Business Insider/Mary Hanbury Primark just opened a new store in Brooklyn.
- Primark, a low-cost European apparel chain, is rolling out more stores in the United States. It opened its ninth US store this week, in Brooklyn, New York.
- The store was described by one Bloomberg writer as a new version of H&M, only with Kmart prices.
- We visited the new store to find out what it is like to shop there.
Primark is making a slow and steady expansion into the United States.
The low-cost, European-headquartered clothing chain just opened its ninth store in the US on July 7. Located in the Kings Plaza mall in Brooklyn, it's the second of the retailer's locations in New York.
Its expansion is timed well to take advantage of an explosion in value-oriented stores in the US. While department stores have suffered, off-price and dollar stores have experienced somewhat of a boom in recent times, enabling them to grow and add new locations across the country.
Experts say that the success of value stores can be attributed to larger social changes.
"The middle is disappearing - low and middle-income customers increasingly shop at discounters and dollar stores, forcing retailers that once served these customers, like Bon-Ton and its subsidiary brands, to close shop," analysts from intelligence firm Gartner L2 wrote in a recent report on department stores.
As the middle class has shrunk, the most successful businesses in
Retail is changing in line with consumer income divides, the report said, meaning that high-end and budget retailers are seeing revenues soar, growing 81% and 37%, respectively, in the last five years, according to Deloitte. Meanwhile, the middle is being squeezed out and has only seen a 2% sales increase in the past five years.
We visited Primark's brand-new store in Brooklyn to see how it will fit into the US retail landscape: