With the exception of the banks and cellphone stores, interest in opening new retail stores in Manhattan dropped abruptly after Sept. 11, as store operators wondered if there would be more terror attacks and attempted to assess the mood of shoppers, Mr. Fox said.
Chef Sleeve already has stores interested in carrying the smart scales, according to Merea.
Last Thursday, inboxes around the world were flooded with crude PDF documents promoting the stock of the Prime Time Group, a tiny Florida company with cellphone and convenience-store interests, among others.
"Dime stores also interest me," she says.
She tended her garden and let her children's store of interests and demands become her own.
Companies can hire people to write positive reviews about products and apps in online forums and stores, driving interest and pushing them farther up the roster.
"Is my fourth grader really going to use 50 pencils herself?" Ms. Cooper, the Alabama mother, spent her summer making the most of the school-supply stores' new interest in classroom supplies.
"People spent the previous decade downscaling to a compact camera, but with smartphones we are becoming a nation of amateur photographers, and a lot of customers coming into our stores are interested in upgrading".
But, according to Robin Stein, land use planner for Stamford, "about 10 years ago, when big box stores were interested in locating in industrial zones, the city went through a zone change to prohibit them, except downtown, where Target and Burlington Coat Factory are moving in".
But store-card interest rates are being left untouched even though some charge up to 60 times the Bank of England base rate.
