It was a few years ago that I worked and lived in Pennsylvania. Beautiful state and beautiful people there.

It is also the home for a very large Amish population. You can often see them in their horse and buggies on side roads and country roads.

While living there in Pennsylvania I had heard about the King of Prussia Mall. People would talk about it a lot. It is one the largest malls in America. It has over 400 stores of all kinds including very upscale stores.

One Saturday morning I decided to go check out this mall...

About a hundred feet into the mall I saw an Amish man with a table. He had a whole host of beautiful apple pies laid out. They were quite magnificent, over stuffed and very large. His sign read "Six dollars each".

Wow! No doubt that these were delicious hand baked apple pies with totally natural ingredients.

The Amish man didn't look happy. It seems to me that he was disappointed that his apple pies weren't selling. Maybe none at all. Even though they were an astonishing bargain.

I thought, "how am I going to carry this enormous apple pie around with me? "

This lead me back to the unhappy Amish man. He didn't realize that this was the reason his apple pies weren't selling. Nobody wanted to carry them around!

I should have talked to him but I didn't. I moved on into the mall.

I enjoyed walking around the mall. But it is enormous and it is very easy to get lost! And that is, of course, the intention. If you wander around you end up in a variety of shops and you end up buying more. Losing sense of time is good for sales.

This is why you will never see a clock in a mall. They don't want you to worry about the time. You might leave!

I stopped at a kiosk that was selling sunglasses. I needed a pair of sunglasses so I looked them all over, and tried on several different ones -noting that there were no price tags on them.

I found a pair that I really liked. They looked great and they fit on me very well. So I asked the employee at the kiosk how much they cost.

His reply flabbergasted me.

He looked at me with a deadpan calmness and said "Six hundred Dollars".

I couldn't believe it. And I didn't buy them.

I walked away from the kiosk thinking that with that same amount of money I could have bought 100 hand made apple pies.

Things can go very wrong with a system that puts too much value on things that have no actual value. I mean image, looks, status and stuff like that. This whole system can easily run right off the rails - in the wrong direction.