This makes me feel almost sorry for them.
Not as sorry as the prospect of maybe having to eat them, though.
Prices for luxury goods rose twice as quickly as consumer prices this year, a study found, showing the jet set need even more to fund their lavish lifestyle.
That just makes your heart bleed, doesn’t it? They need more money to finance an already obscenely priced lifestyle. Next thing you know, they’re gonna have to squeeze you, the Little Consumer, even harder to get the blood out of that stone.
Forbes’s Cost of Living Extremely Well Index (CLEWI) — which measures the price of a basket of luxury goods — rose by 6 percent in the year to August 2007, Forbes said, more than twice the U.S. consumer inflation rate.
And just what does that “basket of luxury goods” consist of, I wonder?
A Shanghai resident recently bought a Hermes crocodile-skin bag for 1.6 million yuan ($213,100), Hermes said in June, equivalent to 65 times the city’s average annual wage.
And the Cap Gemini study this year noted the success of $150 million apiece wide-body private jets that are so comfortable they function as mobile mansions.
In the Forbes index several items showed double-digit price rises compared to a year ago.
A catered dinner serving 40 at Ridgewells, Bethesda, Maryland, rose by a third to $9,795, representing the index’s heftiest price rise. A yearling race horse from championship lines is $710,247, up 14 percent.
A Russian sable fur coat from Maximilian at Bloomingdale’s cost $225,000, up 18 percent, while a facelift at the American Academy of Facial Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery rose 17 percent to $17,000.
But the standard fee for 45 minutes with a psychiatrist in New York’s Upper East Side is unchanged at $300 for 45 minutes, one bright spot for those in despair over rising prices.
What, no groceries in that basket? That’s going to make eating these clowns rather hard. I don’t fancy chowing down on a racehorse, a sable coat, or the scar tissue from a face lift.
But at least they won’t have to pay extra to cry a river to someone who probably wonders what the hell anyone so stinkingly rich could possibly have to cry about.
PS: I think I just figured out why they’re all so weepy–they’re gonna have to give up caviar. Poor babies! Mother Earth is such a bitch for refusing to sustain your appetite for fish eggs. No wonder you need Dr. Siggy–you hate your mama!
