The Customer is Always Right

The business strategy of La Bonheur des Dames may have been novel in the 19th century, but it is by the far the money-making method of choice for modern moguls: sell cheap and sell a lot. Today, the problems with that strategy are clear; they are un-sustainable, a waste of resources, a pipe-dream of consumeristic fantasy from which we must eventually awake or risk the demise of our species and the ruin of the planet. But in the 19th century, resources were plentiful, and we were like well-looked-after children who haven't yet learnt the value of money, asking for every whimsical desire that we could conceive.
Mouret is both the puppet and the puppet master of this emerging comsumeristic naivetée, using other people's material greed to fuel his own. In setting up an atmosphere that encourages, requires even, complete submission to the sensuality of the fabric and the pseudo-erotic desires that the guilty pleasure of indulgence provokes, he sets up a whore house of commerce. The metaphor comes around full circle when Mouret himself is constantly giving in to his actually-erotic desires that he indulges in with a bounty of different female companions. He falls victim to the same desire in himself that he is manipulating in women.
Today, the story among modern capitalists is much the same; the guiltification of their product is a selling device that turns a normal product into a seductive object of desire. A case-in-point is ColdStone ice cream stores. Their in-store advertisements depict pictures of happy peoples' faces just out-of-focus in front of which is a beautifully constructed and computer-edited still-life of an (enourmous) ice-cream cone, with all the guilty pleasures mixed right into the ice cream, and the words "Ultimate Indulgence" written in sumptous cursive scrpit below the image. The owner of the store (any store, not just ColdStone or La Bonheur des Dames) is both the controller and the victim of his customers. A satisfied customer is money in the pocket, an orgy of dollar signs. But an unhappy customer is money in somebody else's pocket, someone else's deepest desires fulfilled, and to keep the dollar signs flowing into the right treasure chest, the owner must bend to every will of the customer, allowing them always to have the final say, always to be right. Of course, this is a circular existence. One can never be happy living like this because one's exploitation of others can never be complete. Mouret can expand his store from the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin all the way to the Champs Elysee, but will never be content because there will still be more money to be made, more urges to indulge, more people to use.