Thai retail conglomerate Central Retail opened the doors to its second eat-shop-play lifestyle centre on the Thai island of Phuket on 6 October. The new centre is in the urban seaside Chalong neighbourhood, about 20 kilometres south of Phuket’s first Robinson lifestyle centre in Thalang, which opened a year ago. The company’s latest business update for the Stock Exchange of Thailand states that The Chalong mall has 17,000sqm of net leasable area, and is anchored by an 8,000sqm Robinson department store.Central has now opened 28 of the popular lifestyle centre concepts in Thailand. Collectively, they have about a half million square metres of net leasable area, occupied by 4,700 tenants and enjoying 120 million customer visits annually. Despite the fact that the Phuket malls are in a famously touristed area and will attract some tourist shopping, the Robinson lifestyle centre concept generally is much more targeted at Thais than international visitors. The malls are distributed across Thailand, often in locations of no or secondary tourism importance. And this is something that is so cool about them: They serve a valuable niche in markets that are not first tier but are dense enough and with enough disposable income to warrant a more sophisticated shopping experience than the standard Big C or Lotus’s hypermarket centre.  The design of the lifestyle centres is functional and clean, and the tenant mix brings together – in a modest amount of space equivalent to an Australian sub-regional centre or a US community centre – enough merchandise, food and leisure to satisfy most needs. The eat-shop-play moniker is not a bad descriptor. What is the winning formula?Each of the centres is tweaked in a slightly different way to suit the local market, allowing the owners, as in the case of Chalong, to tweak the names of its amenities also, to evoke newness. The Chalong centre, for example, styles itself as a “carnival village” to be more evocative of Phuket’s tourist heritage. Underlying these little tweaks, however, is a well-worked and effective formula.The formula for the 28 centres follows a similar script. On the ground floor is the large, single-level Robinson department store that caterpillars up one side of the mall. On the other flank is the fashion zone, with small specialty tenancies featuring brands from Thailand, Korea, China and Japan. Vacant spaces, if they exist, are discreetly filled with tables and chairs that can be used as work or relaxation areas for visitors. The line of fashion shops can also include a Watsons health and beauty store and a Starbucks.Between the specialty fashion stores and the department store is a middle zone that in old-style malls would have been an empty common area. (Does anyone remember the ‘common area’ anymore, before ‘squeezing the asset’ became the norm and the open space was stuffed until it was blue in the face with kiosks, pop-ups and carts?) This middle place in the Robinson lifestyle mall is a mixed merchandise zone with accessories that might include a gold shop, women’s handbags, watches, toys and small home goods. There are also some food installations, such as a bakery.On the ground floor is also where you will find Moshi Moshi, an expanding Thai chain that offers, online and offline, an intriguing mix of 22,000 attractively showcased and priced lifestyle products, including stationery, bags, beauty products, plush toys and digital gadgets. Moshi Moshi already has 115 shops in Thailand and, to fund its expansion, was listed on the Thai stock exchange in late 2022. (Moshi moshi, in case you are wondering, is an informal Japanese greeting, the subtleties of whose everyday usage has resulted in a whole cottage industry being built up around the phrase. Look it up at your own risk.)The ground floor ends with a Tops supermarket that is typically upscale but with a product mix targeted specifically at Thais rather than foreigners. It has a small number of self-service checkouts but like most Thai supermarkets, still leans heavily on the traditional staffed checkouts.Upstairs represents a shift away from apparel and accessories into hardlines, food and entertainment. Here is where you find the fitness centre, the cineplex (the one in Chalong is a Major Cineplex, which operates more than 800 screens in Thailand) and information technology, the latter consisting of mall staples Banana, Jaymart and Power Buy, along with a plethora of small tenants selling cut-rate phones, tablets and IT accessories.Also present are two other staple Central Retail brands to round out the visitor’s everyday shopping needs: Office Mate and B2S for office supplies, books, stationery and digital products.And finally, there is the obligatory food court. When all is said and done, it’s hard to find a retail category not covered in this compact and highly effective mall concept. When adapted for local conditions, this concept, or at least a flavour of it, is likely to become an increasing part of the Vietnam retail scene, via Central’s expanding Go! mall chain.More going forwardDepending on how you define ‘retail conglomerate’, Central Retail is either Thailand’s biggest or second biggest by sales. If you include its wholesale arm, CP Axtra – formerly Siam Makro – is almost twice the size of Central by sales volume. However, if you exclude CP Axtra’s wholesale business, which sells to both retailers and end-consumers, then Central was the largest by sales in 2022, but only just.Central has yet to release its results for the third quarter (this will not occur until mid-November), but for the first half of the year total company revenue was up 9 per cent from the first six months of 2022. The key sales growth driver for the company has been its fashion segment, which has enjoyed stellar sales growth of 22 per cent, year on year. Food and hardlines were up by 5 per cent and 3 per cent, respectively.