Transcription
There were some wonderful findings which showed that you get very high status competition when you get an excess of males. Yeah.
Yeah. And also people are strangers to each other, so they have the chance to reinvent themselves. So, oil, the oil industry, of course, somewhere like Dallas was absolutely sort of status-seeking central.
Mhm. Um because the oil industry brings in disproportionate numbers of men [laughter] who are all effectively starting afresh. So, whereas in So, they I think there was a fantastic paper which explained effectively why Neiman Marcus launched in Dallas, not in Boston. Cuz in Boston it was where you went to school. Yeah. You know, it was all that sort of stuff. Yeah. People knew who you were. Whereas, of course, people went to Dallas and effectively you were reinventing yourself from scratch.
Yeah. And and of course, those things mattered much more. It was famously American Express had that "Do You Know Me?" campaign back in the 1960s, which was really, I suppose, the anxiety of people who are quite a big fish in Peoria, Illinois, but when they went to a city 300 miles away, no one knew them from Adam, and they needed to kind of assert some sort of status or prestige when you travel.