Everybody’s a Winner

This city has banked its entire reputation on one word: shopping. The Gulf Emirate of Dubai decided long ago that it needed a logo, a brand, a concept -- something that would pull people in, as well as anchor everything else this ambitious little port city wanted to be.

A decade later, Dubai is well on its way. As it hosts the tenth round of the festival that made it famous, the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) is no longer the only famous thing about Dubai. The Emirate is also home to the world's only seven- star hotel (the Burj Al-Arab), and will soon boast the world's largest indoor ski slope. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it will be in the planet's biggest mall. Just a few minutes away from Burj Dubai, set to be the world's tallest tower.

The global dynamic is shifting, and Dubai is in the right place at the right time. Geographically, it has always been the meeting place of several important trade routes, so it almost seems natural that today, Dubai would ride the global wave of consumerism to its logical end, by daring to ask: Why not celebrate shopping itself?

The DSF's message is that shopping can be an expedition, a form of serious adventure travel. Trying to outdo the West in all ways and means of ostentatious consumer frenzy, they're selling shopping's feel-good aura here like there's no tomorrow, and the world is responding in tune, heading for a place where it's okay to unabashedly dedicate yourself to consumerism.

From the moment you set foot in Dubai, it is clear that shopping is not just a duty, but also a pastime. The city's grandiose International Airport has become a destination in and of itself, thanks to the tremendous amount of shopping going on at its stylish Duty-Free stores. As you concourse towards passport control via banks of escalators and endless moving floors, slick stores and serious image making of every sort surround you. 7-Up branded golf carts carrying tired passengers whiz by on the spotless marble floors. Huge billboards advertise multi-million dollar Dubai properties for sale. And then, suddenly, right before the baggage claim, there's the Snake Forest, a special shopping festival promotion.

This "forest" is proof that Dubai is master of its game. A gaggle of people -- from older women in full black niqab to young British girls in shorts -- are standing in line to get their picture taken with a live snake, one of a collection of 17 of the reptiles on display. Sponsored by Epson (the photos are taken with one of their new digital cameras, printed on one of their new instant printers, then given out to visitors for free), the gimmick is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fun tourist traps that make this festival what it is -- a perfect marriage of consumerism and spectacle.

The idea, according to Gulf News, originated 10 years ago, when the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department "was looking for new ideas for the DSF". The department's director suggested that his own prestigious snake collection be used, and the rest is history.

But free snake pictures are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to prizes. A hundred million dirhams (about $27 million) in prizes will have been given out by the time the month-long festival ends on 12 February. On the last day, three lucky winners will pick up nearly a fifth of that total -- 17.5 million dirhams -- in one fell swoop. The slogan for the gold coin raffle starring aging Indian film heartthrob Amitab Bachan is probably right about the eventual winner -- who will be awarded 120 kilogrammes of gold -- being "the luckiest person on Earth".

Or what about Palestinian toddler Ibrahim Al- Bai, who just won three Lexus automobiles worth half a million dirhams; he was lucky enough to have a dad who always gives lotteries a try, even when they're relatively expensive like the ones Dubai has become famous for. Then again: the bigger the risk, the bigger the pay off.

DSF has given away 390 kilos of gold and 962 cars over the years. In 2000, 31 Rolls Royces were raffled off, and a mega prize of one million dirhams was on offer in 2003.

This year's car gold lottery requires that you purchase a gold coin for about $68. But it's precisely big scale lotteries like these that have been the bread and butter of the festival's -- and Dubai's -- success and fame, its reputation as a place where dreams can -- and do -- come true. It's also symbolic of the momentum behind Dubai's amazingly swift rise -- a microcosm of the dynamic whereby people are willing to bet on the big pay off, and Dubai itself gets bigger in the process.

SHOPPING AS FOLKLORE: The keys to the festival's continuity, its chief marketing officer Laila Suheil recently told Gulf Marketing Review, are innovation, efficiency, and "the state of mind of Dubai itself. It's not just the festival," Suheil said, "it's the city surrounding it." And that city has responded in tandem, its major businesses lining up to become part of the festivities.

Emirates airline, one of the city's largest employers, has been a sponsor since day one. At the airport, the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department hands out gold-coloured dirhams to 50,000 people as a welcoming gesture. At Mercato, an Italian piazza-themed mega mall, a magic carpet ride booth is a DSF gimmick meant to draw kids in. They are filmed on an Oriental carpet, and then superimposed onto a video made to look like they're flying. The parents then shell out the dirhams for the tape.

In fact, the plethora of kids' activities are usually right there at the leading edge of what young people like -- this year, for instance, there's a Bey Blade festival going on at Creek park. For adults, there's also a Cirque du Soleil-style performance at the Global Village. This reliance on name brands to ensure ease of communication and message in a fast-paced world is a shrewd and literal translation of the DSF guidebook's claim that the festival is like a hug, or "a magic circle".

