stijgt ook het gemiddelde inkomen in Centraal- en Oost-Europa. En dat belooft dan weer een hogere omzet voor de talrijke ondernemers die consumenten helpen hun nieuw verdiende geld uit te geven.

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