Sarinah is a 74-metre tall 15-floor department store in Gondangdia, Menteng, Central Jakarta, Indonesia. Sarinah was the first skyscraper to be built in Jakarta. It is located at the intersection of Jalan Kyai Haji Wahid Hasyim and Jalan M. H. Thamrin. Sarinah was Jakarta's first modern department store, famous for having Indonesia's first escalators, for being air-conditioned and for having electronic cash registers. In addition to Thamrin, Sarinah also has a number of outlets located in Pejaten Village at South Jakarta, Banyumanik at Semarang and Malang.
In the early 1960s, Indonesia was hit by very high inflation rates. President Sukarno believed that a department store would act as a price stabilizer to help keep prices under control, a view he formed after visiting several communist capitals including Moscow, Prague and Warsaw. The department store was built by Obayashi Corporation using Japanese war reparation funds, and opened in August 1966. The project was conceived by President Sukarno, who named it Sarinah after his childhood nanny. In an effort to pursue its price stabilization agenda, state-owned Sarinah department store published weekly grocery price lists. Sukarno affirmed that "The Sarinah department store will become one of the important tools for the organization of Indonesian socialism..." and "if Sarinah sells a blouse for 10 rupiah then another retailer will not dare to sell the same blouse for 20 rupiah". However, it failed almost immediately in this role as there was a limit to what one store or even a few stores could do in such a large country. Sarinah struggled to compete with other retailers and went into debt as it expanded aggressively into other cities in Indonesia. In the early 1970s, in an effort to survive, Sarinah moved its focus to local handicrafts, especially batik. Sarinah is still best known for batik today. In the 1990s, after leasing out some of its space to McDonald's and Hard Rock Cafe, Sarinah managed to rejuvenate itself as a popular place for young people.
Two forty-one story towers are planned to be built in the area to complement the existing shopping center. The new towers will house high end restaurants; offices; and venues for meetings, conferences, and exhibition halls. The existing building will undergo major renovations to restore the originality of the building. The expansion project is expected to start by July 2020 and is projected to be completed in its entirety by mid-2022. Renovations on the existing building are estimated to complete by mid-2021. In order for the renovation to be carried out, the building management ordered all tenants to close in a 30 April 2020 memo. Notably the closing of the first McDonald's in Indonesia at the Sarinah location on 10 May 2020 attracted a considerable crowd and legal rebuke for violation of social distancing laws in effect for the ongoing SARS-2 pandemic at the time.
