Trinkets Aren't The Trick

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday December 14, 2005

Jeff Corbett

IT was quite the worst thing that could have happened on the first weekend of Newcastle's Mall Market in mid August, a capacity crowd of 20,000.

My wife and I were among the 20,000 that weekend, carried by the crush on a circuit of the stalls, and there was no doubting the mood of those around us: Is this it? This is junk.

The disaster of this was that the 20,000 people were the mall market's primary target, potentially its most enthusiastic supporters, its most willing buyers, which is why they'd turned out in such number.

As was obvious then, few would return, and as became so sadly obvious, few did. This paper reported yesterday that the market has gone into voluntary administration after just four months.

The biggest impact of the first weekend's crowd described by mall market chief Frank Elgar as phenomenal was in what they had to say to friends, family members and work colleagues over the next few weeks. It was the topic of conversation for a week or two and the comments were not ambivalent. The market was condemned without reservation.

I was genuinely disappointed. I was disappointed that the market was abysmally boring and I was disappointed that a brave venture to enliven the CBD seemed doomed.

And like so many others I was angry that Newcastle City Council had extended paid street parking to Saturday afternoons and Sundays on the first day of the market. I couldn't see how this was anything other than short-sighted greed, and I still can't.

The statement by Newcastle council general manager Janet Dore in yesterday's news report of the market's financial straits that the extended meter hours were "not at all" a factor in the market's problems defies belief! That Ms Dore doesn't seem to realise the impact of metered parking doesn't augur well for the CBD's weekend hopes.

Of course metered weekend parking did have a major dampening impact. It's not so much the money we must feed into the machine, it is the fear of being booked and losing more serious money that concerns visitors to the CBD. Lesser but real issues are the resentment at being ripped off, as people feel they are by weekend meter hours extended to catch them visiting the market; lower acceptance of paid parking as people have become accustomed to free parking at shopping centres; and a lack of confidence in working the meters themselves.

The market's fate had been sealed when Newcastle City Council offered free parking at weekends in its King Street and Bolton Street parking stations a month ago. In any event, it seems few people knew of the offer but pretty well everyone knew of the retained metered parking and its risks.

But the market's woes cannot be put down to parking meters. The simple fact is that the market was, is, grossly out of step with its market.

Trinkets were the major offering at the mall market. Big trinkets, small trinkets, novel trinkets, but the age of the trinket expired quite some years ago. Next were the clothes and goods moved from inside mall shops to stalls, and while the retailer might see that as an exciting opportunity market-goers will see it as a waste of their time. There were people standing behind a counter trying to sign us up for something, which is just what we don't need.

And even if we did want to cram more trinkets into our lives, just how many mosaic mirrors do we want in one lifetime?

This is the age of food. We not only need to buy food every week, we want to buy food every week. We want to buy gourmet, organic, artisan, new, ethnic, hand-made food, and we want to buy it from the producer or the farmer.

That's why we have been flocking in our thousands to the Newcastle City Farmers Market at Newcastle Showground once a month. That's why this market can sign up stallholders to commercially viable, multi-month agreements and keep them.

If the Newcastle Mall Market can't cover its costs selling trinkets in the lead-up to the festival of trinketry, Christmas, it's never going to. Maybe something else will emerge from the mess. Maybe.

© 2005 Newcastle Herald

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