1 - Luxury goods

Summary

On 31 December 1987 The Times carried the following report,

A Lake District Hotel is offering weekend breaks costing nearly £1,000 a day. Guests paying £1,995 each will be served grouse, venison, fillet steak, lobster, caviar, truffles and pâté de foie gras. Miss Carolyn Graves, a director of the hotel, said,

‘The big-spending break is for people who work so hard that holidays are a rarity and have to be crammed full of a year's worth of pleasure.’ …

Those include return helicopter travel from up to 200 miles, a self-drive or chauffeur driven Rolls-Royce, the hotel's luxury suite with its spa bath and sunbathing tower, a case of champagne per person, the pick of the cellar, a personal chef to cook whatever takes the guests' fancy, and two sheepskin coats and personalized crystal decanter and glasses as souvenirs.

The Times called this a ‘luxury weekend’ and it does indeed represent, even to the possible extent of self-parody, what would appear to be commonly conjured up by the use of the word ‘luxury’.

Open any newspaper or magazine, turn to the advertisements placed by commercial retailers, and the word ‘luxury’ will recur and recur. Since this is a commercial context, we can be reasonably confident that this rhetoric must be thought to be a selling-point. Obviously in the competitive market-place advertisers are not going to proclaim their products deficient, inadequate or even average.