Topic :
In many cities, young people prefer shopping as a form of leisure activity, why do you think this happens and is it a positive or negative development?
Answer :
Shopping malls these days tend to be a popular leisure place for many youngsters, and I firmly believe this trend is beneficial to young people.
There is a major reason why the youth enjoy shopping as an amusement activity. As a matter of fact, nowadays there is not enough space for young people to have fun, so they have naturally got together to shopping centers to enjoy their time. By providing fancy places and entertainment factors with their products, department stores have tried to make themselves a play zone for the young. Consequently, many big shopping centers or department stores have their unique leisure communities. To illustrate, Hyundai department store, which is the biggest shopping mall in Seoul, have been opening pop-up stores which are based upon the theme of emoticon characters popular among young generation every month, and it became a culture for the young to take pictures with the cute characters and share them to their peers on social networking service.
In terms of the development of young people, there are some positive points over this situation. First, this trend could lead much more opportunities for the young generation to express their own creative mind and even get a job. This is because major shopping centers would invest their budgets to support youngsters culture and they could make exhibitions of innovative minded young stars or service jobs suitable for the young more and more to gather customers. Also, they could learn the wise spending habits while taking pleasure in shopping. Shopping does not directly mean buying items, so by seeing around the shopping malls and getting the sense of overall prices of products, they can become aware of the commercial marketing strategy and understand how to allocate a limited budget when shopping.
To sum up, many young people enjoy go shopping as a free-time activity and also they could get some positive feedback from this behavior.
