For most of this week, Kim's Club, the giant discount store in Seoul, was mobbed by shoppers frantically hoarding sugar, flour, noodles and imported household goods. With the collapse in the Korean won, working people are desperate to stock up on everyday necessities before prices soar.
At the other end of the scale, dollar-rich expatriates and foreigners, many who flew in from Tokyo and Hong Kong, jammed Seoul's chic clothes stores in the Itaewon district snapping up bargains in an opportunistic frenzy.
This is the surreal background against which South Korea goes to the polls today for the third free presidential election since 1987. The voting takes place in a country dizzy from the rapid disintegration of its economy, where heady debate on German-type reunification has given way to disputation about how to cling on to the gains of 20 years of growth.
On one thing all three main candidates are agreed. They can no longer envisage unity on the Korean peninsula until well into the next millennium. Even talk of massive humanitarian aid, common six months ago, has dwindled.
An army of more than one million communist soldiers lies across the border just an hour's drive north of Seoul, but the deepest apprehension running through South Korea's 45 million population today is not of invasion but a sudden collapse of the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang.
This could produce a floodtide of refugees and force Seoul to absorb a wasteland of 22 million hungry people ill-equipped to play a productive role in any modern society. The West German model does not apply, officials say, because the scale of the task is proportionately bigger.
"Most Koreans say we have to have reunification but it is not an election issue, it is rhetoric," said Shin Myong Soon, a politics professor, in his office at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The North impinged on the campaign of the opposition leader, Mr Kim Dae-jung, who hopes to scrape home to victory today. The 73-year-old pro-democracy veteran received a letter of support from the North Korean Vice-President, Mr Kim Pyongshik. This might have damaged his prospects were it not for the cynicism of voters who saw it as a transparent move by Pyongyang to bring about his defeat.
Mr Kim advocates opening the North gradually to the world through economic and humanitarian assistance and investment. His main rival, Mr Lee Hoi-chang from the ruling Grand National Party, has a similar plan and still advocates large amounts of humanitarian aid.
On the economy the three main candidates make bold promises of a better future; but the fact is that each has had to swallow the harsh International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescription for rescuing the stricken economy as their defacto manifesto.
The election could not have come at a worse time for a nation badly in need of firm leadership. It has proved disruptive at a time South Korea is lacking the essential ingredient for economic stability, investor confidence.
When Mr Kim hinted a week ago that he would renegotiate the IMF terms, the really dramatic collapse in the won and share markets took place. Panic buying started and foreign shoppers began arriving to take advantage of world-class bargains in cashmere sweaters, cameras, tape recorders and designer shoes and clothes.
The situation only righted itself when outgoing President Kim Young-sam persuaded the three candidates to make a joint public pledge of support for the conditions tied to the $57 billion aid package. With this promise and the first credits from the IMF coming due, the won stopped its precipitous slide this week and recovered a little, and stocks rose.
The candidates were, however, left holding party manifestos which are infused with wishful thinking, at a time when the bank and business closures envisaged in the IMF-led restructuring are expected to reduce the rate of growth to near zero next year and create legions of unemployed.
Mr Kim, for example, promised to raise per-capita income from $10,000 a year to $30,000 and to make South Korea, the world's 11th-biggest economy, into one of the five most advanced countries in the world. He also promised the near impossible: no layoffs.
Mr Lee Hoi-chang said layoffs will be necessary, but has pledged to create three million new jobs. The only other candidate with a chance, Mr Rhee In-je, has also promised new jobs and a second "Miracle on the Han River" (the name given South Korea's post-war boom) by duplicating California's Silicon Valley.