The only criterion that really matters is that America's retailers, who like Vietnam's cheap merchandise, lobby harder than its garment-makers and catfish farmers who hate it.
All those crazy effects are the products of his restless and inexhaustible imagination, which is no less his for having been formed and fed by movies, television shows and the cheap merchandise spun out of them.
"I said no to the Crazy Horse in Las Vegas because there I felt I would have been a piece of cheap merchandise in a place of money, tears and perdition.
"Most companies tilt too much one way or the other". Mr. Sinegal, who is 69 but looks a decade younger, also delights in not tilting Costco too far into cheap merchandise, even at his warehouse stores.
The streamlining of the big dollar stores opens up, for other outlets, their original source of cheap merchandise: distressed goods, closeouts, overstock, salvage merchandize, department-store returns, liquidated goods, discontinued lines, clearance items, ex-catalog stock, freight-damaged goods, irregulars, salvage cosmetics, test-market items and bankruptcy inventories.
And it's true that when you first land in Ho Chi Minh City, it's hard to evoke languid French colonials in horse-drawn carriages in the furious chaos of small motorcycles, mopeds and bicycles and the cheap merchandise spilling out of the stores made of blocks of concrete.
But even then all they'd sell would be the comparatively cheap merchandise, like key chains and luggage tags.
They pointed out that there would be cheap merchandise coming in from the West that would discourage people from buying goods manufactured in the city.
The elder, called Radio for his endless chatter, hustled clothes and cheap merchandise on the New York streets until it led him toward leadership of a notorious crime ring.
"The first tentative forays into merchandising with souvenirs began in the 1960s and stepped up in volume in the mid 1970s when it was realised that many private companies were using the organisation's properties to sell cheap merchandise without any of the benefit of the sale passing back".
