They want our baseball hats, they want our sneakers, and they want our jeans. Shopping as a tourism activity is getting to be a big business, whether it's a busload of Germans at the King of Prussia mall or a ladies' fellowship group from the St. Luke's Free Will Baptist Church in LaGrange, N.C., at Franklin Mills. In January, Leigh Ann Barnes went to a hand-picked gathering of mall and retail marketing executives in the Napa Valley outside San Francisco. There, among the winding roads, the gentle hills and the wineries, Barnes, director of marketing for the King of Prussia mall, picked up some statistics that made her raise a toast to a new, relatively untapped cache of customers - the tourist. Domestic tourists spend three to six times more than local shoppers on a single trip.
International tourists spend four to six times more than the locals.
Surveys show that tourists, no matter what else they do while on the road, include shopping in their activities. It wasn't that Barnes was unaware of the tourism market. Quite the contrary. She had spent a couple years touting tourism for the Brandywine region. And what statistics couldn't tell her, storekeepers at the mall could.