A picture promoting the NRA presidential coin set from the group's online store. (Photo: NRAStore.com)

In 1995, President George H.W. Bush gave up his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association via an angry open letter in which he expressed his outrage over a fundraising pitch made by current NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre that described federal agents as "jack-booted government thugs" wearing "Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms." Though President Bush said he was "deeply" offended and asked the organization to "remove my name from your membership list," seventeen years later, the NRA is still promoting his past association with the group in its online gift shop.

One of the "premium" items in the NRA store is the "NRA Presidential Series Collectible Coin Set." The full set of eight coins sells for $89.95 and features portraits of what the site describes as "all eight NRA-affiliated Presidents" and a "bonus" coin with the NRA logo. President Bush is depicted on the coins along with John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant, William Howard Taft and Richard Nixon. Interestingly, three of the presidents in the NRA's commemorative coin series, Reagan, Roosevelt and Kennedy, were victims of gun violence during their careers (in JFK's case the wound was, of course, fatal).

The Observer reached out to the NRA to ask why they were still including President Bush as an "NRA-affiliated President" in their coin set despite his break with the organization. As of this writing, we have not received a response. We also spoke to Jim McGrath the spokesman for President Bush. Mr. McGrath said he was unaware of the coin set, but would not be able to get back to us with a response until at least next week as President Bush is currently in intensive care at a Houston hospital.

Uptown becomes more downmarket.

Once upon a time, different kinds of shops existed in different neighborhoods, catering to the different people who lived in those neighborhoods. Quaint, right? But that was then and this is now. And now every corner of Manhattan has been pretty thoroughly colonized, and homogenized, by upscale chain stores.

The transformation doesn't only happen to formerly-gritty, formerly-edgy neighborhoods, either. The New York Times reports that Madison Avenue is the latest location to undergo such delightful changes—changes that have helped the street shake off its post-recession malaise at the same time that retailers like Juicy Couture and J.Crew are not exactly brands that the most insular and upscale of all Manhattan shopping districts would have originally welcomed with open arms.

The changes are attracting a younger, less affluent crowd to the Upper East Side stretch—The Times notes that the strip that once mixed the poshest of stores with a smattering of cheap diners now includes a more diverse range of brands—albeit the diverse range of brands that can be found in just about every shopping district below 96th Street these days.

Nearly 50 stores have opened in the last 18 months, among them Tory Burch, Bottega Veneta, Alice + Olivia, Theory, Rag & Bone and Proenza Schouler.

The area is also benefiting from the arrival of boutiques that are fleeing the meatpacking district. Last month, Yigal Azrouël announced that he was leaving his flagship store in the Meatpacking District for a 1,800 square foot storefront on the Upper East Side. After all, once Patagonia moves in and Lululemon stakes out a spot (Azrouël's old spot, in fact), what's the point of even pretending that the Meatpacking District is edgy anymore?

It's only a matter of time before Madison Avenue turns into Soho: a tourist district of upper-middle class chain stores clogged with shoppers hell-bent on promenading three abreast and as slow as possible down the sidewalk.

“You can now buy a piece of art, some shoes and a panini,” LeAnn Nealz, the president of Juicy Couture told The Times. “It’s nice having old world New York mixed with some of these younger, hipper brands.”

And isn't that the new American dream? A panini place in every neighborhood?

kvelsey@observer.com

Just what New York needs!

New York may be home to some of the best boutiques, specialty shops and department stores in the world, but you know what it really needs? A huge outlet mall with brand names for less!

The New York Times claims that New Yorkers, secretly covetous of the bland, sprawling suburban malls that can be found in the city's hinterlands, are ecstatic to hear that an outlet mall may be opening near Co-op City in the Bronx. (The Lightstone Group, a company that develops and manages outlet malls, purchased a 19.2-acre site in the Ferry Point neighborhood this May, although the group has yet to announce any plans for the site.)

To investigate resident's reactions to the project, The Times talked to tourists on a bus bound for the Woodbury Common outlet mall in Orange County. And guess what? They were all incredibly enthusiastic about the prospect of opening more places in New York that feel exactly like the soulless suburban tracts they left behind. Never mind that most of them had never been to the Bronx and weren't really sure where it was.

“It’s the hassle of having to come down here and get on a bus versus a short cab journey,” said John McLaughlin, a tourist from Northern Ireland visiting with his family and a large duffel bag that they intended to fill with Calvin Klein and Timerberland merchandise.

Other tourists, the newspaper noted, reasoned that if the Bronx was good enough for the Yankees and Jennifer Lopez, it was surely good enough for Prada and Louis Vuitton.

“Love J-Lo, very fashionable,” Tammy Bevcar, an operations manager in her 40s from Toronto, told The Times. “I would definitely go.”

