Jakarta Great Sale closes without fanfare

Zakki Hakim, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Bargain shoppers will find no impressive discounts for the next month or so as the Jakarta Great Sale closes without any fanfare.

Or perhaps, they don't really care.

"No, I didn't know that today is the last day of the Jakarta Great Sale. To be honest, I didn't even know that it was happening in the first place," Yanti, a shopper at Sogo department store at the Plaza Indonesia Shopping Center, Central Jakarta, said on Monday.

Yanti, 42, a mother of two, said that she thought that the discounts offered by the tenants in the shopping center were made to coincide with the month-long school holiday.

Another shopper, Silvi, 18, a university student shopping at Rimo department store in Mal Taman Anggrek, West Jakarta, said that she did not know that the discounts were part of the sale campaign launched throughout the city.

"I thought the discounts were offered only at this department store," she said.

The public was generally unaware that during the Jakarta Great Sale, they could take advantage of discounts of up to 70 percent on various items offered by the city's 100 malls, supermarkets, restaurants, department stores and factory outlets.

The shoppers' unawareness was probably due to poor public relations about the program, which aimed to turn Jakarta into a shopping haven on a par with Singapore and Hong Kong. It came to nothing, as business was as usual.

Kuncahyo, a supervisor at a China ware store in Plaza Senayan, South Jakarta, told The Jakarta Post that the Great Sale brought no significant changes to its sales, nor its number of visitors.

"The concept is actually good, but it had no impact on our business. Business ran like usual and nothing was special," he said.

If there was an increase in sales, it was probably due to the school holiday, during which many students and their parents frequented the malls, shopping or just hanging out.

Dessy Tanumihardja, a public relations officer at Mal Taman Anggrek, said that the mall recorded a 20 percent increase in the total number of visitors in the last month because of the school holidays.

Dessy said the last 30 days coincided with the school vacation, and students and their parents spent more time at the mall, shopping for school supplies and other necessities.

"However, the increase was also caused by a number of other events that we held to lure more visitors to our mall," she said.

She said the number of visitors to the mall reached between 30,000 and 40,000 on workdays and between 70,000 and 80,000 on weekends.

The chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) in Jakarta, Pungky Bambang Purwadi, claimed earlier that the Great Sale had received financial support from the Board of Indonesian Culture and Tourism for a television campaign on CNN.

Pungky said the event, which coincided with Jakarta's 476th anniversary, also aimed to attract foreign tourists besides local shoppers.

It was unclear whether the number of foreign shoppers had increased significantly due to the Great Sale, which was inspired by the success story of similar events in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

He said that Kadin, which organized the event, targeted at least Rp 4 trillion (US$487.8 million) in business revenue from this year's sale.

In comparison, the organizer managed to raise only Rp 3.5 trillion in revenue, lower than its target of Rp 3.7 trillion last year.

Sri Rahayu, project officer for the Jakarta Great Sale 2003, told the Post that the organizer had doubled the budget for this year's event, hoping that it would deliver better results.

She said the results could not be calculated as yet, as the organizer needed two weeks to gather the sales data from all participants.

"The result as to whether or not the event was successful will be announced at the closing ceremony on Aug. 4," she said.

Although the event is unlikely to record a significant increase in the number of visitors and revenue, several lucky shoppers will still make a winning, including a grand prize of a Volvo and 90 Nokia cellular phones, which are to be announced on Aug. 4.