Do you fancy luxury?

These pix were taken inside a high-end mall in Xian. There are several there, offering up everything from Prada and Louis Vuitton to Max Mara and Salvatore Ferragamo. They abound in polished glass and plasma screens, not to mention brigades of bored-stiff sales clerks. The only thing they lack is customers.

It's puzzling in the extreme. I used to live in downtown Palo Alto, one of the most expensive zip codes in the US. And we didn't have half of these stores within a 30 mile radius. Do the executives at Givenchy really think the natives of sooty Xian are going be slathering themselves with $100 per ounce face cream anytime soon? Especially, when you can buy buckets of perfectly useful imitation goop on the street for a few yuan?

I work in marketing at times, and my guess is that behind this are some really slick management consultants—presumably the army of well-heeled mattress salesmen and babbling idiot frat boys at McKinsey. They've told a tremendous tale of the need to build your brand in the burgeoning Chinese economy. They've backed that up with trend lines and statistics in handsomely bound volumes with quotes from the leading analysts at Goldman Sachs and Solomon Smith Barney. Who are themselves busy peddling Chinese stocks to their American customers...

Someone should have told these captains of commerce that it's impossible to build your brand if your store, which has no customers, sits in the middle of a mall, which has no customers. It's that age old Chinese proverb: if a leather hat is on sale for $800 in a Xian mall and no one sees it, is it really on sale?

They will read this and say I don't get it. I'll be honest. I don't.