I guess you are all familiar with the concept whereby rare and exceptional things end up being common and ordinary and losing the better part of their intrinsic values. This effect is favourable to the ‘low-cost’ phenomenon (do not get mixed up between low-cost and fair price!), which, after creating opportunities, becomes a remarkable mass destruction tool! I had already shown how upset I was about this issue in a post published under this heading, so I will kind of repeat myself, but from a different standpoint.

I recently came across a very interesting article on French newspaper Le Monde’s blog entitled ‘The tyranny of convenience’. I warmly recommend everyone to read it. It exposes the roots of this problem which, to me, is spreading everywhere in our industry. Just look around you, and you will realize how many examples there are of things that become appallingly trite: for example, in the field of cosmetics, you can find 200 ml shampoo bottles on Amazon for less than €1.50, or makeup palettes with 80 products for less than €30 – all public prices. And there are dozens of others like this. Specialists in our trades know …