For souvenirs, head to OLD ARBAT STREET, and for just plain shopping, try ARBAT STREET, GUM and the concourse under the subway station in RED SQUARE.
In contrast to those sky-high prices, blue-collar restaurants like Captain's Tavern, in a plain shopping center, and Big Fish, right on the Miami River, offer simple food at reasonable cost.
Fines in New York can be as high as $50 but average $20. "They don't enforce it," Jocelyn Camillucci, a Bronxville resident, said recently at a White Plains shopping center.
Mr. Taubman, 75, a Detroit shopping center magnate credited with transforming plain suburban shopping centers known as strip malls into playgrounds for the rich with designer shops like Yves St. Laurent, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, bought Sotheby's in 1983 and took it public.
As these mattress newcomers try to reinvent this utilitarian purchase, they join a groundswell of e-commerce players that are each trying to break open a shopping category that has largely been defined by a bewildering or just plain outdated shopping experience.
The MSNBC story suggested that Mrs. Fuld and her ilk have taken to asking store clerks to place their luxury items in plain, unmarked shopping bags to avoid the sneers of passers-by.
Rather than flaunting their purchases before recession-pinched passers-by, however, they asked for plain white shopping bags.
In his left hand, a plain brown shopping bag, and, as she shuts the door behind him and six or seven cats glance up suspiciously from their perch on the mantel, he holds it out to her. "Here it is," he says, and, sure enough, her purse is inside, soft black leather with a silver clasp and the ponzu-sauce stain etched into the right panel like an abstract design.
The plain brown shopping complex set back from Vine Street houses the usual suspects: a pawnshop, check cashing, Thai massage, tattoos.
Tells about White Plains, the shopping capital and county seat with architecture, people and vegetation of European origin.
