In New York and somebody said to me that if you really want a snapshot of American Retail, head for the King of Prussia. This somewhat surreal instruction turns out to be nothing more than an exhortation to visit a large shopping mall near to Philadelphia. It houses more than 400 shops and its management claim it's the largest of its kind in the US (and there was I thinking it was the Mall of the Americas in Minnesota).
Anyway, it is big and it is bland. Every US retailer seems to have taken a unit here and although there were a few voids, occupancy seemed higher than in most European equivalents. That said, it has also succeeded in strippping every tenant of personality and as you walk round, you can't help wishing you were somewhere else. If this is indeed Middle America writ large, then there are vast swathes of the country that I really wouldn't care to visit. Surely there must be better than this...and it was almost empty.
By contrast, the newly-opened American Eagle flagship in Times Square, shows what good, show-stopping retail is all about. See if you can guess from the pictures, which is which...
