Look rich for less today

"Look rich for less today."

Good line, isn't it? I pinched it from a piece of SPAM in my inbox selling fake luxury-brandname wristwatches.

The interesting thing about it is the cultural difference between the person who its author wrote it for and the person reading it, in this case me.

I'm a middle class Brit. So I've been brought up to think that "looking rich" is vulgar. And the idea of "looking rich" "for less" is almost too awful for words.

Not only could I "look rich", which I think is tacky, but I could do it on a cheapskate budget which assumes that I hang out with people too unsophisticated to recognise the fakery, or give a damn that I am a fellow who thinks cheap tacky fakes are OK.

Imagine I'm in Africa though. Or the Middle East. Or Eastern Europe. Places where the sensibilities are different. Not the sensibilities of the educated international elite amongst their populations. The sensibilities of their broad, urban wannabe masses (who are not so different, incidentally, from our urban wannabe masses). The people who want the jewellery, the cars, the trainers, the fragrances they see in American movies and European magazines.

These are people for whom "looking" rich is cool, and where doing it "for less today" is estimable, because getting a 'bargain' is a great thing.

So you and I might recoil when we read that line.

But I'm willing to bet that it's spamming author knows precisely what he's doing.