I wrote about this article on my blog

People with money love to overspend. I would even say that they will not buy anything unless they are being overcharged. Muji will probably make money here until some other foreign company with more neutral products and more expensive product comes to town. Ah, Les riches!

Some consumers who are dying to hit-up Muji are a bit confused. They consider themselves minimalists, or followers of the living-simple ethos. I could extemporize for a while on how the minimalist movement sprang from a world wracked in war and recession and the advent of a form of capitalism (initiated in America) that sought to strip all undue cost and expense from everything including their product and the factory that made them. Bauhaus sprang from American factory design and so forth. Ultimately, these consumers are buying a product which strips as much expense as possible from the design. Yet, unlike the new-Capitalist giants who were commissioning Gropius and company, these consumers are not getting the benefit of a parallel decrease in cost/price. They're not even getting the benefit of higher quality materials. They're more victims of a clever marketing ethos that throws a switch that allows one to feel "simple" and/or minimalist not by limiting consumption, or by valuing consumption by cost (frugality), but by buying from a brand that has strived to represent this. "It takes real genius to woo even smarter dummies."

You describred the marketing of the veblenest gouge as a marketing strategy much better than I did above.

At least in Japan, I think there is a parallel decrease in cost/ price. That's why people buy it. I don't know about here.

Well, to solve that question, is it opening in the village or Uniondale?

I agree with your comments; there is a magazine out called "Real Simple" that is supposedly based on these precepts; I have read twice, but found it odd that they consider a $500.00 Leather purse (designer, of course) to be a simplistic and non materialistic purchase; I also read with interest about the wall-street exec who cashed in her golden parachute to purchase a home on Martha's Vineyard, to live a "simple life."

I am generally confounded by these types of people; they are slaves to materialism, but make themselves feel better by doing whatever the media tells them is "simple" and non materialist. I once went to a mom's group that supposedly based on this premise; to live simply; yet they were all to a one, bored wealthy stay at home moms, who dressed their daughters in Hannah Anderson clothes, and their little boys in Baby Gap. They all drove SUV's and lived in ARM'd mortagaged mansions.

In Japan, Muji is quite cheap (notebooks for less than a dollar, normal-priced food, inexpensive makeup, shirts for $20 and less, bags for around $40) - I hope it will be in the US, too. I went to a Muji in London once but that was before I'd been to the Mujis in Japan, so I can't remember if the prices were the same (though I bought a skirt at the London Muji and I don't spend much money on anything, so it must have been reasonably inexpensive) - does anyone know how the UK and Japan Mujis compare, price-wise?