The town centre in Chitungwiza, on the outskirts of Harare, would be the very model of a Western shopping mall if only the shops were not completely, depressingly empty.
Sales assistants, Moreblessing Muringani and Viola Mubayiwa, live out a surreal existence in the Cloth for Africa shop, serving time but no customers in front of rows of bare shelves. "We have nothing to sell. They took the school uniforms we stock, all sizes. It will be two weeks before we get new clothes."
Hundreds of looters smashed their way into the town centre last week, stripping the place like a plague of locusts. "They took everything, even the compressors for my refrigerators," said Ray Patsanza, a grocer who says his losses exceed £20,000.
Throughout Zimbabwe, this scene was repeated as looting and rioting broke out in scores of towns and "high-density" suburbs of Harare. Tired of watching as politicians and wealthy business people stripped their country of its resources, the poor decided to empty a few shelves for themselves. The riots resulted in six dead, 2,500 arrested and several million pounds worth of damage. Not a huge toll by African standards, but a shocking one for hitherto peaceful Zimbabwe. For the first time since taking power in 1980, Mr Mugabe was forced to call in troops to restore order.
The image of Zimbabweans as laid-back and docile was laid to rest as frustration at rising prices boiled over into anger. Housewives had started the protest when they found that prices for staples such as cooking oil, "mealie meal" and flour had jumped by over 20 per cent, the third rise in a few months.
After that, the looters took over.
These are troubled times in the land the settlers called God's Own Country. Economic decline has made it harder for ordinary Zimbabweans to make ends meet. Inflation is 24 per cent, while the value of the Zimbabwean dollar has halved in the past six months.
Tales of collapsing states are two-a-penny in Africa. But Zimbabwe is different - or at least it used to be. It has the best health service in Africa, and the best education system. The judiciary is independent, and the Supreme Court is watchful. Human rights abuses are rare and the press is free.
Even though the economy is on the slippery slope, there are some notable successes. Gold production has increased almost every year since independence. Zimbabwe is the third largest exporter of roses in the world, and one the top three exporters of tobacco.
The problem is that achievements made have to be maintained.
The education and health systems, so widely praised in the 1980s, are now bursting at the seams. Raw materials are still exported without any processing to add value locally.
Just when money was needed for these areas, it started seeping in other directions. A compensation fund for veterans of the war of independence ended up in the pockets of 46 senior officials and government members.
Money from another fund to build low-cost housing was used to put up a mansion for the president's new wife, Grace. Built last year at a cost of over £1 million, "Graceland" and its 32 rooms remain unoccupied on the outskirts of Harare.
Questions have been raised about the awarding of contracts for a mobile phone licence, and for a new terminal at Harare airport, to companies in which the president's nephew is involved.
Little blame has attached to Mugabe himself, but there is a widespread feeling that the revolution has lost its way.
Having racked up a national debt of over £3 billion, Zimbabwe is being squeezed by the International Monetary Fund. But the coffers are as empty as the shelves in Chitungwiza.
"Mugabe is in a bad spot, not all of his own making," says Dr Ibbo Mandaza, of the Southern African Regional Institute for Policy Studies, which is funded by Irish Aid.
"All post-colonial economies have faced the same problem; at least in Ireland you have the EU to help. But people always blame the managers when things go wrong."
Under pressure from the war veterans, Mr Mugabe eventually raised a lump sum of £2,000 each, plus a life pension. The beneficiaries of this windfall seem to have spent much of it on televisions and foreign-made goods. Meanwhile, economic liberalisation has made it easier for the white owners of business to move funds out of the country "just in case".
In Harare's plush northern suburbs, with names such as Westgatem Borrowdale, Green croft, Avondale and Belgravia, so redolent of colonial days, life continues as usual for the white population. Four-wheel drive cars cram the car-parks of luxury shopping centres. The greens of the Royal Harare golf club are scrupulously manicured. Last week, only the whiff of tear-gas in the air served to dampen an otherwise idyllic landscape.
It isn't just that many in the 80,000-strong white community are rich, but that they are visibly so. White-owned businesses were targeted in earlier disturbances in December as protesters sought a scapegoat for their woes. The government is inclined to look in the same direction, with the minister of information intimating that white merchants and manufacturers are to blame for the price rises.
The main attack on white power, however, has come from the President himself. Mr Mugabe has proposed seizing more than 30 per cent of the country's prime farmland, currently owned by large, mostly white farmers, to resettle black peasants. He says it is immoral for just 4,500 white farmers to own 70 per cent of the country's best farming land.
Mr Mugabe, who turns 74 next month, has taken a laid-back attitude to the developing crisis. He broke a month's holidays to order the army to quell the riots. Although his ZANU/PF party controls 117 of 120 seats in parliament, there is no obvious successor to the long-time president and former guerrilla chief.
But Zimbabwe, the land of the Victoria Falls and the oldest monuments in black Africa, with its hard-working and educated population, still has much to offer.
Dr Mandaza and other observers agree that now, and not later, is the time for international action to stop the slide. Otherwise, they say, in a few years' time the shelves will be truly bare.