I went to a party on Saturday night, a couple of old uni friends threw open their place and warmed up the flat screen for the Tri Nations final against the All Blacks. It was a great night, and I came away from it with two insights. The Kiwis are so advanced in their World Cup preparations they’ve begun to choke before the French have even turned up. And I think I know what’s wrong with the economy.
Cheap wine.
Not that there’s anything wrong with cheap wine. I took a bottle of Palo Alto. An eight buck Chilean red. Kinda like a baby cab sav, but not so heavy. And that’s $8 across a dozen. You’ll probably need to hand over a tenner for a singelton. And believe me, you should. This is the best value booze in the city right now, besides the cheap six-buck Salvadoran six pack I used to be able to score over in Moorooka. It drinks like a $35 per bottle label, and better than some that cost a lot more.
I’m not naturally a cheap bastard, but my friend Martin had done me a favour by putting me onto another bargain, an Italian pinot grigio that also came in at less than ten bucks, and I wanted to return the favour.
Everyone did, apparently.
The kitchen bench was groaning under the weight of cheap wine. Good cheap wine, all of it eminently drinkable and most of it imported.
It gave me to wonder, before I’d knocked off enough vino to stop wondering about anything, whether the problem with the economy isn’t structural or political but simply attitudinal. We’ve talked ourselves into a funk. We’re buying cheap wine, holding our dollars tight, because we’ve convinced ourselves that’s what we need to do.
Partly it’s a function of the high Aussie dollar. So many people have travelled overseas recently and had the sobering experience of spending our quids in recessed, low wage economies – or we’ve heard about someone doing it - that we expect the same sort of value here, and when we don’t see that value in retail, we go looking for it online, or via cheap imports like Palo Alto. Hell, we don’t even need to actually travel. We’ve been alerted to the bargains to be had, especially in the US, by the bleating of billionaire retailers like Gerry Harvey.
One of the fastest growing business sectors in Australia right now? US freight forwarding.
And why the hell not? If BHP mining can beggar its own steel division by going overseas for cheap imports, instead of sourcing local materiel, why shouldn’t some mug punter whose resources and capital are infinitely more modest?
Not that this is a story about net-based foreign stores eating local retailers lunch. It’s actually about our state of mind. Most of our economy is still driven by domestic demand, but if we’re demanding more and more for less and less is it any wonder there doesn’t seem to be as much of the folding stuff getting around?
Unless you’re an All Black. They folded quite nicely, I thought.
