I picked up the local paper this morning, and was greeted with the full front page ad. ‘Come and celebrate the Royal Wedding at Essence of Asia’ it beckons, with the prospect of an all-you-can-eat Asian buffet and a glass of complimentary champagne.
That generous offer, yours for a bargain £14.95, was not the last Royal advert in the paper. There are photographers and jewelers, venues, car hire. Various local pubs are offering special deals, including a ‘right royal knees-up’ at the Red Lion. Legoland Windsor would like you to know they have a Lego Will and Kate waving from their model of Buckingham Palace. And that’s just the local paper.
So it got me thinking – what is the upcoming royal wedding worth to the British economy?
Well, the Centre for Retail Research reckons we’ll spend £156 million food and drink and celebrating. That includes half a million bottles of champagne, and sales of bunting, presumably. If it’s sunny, there will hardly be a household in the country that doesn’t hold a barbecue at the very least.
Then there are the souvenirs and memorabilia. You can’t move for this stuff at the moment. There’s the high end items, the commemorative plates and the replica engagement rings for sale on the shopping channel. Then there are the union jacks flags and tea-towels for sale in practically every shop in the land. An estimated 3.5 million mugs will be sold, so don’t expect them to be worth anything in 20 years time. If you object, there’s no reason to hold back from the orgy of commemorative consumption – just get the alternative products. ‘My other mug supports the abolition of the monarchy‘, that kind of thing.
The CRR estimates a total Royal Wedding tat spend of £199 million. Lots of people will go shopping on the bank holiday, and we’re likely to spend £110 million. So in total, between celebrating and buying Will+Kate merch, we’re looking at a retail take of £527.1 million. Woo.
Then there’s tourists. An extra 360,000 are expected this week, and many London hotels have doubled their prices to celebrate. There’s also the long term boost in the next couple of years, coaxing people away from cheaper holiday destinations and rolling into the Olympics in 2012. Tourist appeal is the most compelling argument for keeping the monarchy at all, quite frankly. They already account for £500 million worth of tourism. That’s going to be a lot higher this year, not least because VisitBritain is spending £100 million in additional marketing, selling Britain to the world as a place for tradition and history and patriotic tea towels.
All told, the wedding could be worth a billion to the economy, which is pretty snappy. Perhaps we should try and marry Harry off as well. In fact, forget your scrappage schemes and cheap petrol, let’s just encourage the royals to have huge families. The next queen’s role should just be to breed. It’s what bees do.
There’s only one problem with this, unfortunately. Bank holidays have an economics of their own, and while everyone enjoys a day off, they’re generally acknowledged to be bad for the economy. Two in a row is particularly bad, since so many people will take the days off in between. Many small businesses will basically pack up for 10 days straight. A friend in commercial property was saying yesterday that he expects nothing to move next week. Add up all the work that isn’t being done as we put our feet up and toast our royals, and it comes to a grand £5 billion, say the spoilsports at the Telegraph.
I’m all for a double four-day bank holiday every year, but in purely economic terms, it’s probably a bad idea. So here’s to national accounts of happiness instead.
The Earthbound Report 