Yikes! You’re In Überclass City, Post-Cab Hike
by Choire Sicha, with Sheelah Kolhatkar and Gabriel Sherman
Three new Furies have suddenly appeared over Manhattan, inducing faux-shock in the media and nervous laughter at parties. Please welcome the Million-Dollar Apartment, the $200 pair of jeans and the $10 cross-town cab fare—you’ll be seeing a lot of them.
The taxi-fare hike was eight years in the making, but it arrived exactly as the dam was breaking—the one that, for a couple of years there, held prices in the city fairly steady. The result has been a new flood of price hikes in everything from a bagel and cream cheese at Murray’s on Sixth Avenue (now $1.75, up 35 cents from a year ago), to a martini at Whiskey Park ($12, up from $10), to a pedicure at Avon Salon & Spa ($58 for the basic; last year it was $56).
As a city, New York is no longer upper-middle-class—it’s übermiddleclass, and the shifting of the ground under our feet is just beginning to register.
"I noticed somebody in New York magazine, an organizer who was charging $450 an hour to organize your closet," said Tim Geary, a novelist who lives in the East Village. "That’s when it hit me." ...
<http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage1.asp>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ Learn to simplify your finances and your life in Streamline Your Life from MSN Money. http://special.msn.com/money/0405streamline.armx