RE "DOWNSCALED hopes for an upscale mall" (Money & Careers, May 4): If business was bad before, I don't think beating up on the rich but tasteless is the business-savvy way to turn things around.
What is apparently lost on Betty Riaz, owner of the boutique Stil, who says, "We have to educate our customers on style," is that aside from money we also have brains (that's how we got the money), and the suggestion that we must be taught to become fashionably enlightened enough to anoint her with our business is at the very least insulting.
If graduating to the necessary level of "taste" means aspiring to looking like the lady in the photo accompanying the article, then I pass. I'll just continue my tasteless shopping sprees at the likes of Max Mara, where I feel welcome and even tastefully cool.
ELAYNE N. ALANIS
Boston
US COUNTRY bumpkins out here on the frontier are real sorry we don't have good taste and need to be "educated on style." When we need some new duds, we jes' hop in the pickup and mosey over to the Salvation Army store in Framingham.
If $3,000 bags and $500 shaving kits, as found in the luxury wing of the Natick Collection, constitute good taste, then Riaz and other store owners might be in need of a little education themselves.
RICHARD DARGAN
Natick
We are sneered at by a retail analyst for our Yankee thriftiness and by a retail consultant for our obsession with sports rather than fashion.
Perhaps rather than being unhealthily preoccupied with ephemeral "luxury" items, these consumers are focused on investing in IRAs and 401(k)s and saving to provide a secure life. My grocery store only accepts the money inside a Louis Vuitton bag as payment, not the bag itself. A Red Sox ticket is indeed a luxury, but my motto is, I'd rather own a memory than a thing (especially with Manny in the hunt for his 500th home run).
To the retail "experts," may I paraphrase? "The fault, dear Natick Collection, is not in your stars but in yourselves."
MARY JO McGEE
Wellesley
