From buy, buy to bye-bye

The recession will have a lasting impact on the way people shop

The Economist, April 2, 2009 — “WANT IT!” screamed the words plastered on the walls, counters and shopping bags in the flagship emporium of Saks, a big American retailer, on Fifth Avenue in New York. The same exhortation was emblazoned in huge letters on a giant red and white ball that revolved slowly in the middle of the main sales floor. Saks’s spring marketing campaign, which came to an end on April 1st, made its brazen appeal to greed in a bid to drum up sales in a dire market. But the exclamation mark in its “Want It!” tagline should perhaps have been a question mark instead.