Hold Onto Your Lady Parts...We're Getting Our Very Own "Power Center"!!!

Image via Racked.com

It’s now officially confirmed that BK gals won’t have to leave the borough to get their beauty fix, according to Racked.com. The first Brooklyn Sephora outpost will be housed in the Municipal Building downtown, and that’s not all ladies...

Sephora will allegedly be "the anchor for what is becoming a women's power center” in downtown Brooklyn.

Wait, what?

What the hell is a women’s power center? Isn’t that just called a mall?

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Introducing A New Kind of Window Shopping: Soon We Will All Be Robots

A new vintage housewares store has popped up in South Park Slope, and instead of featuring quirky, cross-dressing mannequins or boxes of old records in the window, it features nothing more than photos of the available items and QR codes. (you know, those things that no one in America uses?)

Robert Henry Vintage is a store that you can't actually step foot in to peep potential purchases. "We call it the ultimate in window shopping,'" co-owner Robert Walden recently told DNAinfo.com. "You can come by and look at the stuff and buy stuff without having to interact with anybody." 

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Wallet-Friendly Retail Therapy: Where do you get your fix?

One of my biggest weaknesses is retail therapy; that feeling of satisfaction and temporary happiness that comes with buying something -- sometimes, anything. I have a friend who hits up William Sonoma whenever she's frustrated with the rest of her life. Granted, she has a paycheck that can support such shopping sprees. I'm not saying retail therapy is bad (it ain't good), but for those of us who need it, it's helpful to know where we can go in the hood to get that fleeting feeling without breaking the bank.

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[What You Should Buy At]... Time Galleries

Park Slope is pretty lousy when it comes to furniture shopping. Why?  I’m guessing it's a lack of spacious retail space, and also because a significant percentage of us are nomadic renters who don’t want to spend too much on giant, heavy items that might not fit into our next abode. 

Just check out how much IKEA shit is for sale on Craiglslist. 

However, if you ARE interested in more solid stuff and don’t mind previously-owned items, check out Time Galleries on 5^th Ave (near 15^th Street).  This is a store jammed to the rafters with used antique and higher end furniture including tables, dressers, chairs, chandeliers and desks. It’s literally aisle after aisle of aisles made of furniture.  And they have a basement, which is equally stuffed full of goodies.

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Why it's Mostly Better to Shop Local (and how to avoid being annoying about it)

Photo via Flickr User Betty Blade

Maybe you're one of those people who looks for every opportunity to go on a long rant about how you never buy stuff from Amazon because they put independent booksellers out of business.  Is that you?  If so, please just shut up, okay?

Photo via www.coloraddict.com

Yes, it's important to shop with local retailers in Park Slope.  Don't get me wrong.  But if you're one of those people who feel the need to prosthelytize about it, well...  you need to know that you've been annoying everyone you've ever spoken to on any given day of your pathetic, miserable, carb-obsessed life.  So shut up about it, and think about where, puh-zactly, those boundaries should be.

Let's start with food.  I'm fully on-board with this whole locavore, slow-food, sustainable, blahdy-blahdy-blah business.  The bottom line for me is, if a restaurant in my neighborhood is only going to serve me produce that's in season and was grown no further than 200 miles from where I'm eating it, my meal is just plain going to taste better.  That's not science, people.  That's common sense.  That's the reason that you don't order scallops in Oklahoma City.  Wake up, smell the coffee, and choose Applewood over Applebees.

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