“Let’s not panic,” Sir Philip Green, the proprietor of Topshop, the fashion behemoth that dominates Main Street retailing in England said Thursday morning. The retailer was pep-talking his staff moments before the doors were flung open to the hordes lined up on Broadway for the long-delayed opening of Topshop’s first American store, a 25,000-square-foot emporium in SoHo.

“Let’s try to keep a nice even flow,” Mr. Green added, words that could easily serve as a mantra for the many American retailers struggling to lure warm bodies into stores during a recession, which the British merchant claimed has left his business untouched.

“All journalists want to talk about is the recession, but somebody must be shopping, because we’re doing a couple of billion dollars of volume,” said Mr. Green, whose privately held Arcadia Group reported operating profits of $502 million for the year that ended in August, a decline of 6.1 percent from the previous year.

Part of that owed to the volume of customers drawn into Topshop’s London flagship (as many as 250,000 pass through the doors of the Oxford Circus store every week, Mr. Green said). Replicating those numbers here would be a feat in any economy, let alone in a time of unrelenting doldrums.