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While the Labour Day Golden Week holiday brought a surge of tourists and shoppers to Hong Kong's Causeway Bay district on Friday, the landmark Times Square shopping mall remained conspicuously quiet, failing to benefit from the holiday foot traffic and standing in stark contrast to the bustling scenes just streets away.
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Times Square, a prominent Causeway Bay destination, has recently been criticized online for its dwindling crowds, with some netizens describing it as being "quieter than a library." Today, on the first day of the Golden Week holiday, those observations proved accurate.
Around noon, a visit by reporters found the ground and first floors, home to mid-to-high-end luxury brands, nearly deserted. Many stores had only two or three customers inside.
The mall's central atrium was sparse, and the escalators and upper retail floors were similarly silent. Outside, only a handful of people were seen resting in the open-air piazza beneath the iconic big screen.
This emptiness was a world away from the rest of the district. The streets of Causeway Bay were packed, with most shops enjoying healthy crowds. Just a short walk from Times Square, rival malls like Sogo and Hysan Place were thriving.
At Sogo, queues formed at the ground-floor escalators, and the cosmetics and lifestyle floors were teeming with shoppers. Hysan Place also saw a steady stream of visitors on all levels, with its escalators constantly in motion.
Nearby Windsor House was equally crowded, its ground-floor market and entrances packed, and its restaurants filled to capacity. The comparison made the quietness of Times Square all the more apparent.
Other tourist hotspots in the area were also booming. A famous egg tart shop had a long queue snaking down the street, and the trendy fashion boutiques on Pak Sha Road were so busy that some had queues of customers waiting just to get inside, with lines stretching halfway down the block.
𝗗𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗮𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗔𝗽𝗽 ↓
