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| Lifestyles
of the Rich and Shameless |
| Is the United States becoming a nation where everyone will either be super-rich or work in the personal service of those who are? The latest sign of our bifurcated times: A Los Angeles-based company, Golden Eagle Publishing, has launched a glossy magazine “catering to the devoted domestics of millionaires-turned-billionaires.” The new Celeb Staff bimonthly is aiming for a readership that includes “real estate managers, nannies, butlers, chauffeurs, investment bankers, valets, chefs, and even personal pilots.” Beth Torre, Golden Eagle’s director of operations, feels certain her company has a winner in Celeb Staff. With super-rich households juggling three homes and private jets, she explains, “it’s taking more and more people to run the lives of high net-worth individuals.” September 3, 2007 |
| In China, the mayor of Beijing is urging the city’s billboard industry to start showing a little restraint. Billboards touting luxury cars and villas, the Xinhua news agency notes, now appear on nearly every major Beijing street, “constantly reminding people of the yawning income gap between the rich and the poor.” And that, charges Mayor Wang Qishan, makes for a climate “not conducive to harmony in the capital.” The billboards apparently pose more than a mental health danger. Ad companies, in their haste to reach China’s new rich, have cut corners on billboard construction quality. Several huge billboards, Xinhua reports, have collapsed in high winds and killed unwary passers-by. May 14, 2007 |
| The world’s top luxury cellular phone maker, Nokia’s Vertu division, has just unveiled a new product line for 2007. The price-tag on the new line’s top-end model: $310,000. Who’s buying phones that retail in the six digits? Vertu, Reuters reports, is marketing at swells whose idea of a fun day includes “breakfast in London, shopping in Paris and a late dinner in New York.” One of Vertu’s new phones comes wrapped “in a diamond-perforated leather” specially treated to resist “almost everything from lipstick to suntan lotion.” Vertu sales jumped 140 percent last year. This year, a Vertu flack predicts, the Nokia luxury division will sell 100,000 phones. April 23, 2007 |
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