"Upon the advent of gays and lesbians, a rich array of shops almost invariably follow," writes Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal (7/16/09). Joseph is speaking specifically of Andersonville, a "revived Chicago neighborhood, once chiefly Swedish working class, on whose main thoroughfare, Clark Street, reside a charming gallimaufry of odd shops and non-franchise restaurants." The neighborhood contrasts sharply with nearby Evanston, which is about three miles north of Andersonville, and is where Joseph grew up and still lives.

Back in the day, says Joseph, Evanston was "teeming with shops." But they faded away, done in, he says, by shopping malls. Joseph also blames Northwestern University students, a "transient class" that he says turned downtown Evanston in to "Taco Bell country ... land of Burger King and the Gap." In his Evanston neighborhood today, Joseph counts "21 restaurants, six coffee shops, five manicurist-pedicurists, four cellphone purveyors, three dry cleaners, two quite good libraries, one multiplex theater and ... a paucity of interesting and useful shops."

Joseph says his late friend Edward Shils, a sociologist, judged "a city by the interesting shops it contained." It's the shops that make New York a great city and perhaps Los Angeles something less. It's the shopkeepers, he suggests, that make a country strong: "Considerable courage and perseverance are required to start and keep a good shop running," he writes. He recalls that Napoleon dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers" ... before they kicked his butt at Waterloo. "A nation of shopkeepers, far from being the put-down that Napoleon thought, sounds more and more like an ideal to which a healthy country ought to aspire."

Shopping may be down at American malls, but customer traffic remains relatively decent, reports Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times (7/14/09). "The consumer's not avoiding the mall," says NPD Group's Marshal Cohen. "The consumer's just avoiding spending the money." It seems that, in many cases, the "free or low-cost amenities like jogging routes, restaurants, movie theaters and merry-go-rounds ... Suddenly seem more attractive than the stores."

Mall operators are fine with this, for now, since it's better than having no one in their malls at all. Some are even adding more attractions, such as "wave-riding machines ... Laser tag, paint ball and ice skating. They have organized concerts and karaoke contests, temporary-tattoo parties and social clubs for children, and they have begun turning vast -- and empty -- stores into community theaters and health clinics."

The question is whether these changes might permanently alter the way we think about shopping malls. Marshall Chon suggests the effect may indeed be lasting, since many of these projects, such as day-care centers and professional schools, are long-term in nature. He suggests that "the mall could even become more important rather than less important," over time. There's certainly an open door for innovation: The mall vacancy rate is now about 7.9 percent nationally, up from 5.8 percent in 2007.

"He's coming at it from a really innocent design perspective, and that's what makes this significant," says Sam George in a New York Times piece by Joshua Robinson (7/14/09). Sam is a former editor of Surf magazine and he's referring to Thomas Meyerhoffer, who used to design electronic devices for Apple but has now designed a "startling" surfboard for himself -- and for other surfers looking for something new. "It's about creating a different feeling," says Thomas. "Like the difference between playing tennis with a wooden racket and a metal racket. Or playing golf with wooden drivers."

Actually, Thomas "does play golf with wooden drivers." But the surfboard he's created, known as the Meyerhoffer, features a pointed nose, a pinched middle and a long tail. He fashioned its hourglass outline in a "tiny backyard shed," by hand, out of foam. The idea basically is "a longboard that rides like a quicker, more maneuverable shortboard." Thomas says the result is a shape that's more "organic and fluid which seems to fit the wave better. Instead of surfing the wave, the wave surfs you ... You become one with the wave."

He says the design evolved over time. "I never designed the board to look this way," he says. "It became this way." At first he tried designing by computer, and sending out his creations to be machine-cut into foam and then slathered with epoxy. But he soon realized he had to refine the machined shapes by hand. "Everybody can design on a computer today," says Thomas, "but to go from your computer screen to a board that really works is like cooking food. Anyone can read a recipe, but the master chef will always be much better." His first run of 1,000 boards, manufactured by Global Surf Industries, sold out.

