A Thrifty American In Paris
That would be...me! Eric Wahlgren writes in Business Week/Europe:
The weak dollar didn't stop Amy Alkon going to Paris on a recent weeklong trip. But currency woes did force the Los Angeles resident to keep herself on a budget. She slummed it at a two-star hotel and limited herself to cheap restaurants.Her biggest privation? She nixed buying a pair of Yves Saint Laurent boots that, with the exchange rate, would have popped up as a $300 charge on her credit card, even though they were on sale.
MORE WITH LESS. "Every time I saw a sale in Paris that said things were 30% off, I realized that they were on sale for everybody but me," says Alkon, 40, a syndicated columnist whose column "The Advice Goddess" appears in more than 100 papers in the U.S. and Canada.
Tragic, simply tragic, huh?