It seems that while the high-end malls are struggling to attract shoppers, and having to rely on special offers to get people to buy anything, the low-end malls are still doing a roaring trade.
On a recent visit to the Golden Arcade in Shamshuipo, the mall, as always, was packed with a mixture of tourists and school kids.
Normally, I avoid Shamshuipo, as there is little there to interest the serious PC user. In fact, most of the stores seem to sell either illegal VCDs or video game cartridges, with a few component shops thrown in.
However, this time I did find a couple of good bookstores, one of which was offering a 70 per cent discount on a thorough guide to Office 97.
The other store proved the Golden Arcade is not just for games players by stocking a publication called A practical guide to configuring Cisco routers.
Meanwhile, 298 Computer Zone in Hennessy Road - a road which has more than its share of illegal VCD stores - also had plenty of shoppers. Indeed, one shopkeeper said business was so good that they were expanding into a second store.
Unlike the Golden Arcade, 298 always can be relied on to turn up a few interesting new products. For instance, on a recent visit I spotted the Plustek OpticPro 9636T scanner. This colour scanner has a built in 35-millimetre transparency adapter and comes with Chinese OCR (optical character recognition) software - all for $1,380.