To battle the Recession, Chris Martin of Martin Guitars took a page from his great-grandfather's playbook during the Depression, reports Timothy Aeppel in the Wall Street Journal (7/6/09). Back then, Martin manufactured a "stripped-down" guitar, still made of fine materials, but devoid of fancy inlay and other flourishes. It was made of mahogany and sold for somewhere between $20 and $30, and some say it saved the company. Today, Martin is selling a similar guitar -- dubbed the 1-Series -- although this time around the price is between $800 and $900. But the effect is similar, because that price-point sells well in the guitar category, and Martin quickly sold out its initial run of 8,000 guitars.

"We needed something so we wouldn't have to start laying people off," says Chis, who is the sixth generation of Martins leading the company. Keeping his highly-skilled workers employed is especially important for Chris because, over the long-run, it would be more difficult to train new workers once the recovery kicks in. The challenge was figuring out how to build a guitar that sounds like a Martin but doesn't cost $2,000 or $3,000 like most of its other guitars -- but does not use laminates instead of solid wood like Martin's other lower-end guitars, such as the DXM. Martin was able to accomplish this in large part because its "factory is still largely run as a handcrafted process."

Building a Martin guitar involves "a series of 60 workstations, with more than 300 distinct production steps." Some automation is used but for the most part guitars are "fitted and glued by workers hunched over workbenches." This affords Martin "extreme flexibility" and enables the company "to come up with a new design quickly and without tearing apart a production process" or making "a huge investment." For the 1-Series, "cost savings included switching to a type of lacquer that doesn't require time-consuming polishing," for example. Martin was founded in 1822, and currently employs "about 575 workers, who make 52,000 guitars a year" at its Nazareth, Penn., factory. It also has a factory in Mexico that produces beginner guitars.

More companies are outsourcing jobs to their own customers, reports the Economist (7/4/09). That is, they are increasingly steering customers to self-service ATMs, kiosks, websites and checkouts: "According to VDC Research Group, retailing, hospitality and health-care firms spent $2.8 billion on self-service technology in 2008. Between now and 2013 their investments will grow by around 15 percent a year." The fact is, most of us have gotten used to self service, and some of us -- especially younger people -- actually prefer it.

A study by NCR suggests that "self-service can even increase customer loyalty." Of course, NCR makes self-service technology, but it claims that "85 percent of consumers prefer brands that offer several forms of self-service: online, at kiosks and via mobiles, for example." In some cases, the technology -- such as voice recognition -- does make self-service highly personalized. It's also a heck of a lot cheaper, as online self-service costs about 10 cents a query versus $7 to have a person answer a call at a call center.

Not only that, but according to Summit Research Associates, "each self-service checkout at a grocery store replaces around 2.5 employees." However, companies claim that they aren't replacing people with machines, but rather redeploying them "to do more important work." Blockbuster meanwhile plans to install kiosks in 3,000 supermarkets and c-stores, and Pitney Bowes, in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, is setting up mailing kiosks "in shops and office buildings." And, coming soon are near-field communications chips, which will let people use their mobile phones like credit cards.

Mitch Lowe, president of Redbox, used to work for Netflix, and he understands the differences between the two video-rental concepts, reports Randall Stross in the New York Times (7/12/09). For one thing, Redbox customers, who pay just $1 a night to rent movies from in-store kiosks, tend to be "lower-income households with large families -- the opposite of the profile of the typical customer at Netflix." That difference manifests itself in the kinds of movies rented.

The number-one rental at Redbox is "Paul Blart: Mall Cop," which doesn't even show up on the Netflix top 100, where the number-one flick is "Crash." Redbox customers also are not impressed by a huge selection. Where Netflix "offers more than 100,000 unique titles," Redbox offers "just 200." Mitch says his customers don't "want to wade through titles they won't be interested in." The focus is on titles released within the previous two weeks or that are "in high demand nationally."

Tom Adams, a consultant, offers yet another intriguing insight into the Redbox appeal. "We're only 10,000 years out of caves," says Tom. "Humans like to go out and get stuff and bring it home -- we're just wired that way." Whether the primal strategy will survive a video-on-demand future remains to be seen, of course. In the meantime, Redbox kiosks can be found "in more than 15,600 locations, renting 7.5 million movies weekly ... not far below the 10 million-plus weekly rentals claimed by Netflix." That's up from 600 locations and 24,000 movies just four years ago.

