I loved the excerpt from Robert Frank’s new book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich that ran in the Wall Street Journal last week, focusing on the rise of the butler trade among newly minted Bush-era plutocrats. It seems that the new rich want butlers, but the traditional ethos of the profession doesn’t always mesh well with the wishes and self-images of their employers. It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs transposed to the business-casual era:
Bob quickly discovered that managing a house staff has its own headaches. “Suddenly there’s all this funky politics going on in your house. Like the housekeeper might be nice to us, but she’s threatening to the other employees. So we had to get rid of that housekeeper.”
His first household manager was a nightmare. An exacting woman who specialized in formal entertainment, she aspired to throw lavish parties for prominent guests. Instead, she got Bob and his family, whose idea of a big Friday night is a mountain-bike ride followed by a big salad. The household manager was deeply disappointed. “We weren’t the rich, famous people she was hoping for,” Bob says.
I realized my own utter innocence of this trend toward ultra-pampering among the ultra-rich when I read the phrase “professional organizer” in another recent article in the Journal.
To me that term has always meant someone who earns a living organizing workers or tenants or political movements. But no, this is a person whose organizational skills are targeted at other people’s closets.
[tags]richistan, robert frank, butlers, wealth, new rich[/tags]
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