Reclaiming Beauty: Blog Freedom at Holt's

I asked the Holt's perfume lady about the Creed perfume.

"It is a Holt's exclusive," she told me.

Only at Holt's. Creed!

All You Need is To Believe.

Creed Perfume, Luxury Line: Only at Holt's

I asked the saleswoman what the price of a perfume was - "Fleurissimo, or anything with rose scent in it," I asked her, having seen the rose graphics on the perfume.

75ml, with costs $409, and with the 13% Ontario sales tax, reaches $462.

"Don't you have any 50 or 30 mls?" I ask, a little taken aback. I am used to hearing exorbitant prices for designer fragrances, but this takes the cake - or the perfume!

"Well, some have 30 ml travel sizes. The Spring Flower is for $246."

The $246 with the 13% sales tax comes to $277.

And since when is a 30 ml perfume considered "travel size?"

"You're better off buying the 75ml. You get more than twice the value for you money," she said.

She didn't bat an eye. After all, she's not there to converse and joke with customers. She's there to sell.

I found another scent, with "rose" notes, but without the "complementary" 30ml, called Fleurssimo. It started off surprisingly aggressive, but then diluted into a soapy smell.

The Holt's website describes it thus:

Revel in a real-life storybook romance with Fleurissimo Eau de Parfum. The classic floral fragrance commissioned by a royal prince for his American starlet-turned-princess on their wedding day. Created to compliment the bride’s royal bouquet of white flowers as she walked down the aisle, Fleurissimo is a magnificent blend of Hollywood glamour and European royalty. A sumptuous mix of Tuberose, Violet, Florentine Iris and Bulgarian Rose, this regal fragrance will bring out the princess in any woman.

I wonder who is this "royal prince?" Of course it is the Rainier III, Prince of Monaco. I cannot imagine Grace Kelley with this insipid perfume.

Cargo Pants and Luxury Scents

The new "luxury" store at Square One has its (slow) flux of shoppers. This couple was also looking at Creed perfumes.

Perhaps this couple, even with the scruffy cargo pants, thinks it will be royalty if it shops among the regal ghosts. Square One has made a major advertising pitch into neighboring towns and cities. There are some retirement communities in the Mississauga area with moneyed elderly (often looking like scruffy teenagers). As well, there are some relatively wealthy communities, of people fleeing the multi-culti horror of bigger cities like Mississauga and Toronto to the relative quiet and civility of the smaller towns, with easy commuting networks.

How often will an elderly couple, or a moneyed professional, make it to Holt's to buy a $500 perfume? Even with irregular, but expensive, purchases, the final revenue cannot be profitable for the store.

Also the Holt's prices both online and in store are about 1 1/4 times more expensive: even before the 13% Ontario sales tax - $409 vs. $325.

This looks like a scam to make up for other losses in Square One: Add a surcharge to the exclusive, expensive, luxury items to offset the other losses in the mall. Those rich clients wont notice or, more likely, wont feel the difference!

These costs also affect those rich foreign customers which Square One has spent extensive time and money to attract. This foreigner cliente translates to Chinese and Indian (but mostly Chinese). But, the Chinese economy, with its secretive strategy, and even false information, doesn't tell us the whole story. Things are not great out there. And no-one ever really knows how the Indian economy is doing, which now includes those call centers, where people's money is dragged out of them one interest rate increase at a time, and which provides countless Indians with their monthly survival checks.

They also have links to Canada beyond their telephone calls. Many of their family members have traveled those thousands of miles to take part in this great economic and cultural experiment called multiculturalism. And they crowd the Walmart which the savvy Square One promoters haven't removed from this luxury store (Square One is touted as the only mall with both a Walmart and the "luxury" store Holt's under one roof. Imagine that!). These Walmart shoppers barely enter those great doors of luxury shopping, and I doubt the Holt shoppers have much interest in what Walmart has to offer. The difference is jarring. Walmart is over-crowded with a cacophony of languages and customers going for the daily sales and cheap(er) groceries. Holt's, even during its opening days, is empty and eerily quiet.

Square One is connecting with the Art and Culture Centre of Mississauga, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, by displaying images from the gallery's current exhibition "Pattern Migrations" in its "luxury wing." It features work by Muslim artists. It is of course the perfect exhibition and title for this ambitious mall where cultures mingle (and migrate) together to go SHOPPING!

Orwell's 1984 showed us how populations can be seduced to ignore, or lose the ability to notice and react to, mis-information through false wars (enemies that don't exist) falsified language and various forms of placation. Shopping (window shopping) didn't figure n Orwell's list but it certainly is part of our Brave New World.

"War is Peace!" Say Orwell's characters.

"Shopping is Freedom!" we say.

The realty, of course is closer to: "Window Shopping is Freedom," which doesn't buy any freedom at all.

Young multi-culti men, probably students from the nearby Sheridan College, walking by the Bus Depot which is an intricate regional network for cheap and efficient transportation

Zooming around in a luxury sports car. The mall's parking lot has a handful of BMW, Mercedes and Lexus cars, including quite a few of the corresponding SUVs.