Foreign Perspectives

We’re in the midst of our customary Christmas closing and generally lazing around at the moment.

Boxing Day brought us our first serious bought of snow for several years and for a while it was looking like we’d be snowed in for quite a while. As usual the French didn’t even bother to slow down on roads completely covered with ice and snow so I’m sure that the accident figures are well up.

France is a slightly peculiar place to be over Christmas in that they don’t formally “do” Christmas thus the shops were relatively empty on Christmas Eve and indeed the toy shops were eerily empty even the week before Christmas. Just as eerily empty as the toy shops in the UK were a few weeks earlier though that presumably was down to the current recession.

Although the shops do close several hours early (as does the post office) on Christmas Eve and everything is closed on Christmas Day, by Boxing Day it’s back to normal everywhere and you’d think that it was a normal shopping day. The law doesn’t allow them to have sales at the moment so you don’t get the usual post-Christmas sales that you do elsewhere and nowhere do you get the 70%+ reductions that are commonplace nowadays because the law won’t let shops sell stuff at a loss (which should create interesting closing down sales in due course).

On the sale front, we were comparing prices with the UK and found a surprising number of things sitting at around two to three times the UK prices at the current exchange rate. Obviously with all the shenanaghans recently with the interest rates  the exchange rates are not really at their “true” levels and if the price differentials are anything to go by it should be around EUR 2 to the pound rather than the current 1.10 or so which implies that there’s going to be either a major drop in the euro interest rate or massive increases in unemployment in the euro zone.