In "Perfecting Sound Forever," Greg Milner "traces man's capture of a vocal image," from Thomas Edison to the Apple iPod, reports Norman Lebrecht in the Wall Street Journal (6/29/09). "It is a tale of anti-heroes, of men unknown outside their home-made studios, men who blink in the light of day but who, by dedication, inspiration of low-down cunning added a dimension to the way we listen to the soundtrack of our lives." There's Edison, a purist who believed his cylindrical phonograph was sonically superior to "Emile Berliner's convenient, flat-disc gramophone."

There's Moses Asch, who "invented a sound system that allowed President Roosevelt to project his voice to an overflow crowd outside Madison Square Garden, and, later, as a producer, brought the raw, untreated sounds of Lead Belly and the young Bob Dylan to a mass audience." There's Jack Mullin, an American G.I., who stole a Magnetophon machine from a German studio at the end of World War II. Did you know that magnetic tape was a Nazi invention? The Magnetophon "enabled sound to be cut, spliced and edited without loss of verisimilitude."

Jack used it to record Bing Crosby, who suffered from stage fright and preferred to pre-record his "live" radio performances. Then there were the Beatles, who forced "studios to switch from two-track stereo decks to 16 channels of sound, later 64 ... After the group broke up in 1970, every Jumping Jack and heavy metal band wanted a hyper-refinement of sound that hardly any living person could actually hear." Which brings us to today, "a point where any Joe with a $200 system can be his own Edison, and the record industry, as a progressive phenomenon, is a thing of the nostalgic past."

"Among expert musicians, some brain areas can be up to five-percent larger than in those with little or no musical training," reports Robert Lee Holtz in the Wall Street Journal (7/3/09). "Nerve tissue linking the right and left hemispheres of our brain is up to 15 percent larger among those who studied music since early childhood," he continues. "Moreover, the auditory cortext of an expert musicians can contain up to 130 percent more gray matter of neurons and synapses than someone who has never practiced on an instrument."

According to research by psychologist Petr Janata of the University of California, the brain's synapses are actually rewired by "listening to the classical scales and key progressions of Western music." He comments: "Music is a way of structuring sound ... It really gets to this underlying human desire to discover patterns in things." And perhaps non-humans, as well because "our sense of syncopation ... is a musical quality we share with other species." Maybe you've seen Snowball, the cockatoo, boogie to the Backstreet Boys on YouTube (video).

Steven Mithen, author of The Singing Neanderthals, actually thinks music came before words: "Using music to express emotion or build a sense of group belonging would have been essential to the function of human society, especially before language evolved prior to modern humans," he says. Scientists may not be ready to say that music is part of our genetic code, but neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel says it is "biologically powerful ... Every culture ever discovered has music, no matter what else they may lack," he says.

The future of brand identity both depends on and departs from its past, says General Mills CMO Mark Addicks.  An exclusive Q&A interview by Tim Manners. (more)

Sure, there's a Starbucks, and an H&M store is coming, but for the most part Lexington Avenue on New York's Upper East Side is a retail throwback, reports Joseph Berger in the New York Times (6/27/09). "It feels Old World -- with small spaces that are human size," says Kirk Gerchberg of Henry Miller Opticians. Cliff Kahn, who runs Lexington Hardware, is the great-grandson of the store's founder, who first opened for business in 1929. "I personally have been here 15 years, and very few things have come and gone on the block, and the customers are pretty much the same," says Cliff.

Nobody really knows how it is that the area has remained so quaint, retaining "its intimate mom-and-pop scale and grace while other commercial avenues along the Upper East Side have been transformed." Some think it's down to the area's brownstone architecture and the narrrowness of the avenue itself. One thought is that it's because "unlike Second and Third Avenues, Lexington never had an elevated subway line. When those were torn down, those avenues became ripe for high-rise development. Some residents are in fact worried about the construction of a new 17-story building that will house an H&M store, that it might be a neighborhood "game changer."

Others hope that landlords have learned to love the safety in numbers offered by smaller shops. "If you have two stores in your building and one is empty, you're in trouble," says Nick Kalouids, proprietor or Neil's Coffee Shop, a neighborhood fixture for 50 years now. "If you have five stores and one is empty, you're still okay." There's also a certain stability that comes with old-fashioned customer service: Robert Moffa of Albert & Son, a meat market, seals customer loyalty by continuing to slice steaks by hand, the way his father did back in 1961. "A lot of my customers I've known since I was eight or nine years old, and I'm 50," he says.