Lessons of the Mall
Alyona Kharchenko thinks it will take her a week to summarize what she learned on her three-day visit to the Fashion Square mall in Sherman Oaks.
For most Southern Californians, it’s just another place to buy gifts, hang out with friends and troll for shoes. But for the 24-year-old Ukrainian businesswoman, the mall was an education.
At home in Sebastopol, in the Crimea--the often-embattled area of Ukraine that protrudes into the Black Sea--Kharchenko is the assistant manager of an open-air market with more than 60 vendors. But for the last month, Kharchenko has been in Los Angeles studying that peculiarly American institution--the shopping mall.
Besides the Sherman Oaks mall, she has seen several downtown shopping centers and Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. The market that Kharchenko helps manage is more like a Middle Eastern souk or bazaar than a typical Southland mall.
She said that her market features stalls that sell flowers, clothing, convenience foods and other items as well as several coffee shops and a place that offers shoe repairs. None of the stalls is as large as Z Gallerie, Pottery Barn, See’s candy or any of the other 115 shops in Fashion Square, she said.
Kharchenko is one of 10 Ukrainian managers and business owners who have spent a month in the Los Angeles area under the auspices of Community Connections, a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Administered by the nonprofit International Visitors Council of Los Angeles, the program brings business people from the former Soviet Union together with local businesses.
According to Janet Elliott, executive director of the Visitors Council, the economic situation in Ukraine is “dire, and this program allows them to learn about a free-market economy.”
More than 5,000 entrepreneurs and other business people from former Soviet countries have participated since the project began in 1993, she said.
Ochakovsky Ltd., the company Kharchenko works for, has plans to build a large indoor mall with department stores, supermarkets and boutiques. But its current operation lacks the sleek, coordinated look of the San Fernando Valley mall, she said. Each tenant encloses his or her space with tent fabric or wood or whatever material the vendor can afford.
Kharchenko said she saw many elements at the Valley mall that she would like to incorporate into her home business. “I’ll adjust them to our economic reality,” she said. That reality includes uncertain water and power service.
She also noted the wide variety of goods for sale. “Most of the things we have in our mall are for teenagers and young people,” she said, explaining that younger Ukrainians tend to have more disposable income than older ones, many of whom depend on unreliable state pensions.
Kharchenko pointed out that the Crimea is a region increasingly attractive to tourists. The Black Sea was a favorite seaside resort during the Soviet period, and it continues to draw vacationers from the former Soviet Union.
The area also attracts many British tourists who come to visit sites important in the Crimean War of 1854-56. Sebastopol is not far from Balaklava, where the British Light Brigade made its suicidal attack on the Russians, which was immortalized in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Kharchenko, who stayed with a family in Brentwood for part of her visit, said she knew she was lucky to be in Southern California, especially this time of year.
“What is most fascinating here,” she said, “is the mix of people, the mix of cultures. It’s very unusual and attractive.”
