Category Archives: Shopping

Danga City Mall in Johor Bahru

The Danga City Mall in Johor Bahru is perhaps the only Mall that has a direct railway link at its door step. This means that you can take a train from Singapore to reach Danga City Mall and vice versa. To get an update of the time schedule, you can visit the Danga City Mall website at – Dangacitymall.com. The website also gives you the bus schedule and what bus service that goes to this mall.

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Danga City Mall in Johor Bahru

Personally, I find Danga City Mall a rather quiet mall with much less people coming here as compared to say City Square in Johor Bahru. Firstly, most people may not be familiar with its exact location. What I did was to take a cab to this mall from City Square which cost about $5/- while some taxi may even asked for $1 or $2 dollars more. Perhaps what the developer of this mall could do is to provide a free shuttle bus service from City Square to Danga City Mall at say one hour interval.

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Danga City Mall

Secondly, there are lots of shops that have not been leased out. These empty shopfronts does not create a good shopping atmosphere for this mall.  Yes, the anchor tenant Metrojaya store is there for those who wants to shop in this department store. But you need a spread of vibrant niche stores to give people a good shopping experience. Anchor tensnts does not make a mall successful. You need vibrancy and create the incentives for people to come to this mall.

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Restaurant in Danga City Mall

I will try to visit this mall again perhaps at the end of this year. Hopefully there will be more improvements and more niche stores been added to this mall. I will be also be writing a blog on my visit to Danga Bay, which is a major development for Johor Bahru. By the way, Danga City Mall and Danga Bay are not located in the same site. Danga Bay is near to the beach, while Danga City Mall is near the flyover in the city of Johor Bahru.

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Danga City Mall

For more information about Johor Bahru and Singapore, please visit our website – ImageSingapore.com.

For information and photos on Indonesia, go to our website at – Indonesiapics.com

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City Square Mall Johor Bahru

The City Square Mall in Johor Bahru is the newest mall which is also closest to the Johor Bahru ( JB) Immigration checkpoint. After clearing the JB’s immigration which by the way took more than an hour of queuing to get my passport stamped, I decided to head to the City Square Mall. If you are planning to go to Johor Bahru by bus on the weekend or on the eve of public holiday, be prepared for a long and tedious queue at the JB’s Immigration checkpoint. Bring along a bottle of water, it is totally humid, crowded and chaotic inside the Johor Bahru’s checkpoint building. There is no proper lanes for visitors to queue, so many people jump queue. I can see children crying, a woman ahead of me fainted, a cute toddler vomited on the floor just beside me and I saw the faces of many frustrated visitors. Come on Malaysia Immigration department, heads up and get your act together to provide quicker and more efficient service to visitors. The air-condition  in the building don’t worked and it is oven temperature with so many visitors in there. They could certainly take a lesson from Singapore Immigration, where I cleared it in less than 10 minutes.

When you finally get out of the JB immigration checkpoint, you can see an underground pedestrian walkway straight ahead. Just use this walkway and continue to walk straight. There are lots of touts asking you where you are going, just ignore them and keep walking. You will pass by shops, Merlin Tower, a petrol kiosk and again rows of shops. When you spot a large modern building, that is City Square Mall. This mall has a strategic location and is also opposite the grand old Johor Railway station. The mall has 5 levels of shops as well as a cinema which is on the highest level. I can see plenty of stores selling clothes and fashion accessories. One of my favorite clothing store is the Reject Shop. It is a store that sells branded clothing at a discounted price. The clothes there may be off season or with some quality issue, but it is worth the value. There are plenty of restaurants and small food outlets to choose if you are hungry. One of my favorite is the MacDonald restaurant – this place is spacious and of course a Big Mac is cheaper here than in Singapore.

City Square Mall has a good crowd especially on weekends. You can see lots of Singaporeans coming here to shop and eat. The Management could improve its service by providing more signage to guide shoppers. Signage should be placed to help visitors locate the link bridge, the major anchor stores such as Watsons and the restrooms. I am rather disappointed that the management of this mall imposed a 20 cents charge for using the restrooms ( toilets). Firstly this is a outdated practice and secondly, if you are operating a mall, providing clean restrooms is imperative and a basic necessity for the shoppers. In the restrooms, the taps are automatic sensor taps that dispenses water when you placed your hand under the tap. That is good, but unfortunately some of these taps stopped working – so you see people queuing up to use the remaining taps that still worked.

I don’t have the time to browse through the many shops that are in the mall. I will certainly make some effort to go back there again. Perhaps I will choose to go there on a weekday instead when it is less crowded. There are food outlets that I want to try and perhaps even catch a movie if I can find the time.

For more information on Singapore and Johor Bahru, visit our website at ImageSingapore.com. If information on Indonesia, go to our website at Indonesiapics.com