When the talk of outlets coming to Tulsa, a lot of people mentioned how Oklahoma laws make it where outlet merchandise cannot be damaged/defective/reject items so they're not "true" outlets and that makes them better.
I saw an interesting statistic that about 85% of outlet merchandise is brand-new made-for-outlets. They're just lower quality products made to be sold more cheaply. Most of the time, they're entirely separate operations. The companies are doing a tier system to capture all ranges of the market. Similar to how Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy were all owned by the same company which markets a bit pricey, medium and cheap, respectively. The outlets are just the lowest tier.
When that outlet jacket says MSRP $99 marked down to $14.99, it's just a sub-par $14.99 jacket to begin with which they slapped a brand name on to snag bargain hunters (who may have no idea what that brand quality usually looks like).
It looks like Oklahoma is about the same as anywhere else in terms of having basically all new made-for-outlet products at Outlet malls. That makes the prospect of an outlet mall even worse in my eyes. Eventually, more people will view outlets as low-quality scams rather than hubs of great deals. Hard to imagine it being much of an emerging market, but I guess they'll try to siphon every penny they can and keep building endless retail so long as those tax perks make it profitable.
Dig far enough back in this 55 page thread and I think that conclusion has been drawn several times. Not that I'd expect you to go back several hundred comments to find that.
Does anyone know if there's been movement on the Simon development down in Jenks? Last I was there in June, I didn't see anything which looked like it was moving forward but that was passing by on the Creek Turnpike.
