While it once sold makeup almost exclusively in department stores, Lauder now generates more revenues through mass-market stores and boutiques.

Below 23d Street, the mass-market stores on Sixth Avenue had been barely a block away from the elite stores on Broadway, like Tiffany's and Brooks Brothers.

As shoppers search for cheaper alternatives to the department and specialty stores, mass-market stores like Target and Kmart and chain drugstores are likely to benefit, retail consultants said.

But while most big-name designers and mass-market stores have invented life-style myths with slick marketing, there is a real life style beneath the Quiksilver logo: the surfer life.

Most men's underwear in the United States is made by Hanes and Fruit of the Loom and sold at mass-market stores like Wal-Mart and Kmart.

The tube, priced at $6, appeared on shelves of mass-market stores.

There's no reason there has to be a division between the type of merchandise at a mass-market store and a department store.

Adding to the headache of traditional department-store retailers is the emergence of cheap faux fashion undergarments at mass-market stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Kmart.

And probably the most significant difference is that we do not carry the products carried in mass-market stores, the major toy brands.

In the mass-market stores, 1 out of 10 bra purchases has a Fruit of the Loom label, which is also produced by Warnaco.