Two articles in the Financial Times today remind us about how the rich keep getting richer, financially anyway. From the first article:

• The buying power of the richest people in London, compared to the average citizen, is the greatest it’s been since the 1930s.
• In 1991, the top 1% of earners made 57,000 GBP or more. By 2004-5 the top 1% made 117,000 GBP or more.
• 30,000 people now make more than 500,000 GBP.

How are Londoners spending their “platinum pounds”? The second article offers up Harrods as an example.

Harrods, the fancy department store, has recently revamped its “By Appointment Only” personal shopper service. It now actively courts “cash-rich, time-poor” customers by offering free personal shoppers and a concierge service that will find not just the perfect apparel and gifts but will also find a driver, nanny or housekeeper. They will also call customers to remind them of anniversaries and the birthdays, and suggest gifts for the occasion.

This seems like an awful waste of luxury. Harrods is surely finding demand for such an involved service, but by suggesting which gifts to get and doing so much for these time-poor shoppers, they seem to be taking away any chance for the buyer to appreciate what is being purchased. They’re removing the emotional component, which in the long run hurts buyers and reduces luxury.

In the first of an ongoing series, we are sharing the perspectives of inidividual consumers, on their idea of luxury. Here is the testimony of Laura Meadowcroft:

bq.. To me luxury is new brushed cotton pyjama trousers and my aunt’s bedding (the pillows are feather and yet springy). To my aunt, luxury is a 5-star hotel in the Maldives with great room service. To the man delivering the room service, luxury is the superior brand of fish he can buy that evening with the tip given to him by my aunt.

Luxury is subjective.

The more you have, the higher the leap you make to achieve luxury. A Ferrari to my aunt would perhaps be as achievable, if not more so, than a weeks’ holiday with his family for the room service guy, or for me to purchase pillows like hers.

The ‘experience’, so key to luxury consumerism now, must also be subjective. Harrods–arguably the most famous of the luxury outlets in the UK is the outlet of choice for the rich and famous–it’s my idea of hell. Why? Because, although nobody looks tatty, it is always ridiculously busy, I can never find anything but the toy section, and it has a Charlie and the Chocolate factory style sweet section, in which I can barely afford a lollypop.

Then again, Mr. Al Fayed wouldn’t close a floor to the public if I asked.

This consumer discrepancy over the true meaning of luxury opens up the market; almost anything can be marketed as a luxury product to a certain consumer base. Perhaps then, it is easier to divide luxury into ‘mass luxury’–those, now nearly everyday products, which are consumed by the majority of the contemporary middle class, and ‘class luxury’, those items, which really are only available to the upper echelons of society.

James Twitchell, in _Living it Up – Our Love Affair with Luxury_ states that: “the heart of luxury is the irrational acceptance of magical thinking. If we could own this one item, then things would somehow change”.

It is this key concept of luxury that provides the space for such a broad market. To me, what would currently (and indeed irrationally) make my life change is the purchase of an £800 Steve Job’s masterpiece, in the form of a top spec, black, mac-book–through this I will become a best selling novelist. To a daughter of a friend, whom I took shopping last week, a £40 outfit from Pilot (a somewhat trashy, harshly-lit high-street chain, was a luxurious aspiration–one which would make her look cool at school.

Once I’d purchased the said outfit for her as a treat, she bounced round the city overjoyed, and has worn it every evening since–the novelty will obviously wear off swiftly, as will that of my soon-to-be-purchased laptop as the rejection letters pile up. But they were ambitions and luxury in the first instance, and that’s the essential point.

Sainsbury’s bottled water sells because, to some, it is a luxury afforded over tap water. To others it’s Volvic; to some Evian; to others Perrier, (infused with magical bubbles). Each of these, essentially identical brand (they’re all Hydrogen and Oxygen in a bottle) survives because their branding and their cost makes them a luxury concept to a certain market.