No ‘City that Cares' this Ramadan???

Tomorrow at sunset, the Moon Sighting Committees in all countries with Muslims will go out and look for a crescent moon. If they see it, it will be Ramadan; if they don’t, Ramadan will start Saturday night. (Actually, the moon will be new tomorrow mid-afternoon in Dubai, so they Moon Sighting Committe in Dubai will be able to see the crescent only if they use a lot of imagination.)

For almost a decade, every Ramadan, Dubai has had a big shopping promotion, but not this Ramadan.

Dubai normally has three shopping promotions each year:

There is the winter Shopping Festival, and the Summer Surprises (with Secret Dubai’s favourite, Modesh), and at some time, depending on the Islamic Calendar, there used to be the Ramadan promotion, called ‘Dubai, the City that Cares.’

When Ramadan was in December, the Shopping Festival was in March. When Ramadan was in November, the Shopping Festival was moved forward to January/February. (The idea is to have the shopping promotions spread throughout the year.)

Retailers are charged large fees to participate in these shopping promotions. In fact, any retailer that claims to be having any kind of sale is supposed to purchase a permit (though it’s not clear that Dubai ‘sales’ actually involve any reductions from normal prices). Still, I’ve seen some retailers who posted the permit in their windows to indicate that their ‘sales’ were ‘official,’ and must therefore be real.

This year, Ramadan will begin in September, the same month that Summer Surprises ends; in addition, the winter Shopping Festival has been moved to December/January.

Retailers didn’t want to pay the fees for three shopping festivals so close together, and ‘The City that Cares’ promotion was cancelled. Secret Dubai calls this cancellation ‘The City that Doesn’t Care.’

Actually, even without the shopping promotion, most malls are putting up their usual Ramadan decorations, and I saw a truck unloading the booths where people will collect Ramadan donations.

So the only things missing this Ramadan will be the banners that said, ‘The City that Cares,’ for which retailers proved reluctant to pay the large fees.