beyondbrics

Moscow has always been renowned for its flashy nightlife, where the clubbers keep dancing, music keeps pumping and vodka keeps flowing well into the wee hours. These days, however, Moscow’s nightlife is starting to cater to the more mundane.

For those too old and tired to tear it up on the dance floor, the Russian capital now offers a wide range of late-night alternatives. Forget clubs and discos – these days it’s all about 24-hour grocery stores, book stores and pharmacies.

Asked to explain the phenomenon, which allows Moscow residents to conduct almost all their day-to-day activities in the city centre after hours, most economists point to the late development of Russia’s consumer culture after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In the open-retail landscape of the 1990s, aspiring business owners saw the 24-hour model as a chance to sell more goods. “The market was so under-saturated by services that many companies offered competitive services [such as working around the clock] as a way to gain market share,” says Natalia Orlova, chief economist Alfa Bank in Moscow says.

While kiosks stocked with beer and cigarettes have long been champions of the late-night model, now stores catering to the more high-end tastes are starting to edge into the market as Russia’s spend-ready middle class continues to grow.

“People living in Moscow have grown accustomed to the crazy rhythm and the fact that they can find anything they like and whenever they want for their money,” explains Arina Shayahmetova, head of public relations for Rendez-Vous, a shoe store chain that opened a 24-hour location in Moscow last year.

For Azbuka Vkusa, a high-end supermarket chain that specialises in Rbs550 (£11.53) boxes of Special K and Rbs250 (£5.24) containers of Danone yogurt, keeping most of its locations open 24-7 has become a key part of its marketing strategy.

Flooding the city centre with its stores and keeping them open at all hours makes Azbuka Vkusa unavoidably convenient for many city shoppers, even if they would rather clip coupons, the company says. The stores’ night-time peak lasts from midnight to 2am before a bit of a lull sets in.

Shoe store Rendez-Vous says this month it had 2,380 customers between the hours of midnight and 10am. Most are people who are simply too busy to find time for shopping during the daytime or on weekends, or indecisive shoppers who come in earlier in the evening but need time to decide on their purchases, Ms Shayahmetova says.

So far Rendez-Vous is the only fashion store to keep its doors open all-night-long and it remains to be seen how many will follow. While a walk down Tverskaya, Moscow’s main drag, at 1am revealed a few customers lining up for phones at a cell phone store, sipping cappuccinos at various 24-hour coffee shops, and nibbling California rolls at a local sushi establishment, things at Rendez-Vous were slightly quieter, with the store’s four employees easily outnumbering the store’s two customers: a male window shopper and a reporter in need of a shoe repair.

Stiletto lovers, it seems, are still on the club circuit.

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