Paramus, NJ

Tyler Cowen directs us to Paramus, NJ:

In This Town, Even a Mall Rat Can Get Rattled - New York Times By KEN BELSON: It is fitting that the first store drivers heading south on Route 17 see as they enter town is a Stop & Shop. After all, Paramus is one of the nation's strongest shopping magnets, generating roughly $5 billion a year in retail sales.... [F]ew places rival the sheer concentration of stores in this otherwise unremarkable suburb 18 miles northwest of Times Square. In an already densely populated state, Paramus has more parking spots than people. Four major malls and dozens of smaller shopping centers are packed into 10 square miles.... The town has 27,000 residents, and about 2,700 stores. There is a Saks Fifth Avenue and a Sears; at least two dozen chains, including Borders, Old Navy and Macy's, have more than one outlet within Paramuss boundaries.

It is a Faustian bargain that brings 200,000 cars a day into town during December, turning the roads into virtual parking lots, but also keeps property tax rates in Paramus relatively low -- $1.55 per $100 of assessed value, compared with $3.88 in Maywood, the next town over. And there is no sign of letup: two of the four malls are spending $100 million each to spruce themselves up, big-box stores are sprouting where strip malls and bygone department stores once sat, and traffic seems to get worse each year....

Residents have groaned about the traffic for years, but largely put up with it because of how much money visitors spent in the town's stores. They also won reprieves on Sundays, when the town prohibits sales of practically everything, making Paramus a virtual ghost town...

The fact that Paramus grows even with Sunday closures is, I think, the most fascinating thing in the article>