The end of the line

WHETHER in Nairobi or Albuquerque, a shopping centre is not really a shopping centre unless it has at least two anchor tenants. These can be department stores, cinemas or bookshops—anything that will fill a large space and lure customers past smaller boutiques. The idea is that a cinema-goer might pause to buy a leather jacket; and, in a lovely symbiosis, the monied youngsters who shop for clothes and sunglasses might decide to catch a film.

Take a lift to the top floor of the new SM Aura shopping centre in Manila, and you will find not a cinema or a Neiman Marcus but an enormous call centre. In the Philippines, the arrangement makes perfect sense. Like shops, call centres need young, middle-class people—but as workers, not customers. This one, run by Teleperformance, a multinational based in France, expects to get about 100 walk-in job applicants a day. Yet Manila’s call centres do not just need monied youngsters. They also produce them, in huge quantities. Were there no call centres in the Philippines, there would be many fewer middle-class people, and hence fewer shopping centres.