There is even ample retail options for metrosexuals living or visiting the city.

I was just in Chinatown and overheard this woman who sums up so well everything I find wrong with the suburbanization of the city. It was one of the nicer Chinese places in Chinatown, and as I was sitting at the bar waiting for my take out order I heard her say "I'm afraid to use the bathroom here, I mean it's not like P.F.Chang's or anything." Here we have a very nice, independent, authentic restaurant and this person doesn't feel comfortable because it's not a chain.

It's the same with retail, and these are the kind of people making the argument that we have no shopping. We do have shopping, we're just not overrun with the kind of shopping suburbanites feel comfortable in.

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The idealistic are no longer concerned with influencing public opinion and creating a free world of responsible and ethical social choices, but rather imposing opinion through legislation, mandating these ethics, and outlawing choice in what the loudest sample finds offensive.

Ban the Bans. It's a slippery slope between Idealism and Fascism.

Not so fast there, on both counts:

1) I don't own a car, I don't want to buy a car, and I have enough disposable income to afford shopping at KofP once in a while. So if I want to get there, I have three options:

--PhillyCarShare/Zipcar
--Ride up with a car-owning friend
--Routes 124/125

I generally prefer the last of these, except when the Schuylkill is a parking lot or I plan to return with a lot of loot. I'm sure I'm not the only carless Center City resident with cash to burn who does this, either. However, I will allow that many more such residents shop more often close to where they live -- as do I.

2) Even if I didn't have that much disposable income, I could still afford to shop at KofP. Don't forget that the very same mall that houses Needless Markup, Nordstrom, Apple and all those designer boutiques also has as tenants:

--Sears
--JCPenney
--FootLocker (in all three variants)
--Five Below (though with a store at the Gallery now, you don't have to go to KofP to shop there)
--Lane Bryant (think there's one in the Gallery but am not sure)
--Modell's Sporting Goods (one of those in the Gallery too)
--Payless ShoeSource (ditto)
--Motherhood Maternity (again, also in the Gallery)
--Wilsons Leather (again...)
--Perfumania (edited to add: oops! yet another Gallery tenant)
--DSW Shoe Warehouse

and two -- count 'em, two -- nail salons.

There is no closer Sears or JCPenney location for many North Philadelphia residents. (Same goes for West Philly in JCPenney's case; there's a Sears on 69th Street.)

IOW, Kravco added the uppercrust stuff onto the existing middle-of-the-road mall without completely getting rid of the MOR stuff. Most of the overwhelmingly African-American passengers I see packing the 124 and 125 when I take the bus to KofP are clutching shopping bags on the return trip, and most of them get off at Wissahickon Transfer rather than ride all the way into Center City.

I also note that the majority of the smaller high-end stores at KofP are also on Walnut Street or west Chestnut: A|X, Art of Shaving, Brooks Brothers, Guess (on Walnut soon), Arden B., Banana Republic, Talbots, Cole Haan, bebe, Burberry, Diesel, J. Crew, The Body Shop, Lucky Brand Dungarees, Sharper Image (RIP), Puma, M.A.C Cosmetics, BCBG Maxazaria, L'Occitane, Urban Outfitters -- there are probably a few more I left out. On Walnut but not in KofP are Kiehl's, The Children's Place, Anthropologie, Polo Ralph Lauren (!), Origins, Waterworks, and a host of homegrown shops, including Nicole Miller (well, she's a native), Jack Kellmer Co., The Children's Boutique, Born Yesterday (quite a few children's boutiques for an area not known as kid-raising territory, don'tcha think?), Lagos (a more original jeweler than anything KofP offers), and a few others I can't recall off the top of my head (nothing truly homegrown in KofP unless you count born-and-based-in-Philadelphia Urban Outfitters and its offshoot Free People; Anthropologie is the company's high-end women's chain).

H&M is the Ikea of fashion (right down to being of Swedish origin). Jos. A. Bank does the same thing for fine men's wear.

After looking at this rough matchup, it looks to me like the only difference between Center City taken as a whole and the King of Prussia complex is the ratio of upscale to noscale retail -- and the relative paucity of downscale retail in the latter. All this would be in keeping with the overall demographics of the immediate area around both (Chestnut Hill residents can get to KofP as easily as they can get to Rittenhouse Row). But both complexes have both expensive and not-expensive stores.

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
“Basically I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.” --Theresa Neilson Hayden

Gotta take issue with this. There are people who can't afford a car......people who have a car and can afford tons of stuff....people who can't afford anything b/c they won't get rid of their car (I know a lot of these)........and those of us who can afford a car but ditched it to reroute the money into disposable income.

I gotta take issue with all of you. MarketStEl and rpost3 are both right, there are some people who live in the city without cars and can afford to patronize higher-end shopping options. But Bryson is also right, in that you guys are both very much in the minority in our metro area. Sure, there are people like you, and perhaps even a sizable number in absolute terms, but you're really a tiny minority in relative terms

And that doesn't touch on my second point in my response to Bryson at all, which is that KoP also has enough non-high-end retail to draw shoppers from other city neighborhoods.

As I said before, most of the people I've seen packing the 124 and 125 to the gills are (a) black like me (b) holding shopping bags on the return trip (c) getting off at Wissahickon Transfer, there to presumably catch one of several bus routes that head from it into parts of North and West Philadelphia.

Now if you were concerned only with high-end retail in Center City, my second point is totally irrelevant to the discussion. My comparison of Walnut Street and KofP is more germane, and it suggests to me that even though there's more mad money living in the 'burbs, there's enough of it within shouting distance of Rittenhouse Square to enable some bigger fish to swim there.

The two points taken together were meant to demonstrate that the presence of downscale shopping is, or ought not be, in and of itself a barrier to more high-end shopping in the city center.

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Sandy Smith, Exile on Market Street, Philadelphia
“Basically I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.” --Theresa Neilson Hayden

Which has nothing to do with my point at all, which is that people need to be careful not to confuse anecdotal evidence with data based on larger trends.

This conversation is making me want to drink.

__________________
The idealistic are no longer concerned with influencing public opinion and creating a free world of responsible and ethical social choices, but rather imposing opinion through legislation, mandating these ethics, and outlawing choice in what the loudest sample finds offensive.

Ban the Bans. It's a slippery slope between Idealism and Fascism.

We have plenty of places to do that in CC!

__________________


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xCiKCxfYqE

"If we can't learn from our mistakes, what's the point of making them!" ...my friend Richard.

"You are protected by the enormity of your stupidity." Mother to son Victor, in "Notorious"

all i know is that i hope people start talking about the gallery's retail mix or the new macy's. we haven't covered that yet.