The Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalog is Affordable
Every year, Neiman Marcus kicks off the holidays with a catalog full of luxury goods, cars and experiences most can only dream of buying. People gasp and shake their heads, declaring how ridiculous these gifts are.
Oh my God!! A pen for $160,000
A trip into space for $1.7 million!
$295 for a set of boxer shorts…nobody even sees your boxer shorts!
If you take a closer look at the catalog and the people who it is targeted to, maybe it isn’t so ridiculous after all. We live in the richest nation in the world, a country with at least 400 billionaires. A country where many financial advisors won’t give you the time of day unless you have a $10 million portfolio. And to ‘those people’ and many, many others- these gifts are affordable. In fact, there are lots of people that can afford to buy one of each thing in the catalog. Here’s a list of them (link).
I’m not advocating these luxury gifts are affordable for Joe and Jane America, but they are in fact more affordable to the rich (whom Neiman targets) than the crappy gifts the vast majority of us buy each other. The Neiman gifts are affordable, because people who buy trips to space are not skipping mortgage payments, running up credit car debt or pulling money out of their kids’ college funds.
People who buy the most expensive things in the catalog can AFFORD it. For a mere $1.7 million dollars, or less than .17% of your net worth if your one of the 400 richest Americans, you can go to space with five loved ones. Less than .17% of your net worth to fulfill a dream isn’t bad at all.
One of the most talked about items in this year’s catalog is limited edition BMW M6. Only 50 are available at a price of$139,000 and they will probably sell out in less than an hour (this is quite normal for cars in past catalogs). Is it really that shocking there are 50 people that can easily afford to snatch them up? Not really when you consider all those multimillionaires and billionaires need to buy gifts for each other , just like the rest of us. Imagine how hard it is to buy a unique gift for your wife if her monthly allowance is five or six figures.
The real story about extravagant gifts are far removed from the Neiman catalog. They lie in the lowly aisles of Wal-Mart and Toys-R-Us , where low-wage earners blow hundreds of dollars on plastic toys that kids break or get bored of before the Christmas trees come down.
It’s all perspective I guess, but the catalog is affordable for lots of people.