The Ministry of Commerce has ordered every Romanian locality with fewer than 100,000 residents to raise a modern shopping centre within eighteen months, after a consultancy report found that most of the country's retail floor space sits in Bucharest and the large regional cities. Town councils received the directive on Monday and began clearing fields, car parks and former bus depots the same afternoon, with the first ground broken in Zalău before the paperwork had reached Bârlad.
Officials say the scheme will be delivered by bulk purchase rather than by individual developers. The ministry has bought forty thousand shopping trolleys from a single supplier and is transporting them by rail to every small town, where they are being parked in rows outside the new unfinished buildings. A spokesperson for the ministry told reporters: «A trolley waiting for a shop is a shop that has not yet opened, and we intend to fill every one of them before the next holiday.»
The effect on daily life has been immediate. Residents of Roman have been asked to shop only in the one centre that stands finished, which is a single room with a cash register, and the mayor has banned the use of local markets on weekdays. Trains run through the night to keep the trolley supply moving, and school timetables have been reorganised so that every pupil spends one hour a day pushing a trolley around the nearest car park as part of a national training exercise.
Economists at the Ministry say the programme will reduce the gap between cities and towns to zero within two years. Asked how the towns would pay for the buildings, the head of the department said: «The retail network will pay for itself once every citizen of Sepsi has spent a full month's salary in the new centre, and we are confident they will want to.»