why is there nothing to buy, despite a plethora of stores ?

Countless stores, acres of floor selling space, nothing to buy....

Our coffee maker broke, so I went out to Mall Land - which, for those of us in the Boston Suburbs, is Framingham MA, at the corner of Speen Str and Route 9: the giant Natick Mall; the smaller shoppers world, walmart kohls target lowes homedepot, not to mention all the discount stores on Rt9

What was surprising to me was that there was a limited selection of coffee makers - all the stores had largely the same items - and within that selection, very little choice.

If you wanted a "plain" coffee maker, with just an on/off switch, there were 1 or 2 offerings in the 10 to 20 dollar range; they looked cheap poorly designed.
If you didn't like these, you had to go to something with a lot of electronic controls.
There were no simple, well designed, elegant in a minimilisic way coffee pots like our old Braun 4085
I am not, as this post shows the only person who mourns the passing of a simple coffee maker.

What is worse is what has happened to vacumn cleaners. A vacumn cleaner should have a disposable bag; that way you can discard the dust with no muss/no fuss. almost all of the VCs on sale had re usable clear canisters - you have to shake them out somehow, which, in my experience, leads to dust pretty much everywhere.

Even worse are all the fancy, but useless curves; just like tail lights on 50s cars. I think dyson is responsible, he started this trend of useless gimmickry