Scampi, I remember once reading, used to be very expensive. In the 1950s, ordering scampi in a restaurant was a really swanky thing to do. To contemporary ears, the word would have the same connotations that lobster and champagne do today. It feels a bit incongruous, like Princess Grace having a cheese ploughman’s at her wedding breakfast. But there it is: scampi was a prized and pricey luxury.
So what happened to it? Did it somehow get much less delicious, but still basically palatable, so restaurateurs concluded that they couldn’t charge top dollar for it any more and it became the basket-borne bar snack of the 1970s and beyond? Obviously not. It just got more plentiful and so cheaper. Because of fishing or farming or freezers, I suppose, it was suddenly possible to dish out millions more plates of it, so it lost its cachet and ceased to be a luxury item.
I realise the term scampi probably now covers a wider range of marine biomass nuggets than it did in the dish’s postwar glory years. There’s scampi and there’s scampi. I mean, they were putting horse in lasagne, so I wouldn’t want to be a slow-moving walrus or squid when an unscrupulous scampi trawler breasted the horizon. But in a nice pub, where they might call it “wholetail scampi”, I imagine they’re basically dishing up the same item Noël Coward would have paid through the nose for as he handed over his ration book at the Café Royal.
Most of us know how that tastes. It tastes fine. It’s OK. A bit fishy, in both senses of the adjective, but a broadly acceptable vector for tartar sauce. But I think we’re clear what we’d do if it suddenly quintupled in price: we’d just stop ordering it. We can all live with never eating scampi again – it’s just slightly gristly fish and chips that you don’t have to cut up.
So what were they thinking, those people in the 1950s? Never mind all the sexism, racism and homophobia, never mind McCarthyism and Korea and Suez – that’s all very regrettable, but then people have always been absolute bastards. But what were they thinking, paying so much for scampi?
I was put in mind of the cost of luxuries by reports that, according to this year’s Coutts Luxury Price Index, it’s rising way ahead of inflation. Inflation is at 2.4%, but there’s been an overall price rise of 5.5% in luxury cars, Savile Row suits, private school fees, posh boozes and other high-end items that make up the Coutts luxury basket of goods.
This is one of the few baskets in which you won’t find scampi. It’s long since ceased to be a luxury food, so doesn’t qualify. But that actually raises a question about how you measure price fluctuations only in items that are incontrovertibly expensive. If their prices were to fall enough that they wouldn’t be deemed expensive anymore, would they stop qualifying for the basket and so fail to mitigate the apparent inflationary trend?
The story of scampi demonstrates that all that is required to render an otherwise unremarkable thing luxurious is for it to be very expensive. That’s what drew people in the 1950s to pay so much – the simple fact that it cost so much. Its exclusive price made them keen to be included in the elite group that could afford it. They would then undoubtedly tell themselves they were eating something exceptionally delicious, as people do now with truffles, caviar, pate de foie gras and a whole host of other astronomically pricey items whose flavours range from quite nice to weird, but none of which actually tastes as good as a slice of buttered toast.
There’s no schaden in any freude we might feel about the fact that the super-rich might have to pay a bit more for the ridiculous stuff they buy. The respectful solemnity with which designer clothes, luxury cars, extremely expensive watches and daft modern art works are viewed makes me well up with contempt. Whenever I see an advert for a designer watch, for example, I imagine all the stupid men looking at it, nodding and seriously muttering: “Nice watch”, aspiring to own it, or perhaps being able to buy it and add it to some prissy collection, and I am mystified at their certainty that this is a more noble use of their finite span than, say, a rampant heroin addiction.
But what does this inflation really mean? Well, for Sven Balzer, head of investment strategy at Coutts, it means that “anyone looking to maintain the spending power of their wealth in the long term should consider a diversified investment portfolio alongside cash holdings”, but then he’s got products to sell. Some of the price rises are probably a sign of real economic changes and uncertainties – fluctuating currencies, Brexit, Trump’s enthusiasm for a trade war – and it’s nice to think that the jet set are copping a bit of that flak as well as everyone else.
Mainly though, it just means that those who make or sell all the overpriced crap have decided to put prices up because they know people will pay them. In fact, people may be even keener to pay them because the exclusivity of the basically-just-a-bag/dress/car/watch/school/bottle of tequila/holiday is reinforced by the higher charge. These retailers aren’t looking to give their “best price” – they need this stuff to cost too much or it will start to seem normal.
It’s all the inevitable consequence of the widening gap between rich and poor. As the world splits further in two, with a small plutocrat class increasingly distant and separate from the rest of the population, the luxury brands need to nail their colours firmly to the superyacht mast. These days, some people can pay anything, which means some have to charge anything. Either that or they risk going the same way as scampi.
