Prior to visiting Korea, I did a lot of cursory research on sights to see and things to do. I found plenty of sights to see throughout Seoul and some of the other places I visited, but the things to do spectrum proved to be a very shallow well to dip into, with the most frequent suggestions revolving around drinking, eating or shopping.
I didn’t really want to drink too much around my mother, and the human stomach does have a finite amount of space in which meals and extra meals can go into at any one time, so that really meant that if I really wanted to do what the Romans Koreans did, there was a whole lot of shopping (and browsing) that was going to happen.
If anything at all, because I don’t really know how to buy things for myself that aren’t food, occasional clothing or other consumable goods, I was going to be wandering around a whole lot of shopping centers. I had a moderate list of things that I wanted to purchase for others, but my money was about as finite as room for food in the gullet.
To cut to the chase, shopping in Korea is unlike shopping anywhere else in the world, in my opinion. Shopping isn’t just a recreational activity done in Korea, it’s pretty much a completely essential thing done by anyone who lives and visits the Motherland.
The sheer volume of available places to spend your money is astronomical. At first, I thought it was only the case in Seoul, since it’s the most metropolitan and modernized place in the country. But then when I saw places like Busan, Gyeongju and other Korean cities and towns, the focal points of all of them were pretty much large shopping districts.
I made the joke over social media that the amount of land dedicated to shopping in Korea dwarfs the amount of miles that Forrest Gump ran when he was going back and forth throughout America when he just felt like running, and based on the nerds that have actually tried to come up with an educated estimate of miles that was Forrest’s run (19,000~), I would still say that Korea still has more land dedicated to shopping.
South Korea is a vastly smaller country than the United States, but where they lack in square mileage, they make it up by basically stacking. In the U.S., you go into a mall, and it’s maybe 2-3 floors, with maybe like 150 stores, tops. In Korea, you go into a mall, it’s 10-stories tall, has 3-6 basement levels, has 250 stores. On the top floor, there’s a bridge that connects to a sister mall that is now 15-stories tall, has six basements 350 retailers, and on the top of that, is another bridge that connects to yet another mall that is 20-stories tall for retail, and has a hotel on top of it all, that has 20 more shops inside of it. All owned by one of the corporate giants of Korea, Hyundai, Lotte, SK, Samsung or whatever.
All while there’s an underground shopping complex beneath the entire trifecta of towers that are conveniently connected to the local subway, and also has 200 more stores, most of them selling the exact same stuff as one another. Seriously, just about every shopping district I went to in Seoul and Busan had an equally spacious and expansive underground shopping center, right underneath the street level. And as if it’s a metaphor, they’re like the Morlocks of commerce, selling a lot of shady looking goods of seemingly lower grade and quite possibly counterfeit.
Seriously, trying to “walk through” a Korean mall complex resulted in more exhaustion than when I tried to cold-run a 10K after low preparation. If I had a step counter, I could probably safely assume that I walked like 10 miles on a particular day where I decided to go to the mega Coex mall, followed by an evening in Dongdaemun.
Needless to say, I went to nearly all of the prominent shopping districts in Seoul while I was there. There are places like Dongdaemun and Namdaemun that are pretty similar to each other, in the sense that they’re endless alleys and cramped plazas all selling the same cheap crap as their neighbors, and you think you’re going to browse and shop around, but eventually grow exasperated with the fact that everything is the same, and eventually settle. They’re both interesting neighborhoods with their own unique blend of store types and nearby food, but ultimately, there’s not a whole lot of stuff I actually wanted to buy when I was at them.
And then there are the aforementioned mega malls, like Coex, the Lotte Department Store in Myeongdong, and the I’Park Mall in Yongsan; “mega mall” is almost an insufficient descriptor for them, because the Mall of America in Minnesota is a mega mall, but it doesn’t come close to the sheer size and volume of stores and name brands available at any one of these malls in Korea. Korean malls justify the notion of Korea and other Asian cultures’ obsession with name brands, because they’re pretty much these giant shopping behemoths all boasting the brands that each floor sells, much less the sum of their parts as a whole.
The thing about the malls are that they all run the business model of clumping all merchants selling the same things, and let them fight amongst themselves for the business of a single customer. That being said, every mall kind of feels like being a fish swimming into shark infested waters, with ten different store employees calling out and trying to get you to come spend money with them.
“Hey, what kind of camera is that?”
“Is that a Canon?”
“I’ve got a great deal on this lens!”
“Do you need a portable tripod or memory card??”
“I’ll give you a bargain!”
I was looking for cheap, nerdy, game-related goods, and just happened to pass through the camera section. Needless to say, I took a very wide berth around the floor henceforth.
Personally, I don’t like the clumping business model, because to me, it feels extremely overwhelming and counterintuitive to give me 9,000 options for a AA battery, when I really just want a two Duracells without getting bent over the kitchen table to get. I probably ended up leaving places empty handed more often than not, because I simply was getting overwhelmed and didn’t want to recklessly spend anything.
Subsequently, this dog-eat-dog marketplace mentality all throughout Korea leads to kind of a depressing scene occasionally, where you see retailers sitting on their ass doing nothing, hoping for people to come by and possibly buy something. Much like it was in some of the European countries I visited, bargaining is always in option in Korea, and it’s very understandable to why that is. I saw way more people sleeping behind counters at Korean marketplaces than I’ve probably ever seen in the U.S., ever.
And the thing is, the U.S. dollar is stronger than the Korean Won, but ultimately, when it comes to name brands, they still price themselves somewhat similar to their U.S. counterparts. Maybe I’ll save like 5% or something overall, but I still don’t really want to spend the equivalent of $28 for an H&M sweater.
If I had to pick, I would say that my favorite places to shop in Seoul were probably Myeongdong and Insadong. Myeongdong had a good blend of the cheap chintzy crap available at all of the cheap chintzy crap stores scattered throughout the entire country, but they also had many cool Korean brand stores within the district. Failing finding anything in the alleys, there was the adjacent Lotte Department Store that was exactly the multi-building behemoth I described earlier, where one should be able to find something of decent quality.
And Insadong was just an awesome neighborhood full of rustic, traditional shops, where if anyone wanted to buy something quintessentially Korean, would probably be the best place to go for reasonable prices. Insadong also had all the good street food, from meat on sticks, dumplings, to my absolute favorite food discovery of the trip, jajamyeong for the American equivalent of $2.50; quite possibly my favorite meal of the entire trip.
Shopping in Korea is a very overwhelming and endless endeavor, but with patience, willingness to walk, and understanding that it’s impossible to see all the options before making a decision, there’s still a lot of great stuff to find. I bought a good deal of stuff for my family, friends and mythical gf, and was able to even buy myself some Korean-branded shirts, and some traditional trinket keepsakes.
