Bangkok Shopping
There are no translations available.
Bangkok has a good reputation for shopping, particularly for silk, gems and fashions, while the range and quality are streets ahead of other Thai cities, and antiques and handicrafts are good buys too. As always, watch out for fakes: cut glass masquerading as precious stones, old damaged good being passed off as antiques, and counterfeit designer labels. Bangkok also has the best English-language bookshops in the country. Department stores and tourist-oriented shops in the city keep late hours, opening daily at 10 or 11 am and closing at about 9pm; many small, up-market boutiques, for example along Thanon Charoen Krung and Thanon Silom, close on Sundays.
Downtown Bangkok is full of smart, multi-storied shopping plazas like Siam Paragon, Siam Centre, Emporium and Gaysorn Plaza, which is where you will find the majority of the city’s fashion stores, as well as designer lifestyle goods and bookshops. You are most likely to find useful items in one of the city’s numerous department stores, most of which are also scattered about the downtown areas.
Seven-storey Central Chidlom on Thanon Ploenchit, which boasts handy services like watch-, garment- and show-repair booths as well a huge product selection (including large sizes), is probably the city’s best (with other Central branches on Thanon Silom and around town), but the Siam Paragon department store (which also offers garment and show repairs), in the shopping centre of the same name on Thanon Rama I, and Robinson’s (on Sukhumvit Soi 19, at the Silom/Rama IV junction and on Thanon Charoen Krung near Thanon Sathorn) are also good. They all have children’s departments selling bottles, slings and clothes, or there’s the branch of Mother-care inside the Emporium between Sukhumvit sois 22 and 24. The British chain of pharmacies, Boots and Chemist, has lots of branches across the city, including on Thanon Khao San, in the Siam Centre opposite Siam Square, on Patpong, in the Times Square complex between Sukhumvit sois 12 and 14, and in Emporium on Sukhumvit; Boots is the easiest place in the city to buy tampons.
The best lace to buy anything to do with mobile phones, including rechargeable Thai SIM cards with a local phone number is the scores of small booths on Floor 4 of Mah Boon Krong (MBK) Shopping Centre at the Rama I/Phrayathai intersection. For computer hardware and software, the undisputed Mecca is Panthip Plaza, across from Pratunam Market at 604/3 Thanon Phetchaburi (BST Ratchathevi or canal stop Tha Pratunam), crammed with new and used genuine and pirated hardware and software.