The site of the outlet mall is not exactly close, but it is accessible via public bus and is about a mile from the nearest subway station. (Shoppers will need to bring their wheeled suitcases, which The Times notes are already common carry-ons on the $42 bus to Woodbridge Common.)

Not that everyone is excited about the development. The local community board is worried about the additional congestion and traffic that an outlet mall would bring to the area, especially since a new mall, Mall at Bay Plaza, is already being planned nearby.

To be fair, The Times does talk to a few New York residents, including Marlene Cintron. Ms. Cintron, who also happens to be the president of the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, said that all her friends were thrilled to hear about the planned outlet mall.

“They were beside themselves,” she gushed, adding that a Connecticut friend was “on her way home to let the rest of the neighborhood know.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Marvis toothpaste.

Last week, speaking at an event at the Center for Fiction, the writer David Lipsky recalled his first impressions of a visit to David Foster Wallace’s home. Mr. Lipsky expected the usual decorative trappings of the self-conscious intellectual: a shelf full of impressive books, yes, but also some signature of the writer’s great erudition as translated into home decor. Instead what he found was a Barney towel hung up as a curtain, an Alanis Morissette poster and a couple copies of Cosmopolitan on the counter.

Mr. Lipsky’s recollection of Wallace’s house in Illinois concords with a theory recently proposed by a friend of mine: there are people who define themselves by the things they produce and people who define themselves by the things they consume. It’s a false binary, sure, but one suspects Wallace was the former, and that the latter, I-am-what-I-consume, is ascendant, even among circles that traditionally define themselves in part by their disinterest in material acquisition.

Blame online social networks, which are little more than showrooms for competitive connoisseurs, but there’s a near-tyrannical rise in the need to show “good taste,” heightened further by the sheer saturation of products made available by the global economy: why use Morton’s when there’s pink sea salt from the Himalayas? Colgate with whitening when there’s jasmine-flavored Marvis?

Good taste, in such circles, is frequently defined by a fastidious resistance to popular brands—or to just accepting sameness. Buying Mrs. Meyers dish soap or a cross-stitched iPhone case, naming a firstborn child Pilot Inspektor, all this passes for individuality in a world where our sense of personhood is defined more by the things we accumulate and adorn ourselves with than by the things we make. It’s especially true for New Yorkers, who, with limited cultural output to justify their sense of intellectual superiority, must rely instead on their refusal of the trifecta of passive consumption that epitomizes so-called real America: the gas pump, television and corporate fast food.

Frechette.

The sorry truth is that New York does not produce greatness by its own existence. Greatness is just frequently drawn here, to have better access to Sardinian cheeses and fine chocolates. In our city, foodies and fashionistas armed with cameras compete with one another not to produce great food writing or beautiful clothes but to post shopping discoveries and restaurants on blogs. We have come to equate this kind of expertise with intellect—until we realize this is just a local version of the suburban contest over who has the greenest lawn. On one end of the financial spectrum a Brooklynite carefully posts a link to a pair of antique silver knife cuff links on the shopping site Svpply; on the other Steven A. Cohen assembles an art collection.

In 2009, The New York Times wrote an article about the rise of the word “curation”—used not in its traditional, museum-based Oxford definition as “to select, organize and look after” but instead to imply expertise in the art of good taste, particularly in the selection of retail merchandise. To curate is to assemble a bunch of stuff smart people really want to buy, instead of the stuff in the Sharper Image catalog or Bloomingdale’s.

The trend gave rise to pop-up stores whose wares were assembled by celebrities and, in recent months, a new way of shopping online. Once a store tried to offer as wide a selection as possible, to be narrowed down for the consumer by a personal shopper; now the consumer goes in search of a person they want to be. We buy what our idols buy and their genius becomes our own: personality shopping.

The Chelsea-based online retailer Open Sky launched last April with 20 food personalities, whom the company refers to variously as “talent,” “curators” or “masters.” Shoppers sign up and peruse a mall of online stores curated by celebrities, most of them known from television shows and advice/self-help books. Since last spring the store has garnered almost one million subscribers and added another 60 celebrities in the areas of health, style and design, everything from Alicia Silverstone selling vegan lip balm and organic kimonos to the Judds hawking candy-cane napkins and woolly slippers.

“The idea that we had was that today, with everybody on Twitter and Facebook, you personalize your discovery of media but that it hasn’t yet happened with shopping,” said Open Sky’s CEO John Caplan, who previously worked as CEO of Ford Modeling Agency.

