NEW STATUS SYMBOLS TO WATCH OUT FOR
ON MY recent visit to England, both of my hosts were driving rather fancy cars.
One had an Audi convertible and the other was driving a large Jaguar. Both assured me they had bought the cars second hand. The used car market is flourishing in Britain, I was told. Later I read an interesting story in the Spectator magazine in which the writer said buying a new car was the worst possible financial move anybody could make.
The moment you drive that shiny car out of the showroom it loses about 20% of its value. Just think of that. You pay R200 000 for your new car and after driving it 20 metres it’s lost R40 000 in value.
While coming in to land at Heathrow Airport, I looked out of the plane window and saw fields of parked cars down below.
I was told they were new cars that had just rolled off the factory assembly lines and were awaiting delivery to dealers around the country.
There were thousands of them shining in the winter sun. Obviously there are still thousands of motorists ready to make the worst financial deal in their lives. No wonder the used car market is flourishing.
I often wonder what happens to all those used cars when they come to the very end of their useful lives. Surely they can’t all end up on bricks in back yards, serving as chicken coops.
I believe there are scrapyards, particularly in America, where old cars are put into huge hydraulic presses and squashed into compact blocks of steel and plastic. Maybe President Trump could use those blocks to build his controversial “wahl”.
Another commodity that often puzzles me is watches (there’s a clumsy sentence for you!). Whenever I visit shopping malls, I am amazed at the number of shop windows filled with watches – literally thousands of expensive watches! Who buys them? And why? It’s hardly necessary to own a watch for time telling these days.
Your smartphone tells the time. Your car tells the time. My telephone tells the time. Every bank and post office has a public clock that will tell you the time if you take the effort to look up.
But people obviously buy watches. I think watches have become the new status symbols. Film stars and sports heroes and even politicians need some way of showing how rich and important they are. It’s no use sporting a flashy new car because everybody now knows car buying is a dumb deal.
So you wear an expensive gold watch instead.
If shop windows are any indication, there must be a whole lot of insecure people out there desperate to prove they’re worth something. It’s rather sad, really.
Last Laugh
In a nightclub, a large woman climbed onto one of the tables and started dancing to the late-night music.
A man sipping his whisky at the bar looked at her and said: “Good legs.”
The woman simpered coyly and said: “You really think so?”
“Yeah,” said the man, “a table with weaker legs would have collapsed long ago.”