Barely a day goes by without someone prominent proclaiming that this summer London is going to be the overspill city of the Olympics. In fact, we’ve carried many pieces about it ourselves. Come on in, we say, the water’s lovely (considering the country’s sewage problem, London’s drinking water is certainly better than the water in Paris), and we don’t have bed bugs! Not French ones, anyway.
And now it’s not just Londoners who are saying this, it’s the French themselves. Last week, Bénédicte Epinay, head of the luxury industry group Comite Colbert (which exists solely to promote French luxury brands), said that the Olympics would be a “terrible period for business and culture. There’s a big question mark around the event, but one that is tinged with concern.” This is a fear shared by many in the luxury sector, worried that a) potential customers are going to be too preoccupied with the event to actually go out and shop, and b) that the vast numbers of Olympic tourists will make the Parisian shopping experience even worse than it is already. One French industry expert told me last week: “Shopping in Paris is going to be a nightmare. No one is going to want to have a big cardboard shopping bag banging against their legs when the centre of the city is full of hordes of people in backpacks and shorts. It’s just not a very French experience.”