“You join for free and you connect to people who are masters,” he explained. Mr. Caplan said that the model differs from the traditional celebrity endorsement because the talent is not paid to put a stamp of approval on items. Instead, profits are split 50/50 between Open Sky and the celebrity. He claims the model is particularly attractive to women, citing research that says females are more likely to buy things based on a recommendation.

Chemex coffee maker.

For the kind of shopper referred to here, however, the one whose erudition in all matters strives toward the heights of a record clerk’s in High Fidelity, Bobby Flay does not cut it: our shopper can smell the corporate superstructure in a celebrity chef’s “Mesa Grill” spice rub from a mile away, and a cameo on Entourage only makes things worse.

For this kind of shopper, other options exist. The masters at another start-up, Quarterly.co, have a shared sense of purpose: the world is full of cheaply made products, restrictive corporate structures, disorganization and toxins. Someone must promote a better life through blogging.

“Tina Roth Eisenberg is a Swiss designer gone NYC with a love of clean and functional design,” reads one bio.

“Scott Belsky is obsessed with organization and the clash between creativity and structure,” reads another.

“Maria Popova spends far too much time curating the web’s interestingness from many disciplines,” reads a third.

Rather than the language of the film set or the art museum, Quarterly uses the language of a magazine. One subscribes “to your favorite cultural icons”—who are referred to as contributors. Every three months, the cultural icon mails his or her subscribers a surprise object, frequently accompanied by an essay or some other piece of writing. The magazine-based language comes from Zach Frechette, the company’s founder, who previously worked as an editor at Good magazine. The idea for Quarterly came from a phenomenon he noticed while working there.

“At Good we would hear back from our friends and family, ‘Oh yeah, we got the issue, it’s so exciting,’ and then I would ask what their favorite article was and they would say, ‘We didn’t actually read it,’” said Mr. Frechette by phone from Los Angeles. He said that they liked the experience of getting something in the mail and having it represent a community they were a part of.

“Getting something that’s not a bill or junk mail in your mailbox is exciting,” said Mr. Frechette. “We put much more emphasis on the actual contributors than their products; not just what they’re picking but why they’re picking it. We feel like putting the emphasis on the contributor takes it out of the commerce space in a way.” He noted that subscribers often refer to having received their “gift”—“which is hilarious, because they paid for it.”

As with Open Sky, Quarterly’s contributors get a cut of subscriber revenue. Their selections are organized around a theme. For her first package, contributor Liz Danzico, whose theme is “time,” mailed her subscribers a print by an artist named Paul Octavious from his series of photographs “Same Hill, Different Day.” In addition to an object, Ms. Danzico includes with each mailing “an experiment” for subscribers to undertake that will help them notice the passage of time. She called the process “non-intentional product seeking,” where shoppers “trust in a person rather than an object.”

Mr. Frechette said that in one case the object was a book, where the book’s author might have overshadowed the contributor, Maria Popova. To remedy the situation, Ms. Popova annotated the book with post-it notes and doodles, which were also shared with subscribers.

Quarterly, which is still in a soft-launch mode, is already experiencing far more success than Mr. Frechette had hoped, success that might be attributed to what Mr. Frechette calls “the golden age of curation.”

“It’s not that there’s a lot of bad stuff out there. It’s that there is so much awesome stuff out there,” he said .

Ms. Danzico said Mr. Frechette had done a beta version with contributors before Quarterly officially launched, around the theme of appreciation of everyday objects like “this very simple, perfect coffee press with just phenomenal coffee, instructions for how to make the very perfect cup of coffee, and a thermometer.”

I asked what the brand was.

“You want to know, don’t you?” said Ms. Danzico. I did want to know, alas. It was an Aeropress and Ms. Danzico said she’s “used it ever since.” She said she hoped they would start selling the objects on the site soon.

Quarterly was preceded by another subscription-based service called the Thing Quarterly, which sends subscribers an object designed by a rotating cast of writers and artists in the mail four times a year. The first contributor, Miranda July, sent out two versions of a vinyl pull-down window shade with the words “If this shade is down I’m begging your forgiveness on bended knee” or “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am.” The most recent issue is a shower curtain with text written by Dave Eggers.

In all the above cases, the store is only as good as the good taste of the people involved—and it turns out that credibility is easily lost by the appearance of having sold out. The fear of losing credibility is something even a more mainstream service like Open Sky faces, and it’s the reason, says Mr. Caplan, that he would be unlikely to let the site be used for promotional opportunities—say, a guest celebrity who puts together a store to tie in with a forthcoming movie. “It isn’t about the most amount of products. It’s the best products,” he said.

