Weak Dollar Depresses Lux. Sales
Aug 6th, 2008 | By Leslie Fox | Category: News
FERME DE CAMUS, France - This week the American dollar fell to a $1.54 against the euro, a record low. Unstable currency exchange is just one of the hurdles that business must leap in search of profits. For some wholesalers and manufacturers the tumbling dollar has created a windfall, others have found their profits gutted, and everyone has one eye on the horizon in anticipation of the next wave in the capricious currency sea. The reasons for the current weakness of US currency have been well documented and range for the massive debt load of both the US government and US consumers, to the mortgage crises, to the oil derived trade deficit, but what has been less examined is the fallout of these imbalances.
For US businesses the weak dollar is not necessarily a bad thing. It allows them to price their products below that of foreigner competitors. There have even been some surprising shifts in luxury items, a market that is generally insulated from currency shifts because of high profit margins and reliance on name branding. Nowhere is this more apparent then at Ferme de Camus, a vision of pastoral perfection on the banks of the Vidourle River in Southern France.
The visitor to Ferme de Camus is first struck by the long rows of cultivation, these fields have been farmed for over a millennia, and there is an ancient air to the place, a soul that seems to express itself in the rolling green vitality of the place. By the time one drives up the crushed stone lane that leads to the seventeenth century fieldstone farmhouse it’s hard to imagine that this farm is barely holding on. Martine Lefevre, the lean sun-dried foreman of Ferme de Camus, assures me otherwise.
Ferme de Camus grows some of the most prized ennui in the world, and regularly achieves a Niveau Un designation from the French Agricultural Ministry. The United States has long been one of the biggest consumers of high quality ennui. But with the weakness of the dollar many American consumers are turning to cheaper domestic or Chinese alternatives. To make matters worse for Mr. Lefevre, these cheaper alternatives have started making inroads his domestic sales as well.
“This younger generation, they are always going this way and that, always [going about like a headless chicken]. They do not appreciate the care that goes into a fine ennui, the true depth of satiety, boredom, and existential malaise that real ennui gives. They are just as content to go to McDonalds and fill themselves with [untranslatable] processed cheese and remorse for a France they never knew, and that probably never existed. I tell you, I see them sitting in there attempting to fill a spiritual void with a food I would not feed to [a pregnant sow]… It almost makes me feel something, but in this heat, perhaps it is just best to sit in the shade and smoke cigarettes, for certain the world will not miss me…”
As of press time this reporter is halfway through a bottle of Pernod and waiting for something, anything, of significance to happen.
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