There is little rigor behind most of the claims of the NYTime story: The targeted site already negates any pagerank benefit of their links (they do implement nofollow), and the definitive example seems to be nothing more than good SEO of the site in question (most of the other front and second page sites are pretty mediocre as well, clearly with little web competition in the keyword space).
In any case, go to a shopping specific (sub)site if shopping. A google search is a terrible way of find either products or retailers.
Note: I do SEO as part of my job, so I know a few tools that can look through this. Google keyword checker gives 590 searches a month for that phrase, so it's not too competitive. I'm sure he ranks for a lot of these tail phrases though.
A lot of his juice comes from every page (seems to be over 10,000 according to Yahoo Site Explorer) on his site linking with good anchor text to every other page. The fact that he ranks so low (on my Google he's number 6 or so) even with this on such an easy term shows something, doesn't it?
In any case, go to a shopping specific (sub)site if shopping. A google search is a terrible way of find either products or retailers.