Everything refers back to itself in this big, brash hug. Also taking place during the festival are the Dubai Desert Classic, the ATP Dubai Tennis Open and the Dubai World Cup, "the richest horserace in the world," according to What's On magazine. Over the years, concerts by the likes of Whitney Houston and Bryan Adams have coincided with the festival. This year Arab heartthrobs Kazem El-Saher and Nancy Agram are scheduled to perform.

The city also loves to host a world record contest. This year, a young man will attempt to break his own Guinness Book of World Records feat of having three 2.75-ton cars drive over him. In another part of town, extreme and monster cars and trucks perform astounding acrobatics. Not subtle about promoting its audacity, the official festival guidebook says, "Dubai is essentially a city of superlatives. The tallest, the biggest, the most fascinating... they're all here or will soon be..."

It's not all golden, of course. With the festival's increasing popularity (3.5 million will attend this year, up from 1.6 million when the festival started in 1996 and 3.1 million last year), traffic has suddenly become a big problem. But even here, reactions are immediate. After last year's stall ups at the relatively downtown Festival City, the massive Global Village part of the DSF was moved several kilometres out of town to the future site of the Dubai land amusement park.

On another front, competition from neighbouring Gulf states is also on the rise. Oman, Qatar and Kuwait all hold festivals now. Oman's for one, tries to be more localised, providing a showcase for Omani culture. Again, Dubai has responded in tune, dedicating plenty of activities to its own cultural heritage, with locally made handicrafts, rugs and traditions now on display at several DSF venues.

It's also costing more and more to put it on: in 1996, DSF spent $.7 million on the entire festival; this year, the cost of the festival opening alone was estimated at $.8 million.

To keep the momentum going, DSF planners are continually targeting newer markets via slick, well thought out, and aggressive marketing schemes. British, French and German tourists now plan months in advance to go, and as a result, Dubai's over 300 hotels boast occupancy rates in the high 90s during the festival's duration.

Sceptics like to predict that the Dubai hype will eventually fade; it's not really built on anything solid, they say. But that would only be true if Dubai did not manage to stay on the leading edge of an increasingly consumer-oriented world; if entire industries and huge swathes of the population didn't depend on shopping for their well-being.

DIGGING FOR GOLD: In many ways it's all about optimism and synergy. The papers pump the festival; the festival pumps the real estate, and everyone's with the programme: welcome to Dubai.

Even though the Mercato, didn't seem that crowded, a woman named Pinky, behind the Seattle's Best Coffee counter, said this year's festival, so far, was gearing up to be even better than last year's in terms of crowds and sales. After all, Mercato, and the nearby Burjuman, were both upscale malls, and didn't need the tremendous crowds that gathered at Deira City Centre. Not all of Dubai's nearly 40 malls, Pinky said, needed to be packed for the festival to be making headlines and loot.

Burjuman, for one, specialises in the top brands -- Prada, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana all have their own stand-alone stores there. Vincent at the Burjuman Plug-Ins, an electronics retailer, said he had already sold eight giant, top- of-the-line plasma televisions in the five days since the festival began, and was set to sell another three today. Basically, he said he was "psyched about the sales figures during the DSF", where indeed, everywhere you turned, there were bargains galore.

That is another key to the festival's success; that it actually delivers on its promise of being a venue for buying and selling goods from around the world, for every style and taste, at prices that couldn't be beaten either locally or globally. Ground zero for that kind of comparison- shopping was at the Deira City Centre -- the city's most popular mall by far. With its flagship Carrefour hypermarket and a ton of other stores, the sheer number of goods and brands on sale there is stunning.

As is the carnival-esque cross-promotional atmosphere, so symbolic of everything else about the festival and Dubai: the minute we step into Deira, a live band -- dressed in Native American costumes with feather headdresses -- is pumping tunes into one of the atriums. Everywhere you turn there are raffle offers, and booths advertising all the new properties going up around town.

Intentionally or not, another festival feature ties into the city's construction boom mentality in a quirky way. At the Diggerland adventure area at the Global Village, people can ride and drive different types of construction equipment like Dump Trucks, and Mini and Giant diggers. Adults and kids are thus inculcated into the live-to-build atmosphere, while the organisers make tonnes of money at the same time.

If anything defines Dubai at this moment, it's the sheer scale of construction going on. At Jumeirah Residence, nearly a dozen high- rise towers are rapidly being built at the same time, a forest of cranes right next to each other on the coastline. The new Marina nearby is also a beehive of multi-purpose construction activity, just like so many other sites in the rapidly burgeoning town.

Back at the mall, there were people nonchalantly inquiring about the properties for sale at the different booths sponsored by construction giants like Emaar and Damac. It didn't seem to matter if you couldn't afford the penthouse at the new Jumeirah Residence -- with its view of the new Dubai Palm islands. If you were here -- at the festival, at the mall, in Dubai -- you were already there, riding the consumer wave to a brighter future. You may not live by the sea yet, but you could still take home a bag full of new clothes, or a shiny mobile phone. And maybe, if you were lucky enough, you'd drive away in a brand new duty-free Benz.