Hey Mister, Buy Me Some Louis Vuitton?
My friend Jason Stone is blogging about his recent move to Paris from New York. You may want to check out his posts about the differences in technology between the cities (seems Paris is actually ahead of us in some categories!) or you may be more intrigued by the French equivalent of the "Hey Mister" game that I hear teen-ageers (not me, mom, never) play to get adults to buy them booze:

We were told that if we stood outside of Louis Vuitton on the Champs-Elysees we would probably be approached by some Japanese women who would ask us to buy them bags or purses in the LV store. They would then give us an amount over 100 Euros in excess of the actual price and we would then be told to keep the change. This sounded too good to be true.

I guess the background story is that the items that are sold at the LV store in Paris are about half the price of what they are in Japan. When the Japanese learned this, they would buy several bags and purses in Paris and bring them back to Japan where they could then turn an easy profit on them. Well, once the LV store determined that this was transpiring, they somehow began to limit the number of bags and purses the Japanese could purchase.

- posted by Amy @ 4/21/2004 10:48:00 AM