A Nation of Shopkeepers

Welcome, commercially-minded reader, as this week I fill you in on the many and varied retail opportunities offered here in downtown Palo Alto.

Palo Alto is a very unusual place. Flush with Big Tech money, its residents tend to have expensive tastes (obviously I'm an exception to that, reader - you can take the boy out of the People's Republic of South Yorkshire, but...), and that means the more basic shops often can't make their way here. Palo Alto is also home to a world-class University, so of an evening it's often humming with student life (although not one resembling early 90s Oxford - not too many kebab vans here). Palo Alto is also home to two separate downtown areas (because halfway through its history it absorbed the neighbouring town of Mayfield) and a big shopping centre. Put all this together and you end up with an odd combination of shops and outlets.

We live near University Avenue, the "proper" Palo Alto downtown (sorry California Avenue), and also the nearby Stanford shopping centre. The good news, if you're in the market for upscale home furnishings, is that Palo Alto absolutely has you covered. There's a very fancy designer furniture shop, and another slightly less fancy designer furniture shop. There's a very fancy designer bedding shop. Well, there used to be two, but the slightly less nice one closed a couple of weeks back.

And of course, if you're buying furniture, you want something to put those furnishings on. Yes, you want a rug. Never fear, because they got rid of that entirely useless massive Walgreens (like Superdrug on steroids - yes, pun intended), and replaced it with a designer rug outlet at 300 University Avenue:

Now I don't know about you, but when I'm buying a rug, what I really want is choice. Once again, Palo Alto can help you out, because over the road, in the shop at 321 University Avenue, which Artsy Rugs just vacated, there's another rug shop just opened up:

Of course, these folks look a bit like johnny-come-latelys who have just set up shop, don't they? So the good news is, up the road at 353 University Avenue, is Palo Alto's original rug shop:

You might think that a single rug shop is an odd thing to have in a town centre these days. You might think having two of them within a single block was some sort of weird coincidence. I have to assume three enormous, expensive imported rug outlets within 100 yards of each other is a very elaborate practical joke, or alternatively there's some kind of rug volcano spitting out rugs in a basement underneath University Avenue, and you just have to tap into the source to create your own riches.

If you're looking for something rare, unusual, expensive and artisanal, Palo Alto's got you covered. Want to buy some socks? You might struggle with that, unless you feel like fashioning socks from an unpicked Turkish rug. Now where's those crochet hooks...