Business is brisk at second-hand stores as we slide down the luxury goods food chain, writes Quentin Fottrell.
CONSIDERING ALL our conspicuous consumption, chomping on the fruit of the boom these past 10 years, it was the ultimate slap in the face: a pyramid of boxes to help cure our over-indulgences: Celebrity Slim, a seven-day meal replacement programme being heavily marketed in Irish chemists. It offers low-calorie shakes and soup for the soul or, in their language, a low-carb weight-loss programme.
Who needs this carrot and stick? Wouldn't home-made soups and salads, washed down with Alka-Seltzer do the job? A Woody Guthrie-inspired Lidl Salad Bowl Blues? Oh, Lord. Was this the Armageddon the Taoiseach was talking about? We tighten our belts, literally and figuratively, but we can't even downsize without being bombarded by easy-to-make diet drinks, flavoured with a sprig of celebrity.
Meal-replacement products are not new, but it was the word "Celebrity" not "Slim" that bugged me. The ever-elusive fame and fortune, the hunger to emulate the celebrated has been used to sell clothing, make-up, eye creams, sports gear and perfume.
Now, we are being encouraged to be "Celebrity Slim". In our own chemists . . . where we go when we feel ill. I feel my lunch coming back up.
Exercise will help, but they say: "One of the great things about the Celebrity Slim is your results are mainly diet-dependent, that is, you don't have to do any real exercise to achieve your goals."
To whom it may concern at Celebrity Slim: I'm going to hang on to my tummy, if you don't mind, if only for a reminder of where my money went. I'll take a run along the Grand Canal if I want to get rid of it.
Like Celebrity Slim, our downsizing has been repackaged as another marketing ploy. It's all about vintage, darling. And Lidl and Aldi, where you can also buy a wet suit and global positioning system should you find yourself in cold water or stranded on a desert island. (After Armageddon. . .) Middle-class shoppers want to show they are rich and successful, but now get to be cheap-chic and clever too.
The survey published last week by the National Consumer Agency showed nearly one-third of consumers - by the way, who or where are the non-consumers? - changed their shopping habits in the last year: 61 per cent who shop around visit Lidl, 54 per cent favour Aldi. Yes, that's what happens in this incredible shrinking economy. You don't "shop around" by eating three times a day in Michelin-starred restaurants.
Cash Converters, the pawnbroker/pre-owned goods franchise, is benefiting at both ends of the downsizing shopathon: bargain-hunters, new immigrants and students love €30 DVD players, while overstretched punters flog their wares or borrow money at an interest rate of 5 to 12 per cent. General manager Shaun Gavin says: "The last four months have seen a vast uplift of second-hand goods."
They have seven stores in Ireland, including Thomas Street, Dublin 8 and Ballyfermot, Dublin 10, both traditional working-class areas, and plan two more in Talbot Street, Dublin 1 and Bray. In the near term Gavin says that Cash Converters plans to open 15 new stores countrywide.
"We treat our customers with the same respect as anyone who walks into Brown Thomas," he says.
I don't doubt that, but it is always sad to see someone else's diamond ring in a window. Pawnbrokers rightly or wrongly get a bad rap for high interest rates/margins, but they provide a service for consenting cash-poor adults, a band-aid for an open wound that needs to stop bleeding within 28 days . . . if you want to buy that ring back.
As we run out of cash and credit, luxury goods companies gently lower us down the food chain from €15,000 collectables to €1,500 handbags to €500 shoes to €300 cashmere sweaters to €100 silk ties for him or €100 bras for her to €50 T-shirts and €20 key-rings, until we finally end up at the stalls on Thomas Street, buying toilet roll in bulk.
This food chain works both ways: Michelle Obama wore an off-the-rack $148 Donna Ricco dress on TV last month, which sold out. As a consumer she was doing what Barack failed to do as a politician: help re-brand the Family Obama as ordinary folk rather than liberal elitists. The mania surrounding this dress shows that people adopt more modest tastes, but forever crave stuff they don't need.
We live in the Land of the Cut-Priced Hat Boxes. (They were piled high in one upmarket shop in Wexford.) What do you buy when you have everything? Hats. What do you buy when you have OD'd on hats? Hat boxes. What do you buy when you've stored your hats? Hat boxes with 50 per cent off. You can store useless bits-and-bobs in them. And more hat boxes give the illusion of more hats.
As a last resort, I recently took refuge at a Socialist Workers talk about how advertisers market happiness. I had heard it all before, but I was prepared to listen until the very end when the mobile phones started ringing and one-by-one they were outed as supporters of capitalist oppressors Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Siemens. It was, however, a timely reminder to switch to pay-as-you-go.