New Yorkers feel jealous of foreigners spending in their city

Conquering NY, with cash

 

Flush Foreigners Splurge In Manhattan, Upset Locals

   This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style—the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs—at bargain prices.
   But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.
   Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves.
   “It’s Psych 101—jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.” Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work’.”
   Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty website, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.
   Feeling flush, foreign visitors are noticeably more lavish in their spending habits, said some New York merchants and restaurateurs.
   Richard Thomas, the marketing director of Marquee, the Chelsea nightclub, said he has seen a surge of European clients this summer, and even visitors who appear to be of humbler origins than the usual Gucci-clad jet-setters are now “willing to play in the arena of bottle service,” he said, referring to the practice where drinks are purchased only a bottle at a time, for hundreds of dollars or more. NYT NEWS SERVICE