Cathal C.
Yelp
Brown Thomas, that beacon to Dublin's moneyed classes, is located on Dublin's Grafton St, and is surely the country's most famous department store. These days, I would only ever consider entering the shop if I had to buy vouchers for a present, as I find all the upper-class nobs who shop there abhorrent to my constitution, and even if I didn't, the only thing that I could realistically afford in there is coffee, and only just about at that.
I must disclose at this point that there is a reason for my deep, underlying antipathy to the place. You see, for a very brief period of time - a couple of weeks one Christmas - I attended the department in a professional capacity. That's right, I was one of those perfume promotions people - squirt squirt.
Day after day, I would stand at my allocated position in the shop, hassling passers by to try the vile smelling perfume that I was endeavouring to flog. People would ask me directions to areas of the shop that I was wholly ignorant of, and give me withering looks when I professed said ignorance. Hour after hour, girls in Ugg boots and tracksuit bottoms, or just in their Loreto uniform and deck-shoes, would traipse around the shop, twittering their vacuous chatter.
And is there any class of individual more petty than retail middle-management? The wan that I worked for was a right bitch, a power-drunken harpy so she was.
I have to say that the my brief stint working there was very instructive as to the upper-middle class mindset, with particular reference to the social phenomenon of conspicuous consumption. There was this one perfume we sold that was uber exclusive: Armani Privé, a private range of perfume sold only at a limited number of stores. The perfume was eye-wateringly expensive as a result: €200 for a 50 ml bottle. One of the lads estimated that it worked out at roughly €2 a spray, so he got testers of all the bottles in the range and gave himself a thorough dousing in them. "Mmm, smell me, I smell like seventy-eight euro!" (yeah, I guess there were some fun times there, too).
But the thing about this fancy perfume was: it did not smell good. It didn't smell rank or anything - one smelled of black pepper and another smelled like church pews, and I can't remember what the others smelt like. But they definitely didn't smell like €2 per spray should smell like.
Nevertheless, this stuff sold like hot-cakes. People were falling over themselves to pay €200 for this gammy perfume. This made me (a man who owns one bottle of aftershave from about 2003 that is never worn) seem like some sort of fragrance svengali, selling bottles left and right. There is definitely a market for selling the emperor's summer line of textiles to these people.
