One mall to rule them all, one mall to find them, one mall to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them; in the Meridian where the shadows lie.

This is the fifth and final instalment in our Malls of New Zealand ranking series. 

In order to answer the question: which Dunedin mall is the best mall, you must first answer the question: how many malls does Dunedin have? This question is not as simple as you might think. 

Joseph Harper, in his magnificent ranking of Christchurch malls, set the criteria. A mall must have toilets. A mall must have a car park. And a mall must have a food court, or “multiple food options”. This decimated my list of potential candidates leaving me with a scant three eligible malls in Dunedin. The Meridian Mall, Wall Street Mall and The Golden Centre. 

Three isn’t bad. Three is almost cosmopolitan. Hamilton only has 4.8 and I’ve never met a demographic of people more addicted to discount shoe emporiums and 11am roasts. But behind the three candidates lies a taxonomic problem. What happens if your three best malls are actually just one mall in a trenchcoat? Or if you prefer a more prestigious analogy, the father, the son and the holy spirit.  

For all intents and purposes, Wall Street Mall, Meridian Mall and The Golden Centre are the same mall. They each have their own webpages. They are presumably owned by different private investment companies. But as a pedestrian, they’re more or less indistinguishable. As soon as you enter the behemoth that is The Dunedin Mall(s?), boundaries cease to exist, like one of those politically nebulous administrative regions on the edge of some contested territory. The moment I stepped over the jurisdictional boundary that separated Sushi Express from Michael Hill Jeweller, I longed to feel some infinitesimal shift, some tremor in the mall’s ambience that would show me I had reached a new plane of shopping consciousness. But there was nothing but the cold, roving eye of the surveillance cameras overhead.

This situation presented a problem. There was some discussion about whether or not a mall ranking was even appropriate for Dunedin. If all the malls are basically the same mall, what is there to rank? But this seems unfair. Just because Dunedin is populationally stunted, it shouldn’t prevent us from having nice things. After all, conjoined twins that share a heart (carpark) are still considered to have individual legal personhood. I decided to rank each mall on its individual merits. 

First, a note on the disqualified malls: 

Harvest Court Mall/ Mall 218

Across the road from the shopping behemoth is a fourth, supplementary mall, alternatively referred to as “Harvest Court Mall” or “mall 218”. The name Harvest Court Mall conjures up a Gilmore Girls-esque miasma of pumpkin-flavoured beverages and charming rural giftware. A quick visit was enough to confirm that this wasn’t really a mall, but a pedestrian shortcut with lofty ambitions. Yes, it has a vegan bakery, a Chinese restaurant with terrific ambience and a barbershop where you can purchase something called a “Normal Adults Haircut” for $30. But there were no visible toilets and no car park. Disqualified. 

Centre City Mall

Ah Centre City, with its four great intersecting rings, like that of a minor Olympics. Centre City Mall may once have been a mall, but these days, it’s simply a New World pretending. There are a few nice shops, but the vast majority of the stores are vacant, filled only by the occasional public health billboard proclaiming “menopause… we get it”. While it does have a bustling public toilet, Centre City Mall is disqualified for only boasting one food outlet, Tiffany’s Cafe, which is always crowded with pensioners and has extremely mixed Google reviews, including one claiming the food tastes like microwaved sand, and another where someone has accidentally uploaded a picture of their newspaper. The best part about this “mall” is the Richard Scarry Lowly Worm ride, where for the low cost of $2 you can climb into a giant apple and vibrate gently. 

3. Wall Street Mall

When you hear Wall Street, you think luxury. You think men yelling numbers. You do not think “glass window in floor revealing heritage driftwood pathway over former marshland” but that is precisely what awaited me as I entered Wall Street Mall at 9am on a Monday morning. 

Wall Street Mall (“where style meets convenience”) has more of what I’d describe as “high-end fast fashion” than its two counterparts. Country Road. Rod & Gunn. Mahers Shoes, which boasted some of the most decadently hideous footwear I have ever seen. Marbecks Cafe, packed with lone elderly women, gnawing on muffin rinds and having obnoxiously loud phone conversations. My spiritual brethren. 

Wall Street Mall boasts an abundance of spa and massage centres. The Rub. Luxurious Spa & Nails. The Vish Beauty Bar. Lush, which I’m always too scared to enter, in case management has finally implemented its new “dive tackle” policy. A conveniently located defibrillator, in case I was experiencing any cardiac distress. A mental health awareness Lego sculpture titled “Hope Defeats Despair”. An enormous blue and silver Christmas tree –  easily the grandest and most magnificent of all three malls, flanked by an empty Santa sleigh. The most horrible and upsetting part of Wall Street Mall was the mezzanine glass walkway which gave me insane vertigo. Nobody wants a glass bridge, especially not in an earthquake-prone building. 

2. The Golden Centre Mall

The Golden Centre Mall had a wistful, almost nostalgic quality to it. Pink and gold stars twinkled merrily on high. Two alarmingly smooth and aerodynamic white birds hung suspended from the ceiling, like Gua Sha facial massagers. Of all the malls, this mall most closely resembled the malls of my childhood. Where Meridian Mall has “EFX” hair, The Golden Centre has Just Cuts. Where Meridian Mall has Merchant/Overland shoes, The Golden Centre has Athlete’s Foot. There was a mysterious concrete area roped off behind Premium Retractable Queuing Stanchions. There was a Boost Juice urging me to go “full froppo.” 

