HotmailComing to America — for a great currency rate
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Looking for discounts
And while the Statute of Liberty, the Empire State Building and luxury shops on 5th Avenue have long been draws for foreign tourists in New York, 8.76 million of whom visited the city in 2007, now many of the city’s discount shopping meccas are becoming major destinations, too.
One recent afternoon, when New York City was heading headlong into a heat wave, the digital temperature sign outside Century 21 — a huge discount department store in lower Manhattan, directly across the street from the World Trade Center site — read 92 degrees at 4:40 p.m.
Beleaguered New Yorkers slogged toward the subway to make their way home. Inside the air conditioned retail giant, though, the lines for dressing rooms were 15 deep and at least a half dozen different languages could be heard in the ladies’ dress section where shoppers had clothes piled high in rolling carts.
For a number of tourists, Century 21 was on the top of their lists of things to see and do while in New York. Two tourists from Bologna, Italy, Claudia Massri, 29, and Federica Bacchilega, 31, had just arrived in the city and visited the Statue of Liberty, World Trade Center and the discount store on their first day.
“For me it’s fantastic,” said Sophia Edstrand, 25, another shopper, about her increased purchasing power thanks to the weak dollar. Traveling from Sweden, Edstrand said she has been to the city to visit her boyfriend several times and that she mostly buys clothes from “American designers” when she is here because it is just so much cheaper.
Likewise, Sarah Sjoeholm, 30, a native of Copenhagen, Denmark, had visited the exact same spots as the Italian tourists on her first day in the city.
Century 21 is a privately owned company and declined to answer questions regarding any possible increase of sales as a result of the growth of foreign visitors.
Sjoeholm, who was taking a break from the heat and enjoying a beer with her boyfriend at Fanelli’s, one of New York city’s oldest bars in Soho, said the weak greenback wasn’t the only reason she is traveling in the United States this summer, but it definitely helps.
“I just always wanted to go here, to see New York. I heard so much about it, so we said this year, we are going to go,” said Sjoeholm. However she did point out that her beer would probably cost about twice as much if she were in Copenhagen.
Taking it in stride
While many Americans are staying closer to home this summer, New Yorkers have taken the influx of visitors in stride.
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The article, which included a jaunty photo of beret-wearing, baguette carrying man arm in arm with a blond woman, and another man in a soccer uniform carrying a soccer ball, even had a sidebar story on “The International Language of Loooooove” with an off-color list of suggested pick-up lines for tourists from a variety of countries.
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