And for average mortals of the world, whom nobody will ever ask to curate anything but who still pride themselves on good taste, the Internet offers other opportunities to show off: sites like Svpply and Polyvore, where amateur merchandisers can link to their own collection of Etsy crafts and excellent coffee makers and beautiful clothes. It’s fun—so much nice stuff to buy! But the golden age of curation might result in a backlash. Think of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, where the main character is a cool hunter with a pathological aversion to brands so severe that she wears only black, rips all the labels from her clothes and has nightmares about the Michelin Man. She soothes her panic about the eventual co-optation of everything she cares about through another one of the blessings of globalization: the presence of a Pilates studio in every city in the world.

ewitt@observer.com

But wait, no: the shoppers got pepper-sprayed for shopping! "Shopper pepper sprays crowd to get deal," reports the Daily News, of aggressive shopping tactics deployed by a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles.

Then there was the news this morning that shoppers were so willing to take direct action to occupy a Hollister store in SoHo and register their disgust with private property that they decided to "redistribute" the Christmas goods.

Meanwhile, down at Zuccotti, Occupiers have organized a read-in starting at noon, "to exercise our right to read and share books in public spaces." They will be reading "silently and peacefully" for one hour. Another possible tactic for shoppers to get the best deal: not buy anything?

But it's not just false advertising: the retailers also sell the real,  raccoon dog fur-ornamented gear at faux fur prices.

For Black Friday shoppers who want to take advantage of this lucky consumer loophole before it closes, the following retailers "are now or have recently been engaged in the selling of fur garments that are falsesly or misleadingly advertised and/or labeled as faux fur when, in fact, the garments include fur made from real animals," according to the petition:

• Barneys New York
• BeyondTheRack.com
• ShopBop.com
• Dillard's
• DrJays.com
• Revolve.com
• Gilt Groupe
• Neiman Marcus
• Ssense.com
• Summit Sports
• Yoox.com

Happy saving.

The Fulton Mall! (No, not THAT Fulton Mall.)

We always kind of knew this intuitively, but The Architect's Newspaper did a really nice job of putting World Trade Center retail into perspective.

After the MTA makes their firm selection, three major shopping centers will be connected via underground transit hubs and pedestrian passageways. The Westfield Group is in the midst of planning 365,000 square feet of World Trade Center (WTC) retail, and Brookfield is revamping 200,000 square feet at the World Financial Center. On completion, commuters will be able to shop and eat indoors all the way from Broadway to the Hudson River. A grand total of 635,000 square feet does not include 90,000 planned for the pending Two World Trade.

That's about half the size of the Chrysler Building, or about 25 percent larger than the Time Warner Center.

Maybe this is the real reason people have not been showing up to the new 9/11 Memorial—Century 21 can no longer sate their shopping desires. Wallets speak louder than words.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

This handbag kills recessions.

Rip! SL Green and Jeff Sutton continue their collective tear through New York commercial real estate, contracting to buy the Valentino store at 747 Madison Avenue for nearly $65 million, according to Lois Weiss at The Post.

The luxury clothier's 10-year lease is up soon, meaning there's an opportunity to raise the rent something fierce.
So it's no surprise, then, that SL Green, the city's biggest commercial landlord (we know, we ran the numbers), and Mr. Sutton, perhaps the city's biggest retail landlord you've never heard of, would buy it.

It's all about the handbags on this little island of ours.

SL Green and Mr. Sutton have been on a tear of late: Last week, they signed Dolce & Gabbana and Escada to major leases in 717 Fifth Avenue (the Dolce deal might be worth $300 million); and they bought 1552 Broadway for $130 million.

Still, the latest deals seem less a capitalizing on a chastened real estate market than on an abiding faith in luxury retail and the shoppers which power it.

Even now, with cats and dogs living together economically: Wall Street is about to see massive layoffs. The city's housing market continues to recover in fits and starts. And the local and national unemployment rates have stayed so relatively high for so long now that Important People speak of a New Normal of near-double-digit joblessness.

Will New Yorkers need their $1,995 handbags much longer?

Well... Perhaps two of the city's savvier real estate investors know the answer.

tacitelli@observer.com :: Follow on Twitter @tacitelli

But now Mint.com has released a breakdown of exactly which shops are raking in the most dough per visit.

The data is based on activity from Mint's more than 4 million users, and is being released as part of the launch of Mint Data, which lets users compare their financial habits to those of other folks on Mint.

The data needed a little cleaning. Apparently being a top shop in terms of purchase per visit is no gaurantee of longevity. Mint's original list had Institute at #6 and Freelance at #10, stores which are now out of business or under new managment.

Most of the top names are easy to recognize, but a few random ones snuck in there. Anyone familiar with Electronic, a computer and camera store at 580 8th Ave, New York, New York, which takes in more money per visit than Hugo Boss, John Varvatos and Bergdorf Goodman?

Check out the top ten shopping spots >