Yesterday on “The Colbert Report” I saw a clip about The Luxury Institute, a marketing research group aimed at high-priced luxury brands. Here is an insightful page from the website:
As far as I can tell, the data is from the FRB’s Consumer Finances Survey.
In an interview, the CEO of the Luxury Institute, Milton Pedraza, discusses the difficulties of being extremely wealthy during an economic downturn, since “Who wants to be the focus of attention on greedy spending in a tremendous crisis?”. He suggests buying an environmentally-friendly yacht and high-end products that don’t have ostentatious logos as ways to be discreet. Also,
“I don’t think you’ll want to show up in your orange Lamborghini,” Pedraza said. “You might want to bring your navy blue BMW instead.”…Likewise, forget $10,000 mobile phones and buy an iPhone instead.
Dammit! I hate it when I have to drive my boring navy BMW just because everybody else suddenly got poor. What’s the point of being rich if I can’t rub it in everybody else’s face? Man. Everybody thinks the rich don’t really suffer in a recession, but they just don’t know what we go through. They just don’t know.
