Some wine with dinner
Conspicuous consumption generally trips itself up with a single anecdote, like Imelda Marcos's shoe collection. Now the symbol of 1990s excess, a year and a half after the fact, seems to be a US$62,700 restaurant tab that six investment bankers ran up last summer in London.
The bankers, who worked for Barclays Capital, celebrated a deal at the elegant Pitrus Restaurant by ordering five bottles of wine with pedigrees so illustrious that the awed proprietor threw in their gourmet meal free and preserved the tab for posterity.
The mysterious details of the dinner are enough to keep the story going for some time. Did the bankers know anything about wine at all, or did they spend $48,000 on three bottles of half- century-old Chbteau Pitrus because it had the same name as the restaurant? And which of the diners passed up the Bordeaux for two bottles of beer?
Since the Pitrus Six paid their tab with their own money, Barclays was content to let them off with a mild rebuke for spending too freely at a time when their peers were suffering from layoffs and exiled to coach class. But later the bankers, apparently feeling the chill wind of recession themselves, quietly tried to pass off some of the bill as client expenses, and most of them were quickly canned.
The idea that it takes money to attract money is a popular one, particularly among junior executives trying to justify a $500-a-night hotel room. But there is a point when spending itself becomes a sign of corporate crisis. While Enron was wildly shifting its debt to one cleverly named partnership after another, its employees were playing musical chairs with their expense accounts, leaping from one division to another and then running up bills on their old cost centers before the bean counters had time to close them. It may be only in hindsight that we can see doom written all over the fact that Enron's idea of cutting back on holiday spending was to merge all the department Christmas parties into one $1.5 million bash at Enron Field.
A $62,700 bar bill that now looks like lunatic extravagance might have been seen a few years back as a sign of wholesome high-spiritedness. It's a good thing, though, that the restaurant kept the bill. It won't see another one like that for another business cycle.
-- The New York Times