Bargain-loving Britain says au revoir to Onion Johnnies
London
They were once a little-known but colourful quirk of London life, the French onion sellers, known as Onion Johnnies, who popped over the channel from Brittany for three months at a time to sell their onions in more affluent districts.
The practice started in 1828, in Plymouth, but by the 1930s there were said to be 1,500 such Johnnies in the UK, so named because many were called Jean, says The Observer. And yes, they did wear striped T-shirts and berets and oui, oui, they did drape their large rose-coloured onions on strings over their traditional bikes.
By the 1970s, however, numbers had fallen to about 150. Now there are but 15 registered Johnnies, cut by the rising cost of short-term lodging in London. But few Johnnies think they will last another year. Why? The headlong retreat of sterling versus the euro. Two years ago, a euro was worth GBP1.55, now it is near parity, making the onions less palatable to Les Anglais.
Emmanuel Lemoach, from Roscoff, Brittany, says he used to sell 40 to 50 strings a day, at GBP3.50 (HK$40) a string (about 1.5kg), mainly to upmarket restaurants. Now he says he is lucky to sell 25.
Mr Lemoach's quandary is matched by Marcel, a cheese seller whose family trades twice a week at Chapel Street market in Islington, north London, and Borough Market near London Bridge.
'Sales have plummeted,' he says. 'My cheese from Normandy was always a little more expensive. It's French, so it is good quality and made by small producers but people loved that. Now, with the British economy and the tumble in the pound, fewer Anglais can afford it.
'I might as well sell Cheddar.'
Where once the French popped over to London to sell their wares at inflated prices, and Londoners flooded Paris to buy them cheaper, the opposite is now true.
A fact borne out by a colleague who commutes twice a week to Lille, just over an hour away. He often can't get a seat on even the earliest or latest trains, and when he does, the carriages are packed with French returning with bags and boxes. 'It takes about an hour to get off the train,' he says.
Channel Tunnel operator Eurostar, testifies The Guardian, is booked solid with French bargain hunters, milking not just the sterling's fall, and the chancellor's 2.5 per cent cut in VAT, but also the British propensity for discounting. As Napoleon once observed, perhaps a tad jealously, England is a nation of shopkeepers - with a heavy propensity to discount everything and anything. In France, however, the fixed price rules.
Books, an obvious Christmas gift staple, are generally one-third cheaper in London. And even without the sales, noted The Guardian, a Marks & Spencer lettuce costs 66 euro cents in London, but Euro1.95 at a Paris corner greengrocer.
Each day now has its own sales-inspired name, according to the London Evening Standard; Mega Monday, Wacky Wednesday, and the slightly incongruous Discount Thursday.
For every winner, however, there's a loser: the thousands of Londoners who packed up for the good life in the French rural idyll, where pensions and savings in sterling are now worth considerably less than last year.
Bon noel? For some, peut-etre.
Tomorrow: Sydney
