Golden Resources Mall

Golden Resources Mall

Golden Resources Shopping Mall, or Jin Yuan (abbreviated from Chinese: 金源时代购物中心) is a shopping mall located near the Fourth Ring Road in Beijing, People's Republic of China. The nearest bus station is Chinese: 远大路东口， which in English is Yuanda Road East.

In English, the mall has earned the nickname Great Mall of China, owing to its total area of 6 million square feet (557,419 square metres) over six floors. At 1.5 times the size of the Mall of America, Golden Resources Mall was the world's largest shopping mall from 2004 to 2005.

The mall was completed on 20 October 2004 after 20 months of construction and opened four days later. The Christian Science Monitor describes:

For sale: everything. goat-leather motorcycle jackets, Italian bathroom sinks, hand-made violins, longcase clocks, colonial-style desks, Jaguars, diapers. And that's barely getting started. It takes about two days to explore With 230 escalators, more than 1,000 shops, restaurant space the size of two football fields, and a skating rink – the Art Deco mall is a testament in glass and steel to the communist party's desire to create a stable, happy, middle-income consumer class.

Although the developer of the mall initially estimated that the mall would have 50,000 shoppers a day, as of 2004 the actual number was far smaller, as few as 20 in an hour. One problem was that prices of most items sold were far beyond the purchasing ability of most ordinary Chinese. Another barrier was the inaccessibility of Golden Resources Shopping Mall to foreign consumers because of what Forbes magazine calls "a tough location outside the heart of the city." Although Line 10 Yuanda Lu Station will open beside the mall in late 2012, connecting it with the extensive Beijing Subway network, possibly relieving the problem a bit.

A writer for the China Business Review observed:

Golden Resources has not attracted a large foreign crowd yet either, mostly because of the mall's location in northwestern Beijing outside of Third Ring Road — far from the city's foreign enclaves. I did not see a single foreign face or hear a foreign language in the hour and a half I spent shopping that Sunday afternoon. Moreover, none of the stores I visited accepted foreign credit cards. In contrast, in many stores at the Oriental Plaza and China World malls in the center of the city, no one bats an eye when a customer hands over a Visa card from a foreign bank.

An American executive based in Beijing suggested that name-brand corporations such as Ralph Lauren, Papa John's Pizza, and Chanel regard these non-earning stores as a form of advertising and positioning for the future sales.

Fu Yuehong, general manager of the New Yansha Group which operates nearly half the mall, explains:

From the beginning we wanted the largest shopping center in the world We are the country with the most people in the world. We have the fastest growing economy. The largest mall shows our progress as a society We think it will take three to five years to start making a profit.

In 2005, Golden Resources Shopping Mall became the world's second-largest mall when South China Mall in Dongguan was completed. It was still in second place as of mid-2012.