The "definitive guide" title is an exaggeration, but the article mentions U.S. alternatives like Target and Sephora.

I think an attempt at a world-spanning set of recommendations would have been spread so thinly as to be useless for everybody, even if in theory it covered their region. I think it's better to have an article that picks a country/region to focus on and does that in depth. Some other journalists/newspapers can handle doing similar articles for the US, Japan, Germany, etc, and as local journos they'll have more experience of what they're writing about and a wider array of contacts to get good suggestions from.