Gold has fascinated the human race for thousands of years. It’s mentioned in the Bible, the Koran and even in Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Aztecs were so taken by it that they called it the excrement of the Gods. And as nasty as that sounds it’s a pretty good compliment.
Whenever gold has been found there has been a gold rush. And normally it means death and destruction ensued as in the case of when South America was found by the Europeans and the conquistadors and caused widespread annihilation of tribes . It also led to the gold rushes in the States when gold was found in California.
Although when you think of gold you think that there’d be quite a lot of it around. Though according to the National Geographic “”In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.” That would make a cube of gold 20 metres by 20 metres.
It also means that most of the gold mined throughout history, from the Aztecs to the Egyptians and the Romans is still in circulation today. So the gold in your necklace, rings or whatever has probably been worn by people for millenia.
That’s why gold is sold in carats and is diluted down with other metals and why Argos can sell gold.
The price of gold also fluctuates greatly. In 1999 it reached an all time low of $252.90/oz but recovered to a record $1023.50/oz on March 17, 2008. It’s so in demand at the moment that they now sell 12.5kg gold bars off the shelf in Harrods.
So gold is not only pretty and shiny but any that you have is as old as the hill and massively historic. And that’s pretty cool.
Back in the early days, the dawn of consumerism there used to only be two sales a year. Summer and Winter. A chance to clear out all the crap that wasn’t sold during the season. And that was great. It was practical. What it wasn’t was a cheap marketing tool to shoehorn people into the shops. Walking around now there seems to be a permanent sale.
There are now four seasons in high street fashion as well as mid season sales and Christmas sales and Summer sales and and and… The list goes on and on. Companies are getting more and more clever at selling things to us and the sale is the ultimate form of it.
We’re conned into believing that we’re getting a bargain deal. Really, we’re still being sold stuff with a profit margin but we’re made to believe that it’s the bargain of the century. It’s unbelievable to think that people queue outside shops to be first to trawl through the reduced stuff. We all know Harrods line of, “There is only one sale.”
When Harrods put on a sale, Mohammed Al Fayed gets out his little black book, yes, his cheque book that is, and gets the seasons must have celeb down to open the sale. All the while the baying mob is held back and fed and watered like caged beast to watch the celebrity procession whilst the media film and photograph them. Check out how they break through the line of security guards and run in the video below. A definite highlight comes at 1m 25s when Al Fayed humps Lily Allen with a dog. Puns with bitches comes to mind…
The biggest problem with sales is that it’s filled with stuff that you don’t want. It’s always Large or Extra Large and it’s all the stuff that wasn’t even good in the first place. This means as a regular shopper who just wants to go in and buy a small t-shirt, you have to contend with a million large ladies fighting over the last tent sized 18 top. Shops descend into a what looks like a war zone. Clothes strewn everywhere, massive queue at the tills, lines for the fitting room.
And it only gets worse. The sale culture has lead to one of the most horrble shops in history’s creation. TK Maxx is like a perma-sale shop. Bursting at the seems with bargain hunters, looking through the most rancid of last years “designer” collections. If only you could instill in all these people that it’s not the label on the clothes it’s how it looks on that counts. I doubt it’ll ever happen.
So what is to be done? Maybe we could all boycott the sales so they’d stop doing them. If it continues on like this all shops will just permanently have sales on and everywhere will end up like TK Maxx. And that could possibly be the worst thing in the world.
P.S. You gotta love that awkward laugh that girls do when a rich arab puts a dog on their head. Does anyone else find these pictures a bit wierd?
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