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Category Archives: consumption
Wine Datapoint of the Day
Krug’s new single-vineyard Champagne, the 1995 Clos d’Ambonnay, will sell for between $3,000 and $3,500 a bottle. And it will sell all 3,000 bottles with ease; indeed, the price will be higher on the secondary market than it is on … Continue reading
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Innovations in Coffee
The best consequence of all the Starbucks news of late, at least for me, was Mike Mandel’s blog entry on the subject over at Business Week. Mandel wonders whether the slowdown in US Starbucks sales is an early sign of … Continue reading
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Do Pickup Truck Sales Make Any Sense?
I have lived all my life in cosmopolitan cities, I was in my 30s before I got a driver’s license, I know little about cars and less about trucks. So do please help me out on this one: I am … Continue reading
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Does LVMH Rule the Champagne Market?
Christina Passariello has an interesting WSJ article today on LVMH’s Champagne business, explaining at some length how the French luxury-goods giant sources all the grapes it needs to be the world’s biggest Champagne merchant. I do worry, though, that in … Continue reading
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What do US Consumers Have to Fall Back On?
Even as the economy has been growing over the couple of decades, people have been feeling increasingly insecure, perhaps because they have less and less to fall back on. Lane Kenworthy puts it well: Households now appear to be more … Continue reading
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Retail Quote of the Day
Joe Wiesenthal reads the WSJ: How about this quote from a retail industry trade group VP: "We don’t anticipate a lot of unplanned markdowns."
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How to Spend $40 Billion
The Sultan of Brunei pays his five PR people $12 million each. But still ends up with really bad press: The total bill was $40 billion. The gifts included $2,570,050 for masseuses and acupuncturists; $14,955,000 for a house supervisor in … Continue reading
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The Uselessness of Zagat’s Cost Estimates
Eleven Madison Park is a very good, and very expensive, restaurant. At dinner, the cheapest menu costs $82 per person. A glass of red wine will cost you somewhere between $8 and $26. So a dinner with one drink can’t … Continue reading
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The Price of Luxury
The Economist notes the evolution of the economics of luxury goods over the past year: while the goods themselves have increased in price by 6%, twice the rate of inflation, the income of the rich has increased by 9%, or … Continue reading
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Annals of Excess, Bar Tab Edition
How did the London revellers stay alive?
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The A380: Not the World’s Most Convenient Private Jet
Some bright spark with more money than sense has just dropped $300 million
on an Airbus A380 superjumbo jet – for
his personal use.
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What is Ben Stein Smoking? (Part 2)
Ben Stein might be the last man in America to think that building more Escalades is actually a good idea.
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Bogus Counterfeiting Statistics Spawn Protection Racket
The anti-counterfeiting industry is using fear to sell its products, rather than economic logic.
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The Beginning of the End of Imported Bottled Water
Out with imported bottled water. In with reverse-osmosis charcoal filtering systems.
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Power Laws and Luxury Goods
A new index from Merrill Lynch is a bet that the rich will continue to get richer, and that as and when they do so, they’re likely to splurge on ostentatious displays of wealth from established brand-names.
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