What one powerful clothing chain can tell you about world peace.

I had never heard of Zara until I came to Israel, though the company currently has 102 stores in the US. Its owner, Amancio Ortega, has a net worth of over $140 billion and is currently listed as the tenth richest person in the world. Just as MySpace and Facebook are in the same internet space but cannot be compared ($1.44 trillion Facebook market cap versus MySpace sold in 2011 for $35 million), there are plenty of other clothing stores—but few that seem to connect with the consumer like Zara. When Princess Catherine Wales wears one of their items, it sells out online in the space of a few minutes.

Zara has a once-a-year sale in Israel. It was announced for both online and store purchases. My wife tried to buy items online but, due to the overwhelming demand, could not finish her purchase. So we went to their store in the Mamilla Mall. The mall itself is an interesting piece of history. It stood as No-Man’s-Land between the Jordanian Old City of Jerusalem and Israeli New Jerusalem. For years after Israel’s 1967 victory over Jordan, Israel didn’t really know what to do with the land. On the one side were the venerable walls of the ancient city, and on the other were the newer buildings pocked by years of Jordanian firing on the fledgling state of Israel. When I first walked through the area in 1989, it was a bunch of blue colored empty stalls that had not seen business in over two decades. In the 1990s, Israel decided that the time had come to develop the area. Today, it is a high-end mall with restaurants and hotels. It’s about as close as one can get to a US mall in Jerusalem with Tommy, Ralph, Adidas, Nike, and many Israeli brands. We went to Zara, and it looked like the McCallister home in the first Home Alone. People were running in every direction with goods in their hands. The line for the changing rooms was half a mile long.........

© Townhall