Handwash - Liquid Gold

In previous posts, I’ve alluded to both fancy coffee and good quality organic food as being two prominent examples of expendable commodities that’ll be benched in the midst of the current economic downturn. I steadfastly refuse to cast aside these essentials though.

But now my old friends at the Co-operative bank (eco-friendly, ethical investors lest we forget) have provided a definitive list of the top twenty items UK consumers have been forced to forgo due to belt tightening and budgeting exercises. The data was accumulated from a YouGov survey of 4000 shoppers.

Here are the top 20 items that the economic slowdown is preventing you from buying.

Cue Jimmy Carr:

(1) Flowers

(2) Magazines

(3) CDs

(4) Bottled water

(5) Posh handwash

(6) Quilted toilet paper

(7) Candles

(8) Branded washing up liquid

(9) Organic produce

(10) Branded food

(11) Fresh coffee

(12) Uncut bread

(13) Nail polish

(14) Fake tan

(15) Multi vitamins

(16) Fabric conditioner

(17) Teeth whitening toothpaste

(18) Wine

(19) Desserts

(20) Napkins

So, my two suggestions made it onto the list at 9 and 11, not as high as I would have anticipated.

Ditching flowers, magazines, CDs and bottled water makes perfect sense to me. Flowers schmowers, magazines come free with the Saturday and Sunday papers, CDs can always be found cheaper online than in shops (ridiculously cheap on Amazon marketplace) and bottled water is just plain silly.

But handwash? Posh handwash? Who even decided to prefix ‘handwash’ with ‘posh’? Handwash isn’t posh, it’s a necessity. Without handwash, your hands get covered in germs and smell bad. Are we, as a nation, shunning handwash en masse? If so, I didn’t get the memo, and handwash is still an integral part of my ablutions.

Casting an eye over the rest, candles I can live without (not just during an economical slump, but forever), don’t need fake tan, Bold Ultra has a built in fabric conditioner and if you’ve got a good knife and fork technique then the need for napkins can be circumnavigated.

Take away my nail polish however and I’ll make you wish you were never born.