The Pyongyang Department Store No. 1 () is a major retail store in

Pyongyang Pyongyang () is the Capital city, capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is sometimes labeled as the "Capital of the Revolution" (). Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. Accordi ...

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu River, Yalu (Amnok) an ...

. On Sungri Street near

Kim Il-sung Square __NOTOC__ Kim Il Sung Square is a large city square in the Central District of Pyongyang, North Korea, and is named after the country's founding leader, Kim Il Sung. The square was constructed in 1954 according to a master plan for reconstructin ...

in downtown Pyongyang, it is one of the largest

retail store The retail format (also known as the retail formula) influences the consumer's store choice and addresses the consumer's expectations. At its most basic level, a retail format is a simple marketplace, that is; a location where goods and services ar ...

s in the country and is often the site of large

commodity In economics, a commodity is an economic goods, good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the Market (economics), market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to w ...

exhibitions. The store, along with two others, are reportedly run jointly with Chinese business partners.

Shopping

The store offers a variety of items including electronics, clothing, furniture, foodstuffs, kitchenware, and toys. , approximately 70 percent of the items in the store were produced domestically. The store is also one of several official tourist stops in the city. Department Store No. 1 accepts only local currency. According to the pro-North-Korean newspaper ''

Choson Sinbo The , also known by the name of its English edition ''The People's Korea'', is a newspaper based in Japan, published in both Korean and Japanese. The name literally means 'Korea Newspaper'. It is published by the General Association of Korea ...

'', it is a popular shopping destination for local residents and in 2016 an average of 20,000 shoppers visited the store daily. Swedish journalist described her visit to the department store as a tourist in the mid-2000s. Upon arrival, the store was closed. One of the tour guides accompanying her tried to distract her, while the other one rushed in to get the doors opened. When opened, the guide had to scramble passers-by to occupy the store as "shoppers". The moment they stepped in, the escalator was started. The shoppers appeared clueless as to how to act in a department store. When after great pains Salzinger managed to purchase the goods she wanted, the cashier was confused and would not hand her a plastic bag for her items: "We look at each other in the eyes. She knows that something is wrong, and that not everything is like it should, but she does not know what it is." According to Salzinger, a Western diplomat monitored the department store for one hour and saw no one come out with purchased items.

Theodore Dalrymple Anthony Malcolm Daniels (born 11 October 1949), also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple (), is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in ...

visited in 1989. He described the

Potemkin Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski (A number of dates as late as 1742 have been found on record; the veracity of any one is unlikely to be proved. This is his "official" birth-date as given on his tombstone.) was a Russian mi ...

nature of the place: "I also followed a few people around at random, as discreetly as I could. Some were occupied in ceaselessly going up and down the escalators; others wandered from counter to counter, spending a few minutes at each before moving on. They did not inspect the merchandise; they moved as listlessly as illiterates might, condemned to spend the day among the shelves of a library. I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep. But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century."

References

Works cited

*{{cite book, last=Salzinger, first=Caroline, translator-last=Lempinen, translator-first=Ulla, title=Terveisiä pahan akselilta: Arkea ja politiikkaa maailman suljetuimmissa valtioissa, trans-title=Hälsningar från ondskans axelmakter: Vardag och vansinne i världens mest stängda länder, year=2008, publisher=Atena, location=Jyväskylä, language=fi, isbn=978-951-796-521-7 Buildings and structures in Pyongyang Economy of Pyongyang Department stores of North Korea Hard currency shops in socialist countries

Shopping

See also

References

Works cited