Retailers have to get increasingly more creative to keep customer count up during a down economy. There's no "one size fits all" formula for it, but Clark wants to share a few reports that have caught his eye.

One small boutique in Arkansas hired a fortune teller to give free readings during a sale, according to the Associated Press. Another boutique brought in a nurse practitioner to do health screenings on customers.

Of course, the traditional approach to capturing customers entails lowering your prices. Clark is seeing a lot of that at boutiques that his wife shops. But if you discount in tough times, you'll look bad when you try to raise prices to their "normal" level when things recover.

In big retailing, the companies doing the best are the ones who are "vertically integrated." An example of this would be Zara, a European clothing retailer that has a relatively low profile in the United States. Zara designs, manufactures and sells their clothes -- they're the whole package -- and that's what makes them vertically integrated.

The average ticket price at Zara is $27, according to The Wall Street Journal. Zara is particularly good at monitoring runway fashions in Paris and elsewhere, and then designing, manufacturing and selling similar garments in about 2-3 weeks. Wow, that's fast!