Consider this mystery of life in the big city: Why is it that so many stores of the same kind should cluster in my neighborhood on the Upper East Side? No sooner, it seems, is a commercial space vacated due to high rents than a bank moves in, or a nail salon, or a mobile-phone outlet. There was a time when we saw waves of frame stores, then purveyors of penny candy, and now these, whose supply far exceeds any conceivable demand. They spring up by the dozens and then disappear, as though in obedience to some obscure Darwinian law. In the meantime, they are sucking the life out of Yorkville.

God forbid a neighborhood should ever get an enterprise it actually needs. You would think that, through the sheer snobbery of the locals, a fancy bakery like Fauchon would have survived on Madison and 78th. But no, after little more than two years, what was arguably the finest patisserie in our woebegone hemisphere – the only one whose croissants and millefeuilles could hold a candle to those of the fabulous First Arrondissement – has shut its doors. You can hardly walk one block in Paris without tripping upon a bakery finer than any on the North American continent. But here on the Upper East Side, for all our pretensions, we couldn’t keep Fauchon in business. You would now be hard-put to find more than a half-dozen real bakeries from 96th Street to Midtown.

The curious thing about the mobile phone outlets that currently populate the storefronts is that that they are almost invariably bigger than they need to be. The number of wares they hold could easily be stored in a little commode in a corner. A new Cingular store that has opened up on Third Avenue between 85th and 86th is something to see: The cavernous forecourt that separates the customer, as he enters, from the distant counter where he is to be served, amounts to the corporate equivalent of conspicuous consumption. Cingular seems to be boasting that it is so massive and powerful that it can rent and expend all that space without giving it a second thought.

At the same time, something else is at work in this huge waste of space. It reflects what we might call the bubble aesthetic of postmodern, postindustrial design. This often builds into itself a sense of hollowness and surplus, as though to declare that state-of-the-art technology is so pared down that physicality is itself merely a courtesy to the clumsiness of human use. That triumphant flimsiness is encoded, if you will, in the very structure of this new store, whose shockingly yellow and orange walls, ablaze with neon and track lights, seem to have been fashioned from lengths of day-glo plastic-wrap. Its floor is a thin layer of tin whose hollowness resounds as you pass over it. I have been unable to learn the identity of the designers of this new shop, but for sheer audacity they deserve our congratulations.

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In the gripe with which I began this column, I could almost have included upscale coffee shops along with nail salons and all the rest. But in fact these purveyors of overpriced lattes are on the decline, now that Starbucks is consolidating its city and worldwide monopoly.

Allow me to say that, since I am a “hardened and shameless tea drinker,” to invoke the words Dr. Johnson once applied to himself, the opening of a new Starbucks on Third and 84th – a stone’s throw from the new Cingular – represents only one more lugubrious instance of a new business in my neighborhood that I will never enter or patronize. But I did buy a cup of coffee the other day, and I did all it for the readers of the New York Sun.

I was investigating the new flagship for Juan Valdez Coffee that has just opened at 140 E. 57th Street and bids fair to give Starbucks a run for its money. This coffeehouse was designed by two Iranian sisters, Hariri & Hariri, for the National Federation of Colombian Coffee Growers. If the press release is to be believed, they “have taken the concept of the 19th-century Viennese coffeehouse and exploded this sedate paradigm into an undulating multi-sensory experience.” I confess I didn’t hear any explosion when I was there and, for that matter, we could really use a few more unexploded Viennese coffeehouses around the city (especially those that purvey a first-rate Dobos torte).

In any event, the best thing about Hariri & Hariri’s design is the austere gray facade of the four-story building, whose first floor alone is occupied by the coffee shop. The well-known image of Valdez (an entirely made-up entity) is etched into a stainless steel chain-link screen that covers a monolithic gray facade relieved by a single expansive window at street level. As for the interior, we are told that the teak wood around the entrance is supposed to suggest the color of coffee and that the folded plane into which it is configured is supposed to suggest a coffee bean. On your right as you enter is a huge undulating white “liquid wall” that wraps around most of the interior.

The problem is that this bold statement clashes tactilely with the organic feel of the wood and the metallic mood of the exterior, not to mention the gilded mosaics and South American patterned fabric of the interior. Though the result is not unpleasant by any means, the cavernous interior seems slightly too big for the frail tables and chairs that inhabit it. The result, a few felicities aside, is a sense of insufficiency, at least in comparison with the new cingular store, where emptiness really resonates.