I lingered for a while in @quisitions, a large gift store that sells enormous clocks without any numbers on them, glass trees with exquisite crystal fruits, and almost anything with your name on it, as long as your name is “Caroline” or “Doug.” 

I braved Chemist Warehouse, one of the most psychedelically intense experiences you can have while completely sober, and spent $40 on a new electric toothbrush, as mine was undergoing serious battery malfunctions, and had begun vibrating randomly in the middle of the night. (Authors note: after publication, a commenter mentioned Chemist Warehouse is actually in the Meridian, not the Golden Centre. I have no excuse, other than to claim I was obviously geographically bamboozled.)

Easily the best store in The Golden Centre Mall was Timezone, which is enormous and has an entire indoor bumper cars rink. Apart from a lone woman my age, meditatively pushing a pram, I had the entire arcade to myself. I spent $5.40 on two rounds of NBA Hoops, a game which I’m unexpectedly good at, and used my remaining credits on a mystery golden egg from a claw machine. I came away from the experience with a stretchy toy apple and an inflated sense of my own athletic ability. 

1. The Meridian Mall

Ah, The Meridian. Definitely the father to The Golden Centre’s holy ghost. According to the informative placard, the mall was officially opened on September 4, 1997 by the former governor-general of New Zealand, The RT Hon Sir Michael Hardie Boys, which sounds suspiciously like a fake name you’d give to the police after deciding against Peter Scooby Doo. 

This Christmas, the Meridian opted for a classic red and gold decorating theme, with strings of golden baubles unspooling from the ceiling, jellyfish style. Enormous red bows hung around every support pillar. Only the stunted Christmas trees were letting down the side, sagging with preposterously large baubles, like inoperable golden goitres. 

Meridian Mall has everything you could want from a mall. It has a Sunglass Hut. It has a Calendar Club. It has several mainstream jewellery stores with hideous calculator font (Michael Hill) where you might buy your bitch wife a hideous apology bracelet. It has a Mister Minit, which was by far the most popular store in the mall, with a permanent queue of 4-5 people. The top floor, where Kmart once stood, has a large and depressing JB Hi-Fi, next to an even larger and even more depressing Smith City, its blank walls illuminated only by an enormous photograph of a golden croissant, gleaming like a stained glass window. There was a pop-up store full of luxuriously furred puppets, and a cotton candy floss self-service machine that was too powerfully fluorescent to capture on film. (Authors note: I originally claimed there was a large and depressing Kathmandu beside the even more depressing Smith City. This was an error. A large and depressing JB Hi-Fi is beside Smith City. The large and depressing Kathmandu is on the bottom floor.)

Perhaps it’s no surprise that most Dunedinites simply refer to all three malls as “The Meridian”. It is easily the largest of the malls, with over 50 stores, three storeys and a confusing system of escalators. It has a food court. It has a gym. It has a currency exchange. Sadly, it also has vigilant security. 

Things got awkward after I snapped a picture of Muffin Break. I have always had a fondness for Muffin Break. Perhaps a kind of culinary Stockholm syndrome, after spending so much of my adolescence in Johnsonville Mall. I was just heading over to Santa’s Grotto to check out his visiting hours, and wondering if I was brave enough, as a 37-year-old woman, to request a photo on his knee, when I was approached by a representative of The Meridian Mall, who wanted to know who I was and why I was taking so many pictures, as security had “privacy concerns”. 

I don’t know what came over me. Having never formally studied journalism I had no idea if I was breaking any laws. I panicked and told the Meridian representative my cousins (?) were planning a cruise ship trip (??) to Dunedin, and had asked me for some “background” on the available shops (???). Considering the Meridian representative had just caught me enthusiastically photographing the coin-operated dolphin ride, it’s doubtful whether she believed me. But I was chastened enough to put my phone away, sadly before I was able to capture a picture of Santa’s Grotto (which looks less like a grotto and more like a festive coworking space).

Perhaps the security guards had finally become suspicious after watching me wandering around for a full morning, taking photos of dustbins. (The Meridian Mall’s bins are more streamlined and restrained, whereas The Golden Centre bins have a voluptuous curve.) But I suspected I had been snitched on by the woman from Muffin Break. I went back and looked through my photos later, and my suspicions were confirmed. Look at this photo and tell me this isn’t the face of someone about to call security.  

I went upstairs to sit on the cracked leather couches and Google “legal take photos shopping mall?” The police and citizens advice bureau assured me I was innocent of any legal wrongdoing. But I didn’t have the heart to take any further snaps. My Christmas spirit had been ground to peppermint shards, like a candy cane under a reindeer’s hoof.  

Luckily, there happened to be one area of the mall where taking photos was not only permitted but encouraged. My last act was to spend $6 in the novelty photo booth. I came away with 16 photos of myself being attacked by various wild animals and, as a bonus, the photos of two groups of teenagers who had been there before me and forgot to collect their pics. 

I decided to make a (muffin) break for it, and slunk out into the cool afternoon light, only to immediately realise I had forgotten to buy the one thing I came in for – a Secret Santa gift under $20. The quintessential mall experience. I returned to Marbecks, made my purchase, and got the hell out of there. 

Usually, I love the mall. Where else can you shoot a few hoops, get minor Botox and eat a muffin the size of a horse’s heart? But my run-in with the law had soured me. 

On the bus ride home, I weighed my experiences. Which of the three Dunedin malls was the best? 

Fuck it. They’re all the same mall.