Band 6+: You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. In many places large shopping malls are replacing small shops. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this development? Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. You should write at least 250 words.

Lately, people started noticing a trend of large shopping centers spreading throughout their countries. their concerns with this rapid transition, many of the family-owned smaller shops are being devoured in the process as they can’t keep up with the rise of these mega corperate centers.

Some would find this a natural and beneficial evolution of human needs, so they support this by backing up their claims with, availability as big centers often offers wider range of products, and makes their shopping trips much more convenient as rather than hopping between shops to find what they are looking for they can just go into one big store and get everything needed. They also claim that big stores noticeably provide cheaper prices as those corperations can get better deals from wholesalers and have the capital to sell for less and still make profits. There’s also the employment aspect for job-seekers as a big shopping center can host dozens of emplyees in comparaison to a smaller shop that typically employes 2 to 10 employees at most.

To contradict that, the opposing side takes an approach that imagines a world full of large shopping malls and they ask a question: “who’s going to control them?”. If those huge stores get a hold of the whole market can’t they just set the prices however they want ? A risk of a monopoly is very serious in this case where a whole city can be under the control of a brand in terms of pricing and pushing whichever products they want. This can also affect wholesalers as they’ll need to satisfy those big malls or they have no other options they can tend to. Large malls are also experts on the psychology of upselling, you walk there in need of a bucket of milk and you end up with 5 other items you didn’t want to buy because their offers seemed “irresistable” so that’ll further deepen the over-spending and brainless consumerism crisis that we as humanity should fight.

Both sides offer a wide range of solid arguments and base their claims on real-life problems that their point of view is trying to solve. As the world keeps evovling fast we’ll have to keep an eye on which side ends up being the victorious and what the next trend would be in terms of consumerism culture.