West Germany: The Ultimate Status Symbol

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Slice & Rice. Every other city has at least one "name" store, as well as a handful of less famous but no less ambitious ones. And though they boast of the barons and movie stars who patronize them, in fact the ordinary working-class German accounts for an increasingly large slice of the business. As one Bonn sociologist points out, the workingman uses smoked eel, sturgeon, venison, curried-rice salad, or even chocolate-covered grasshoppers to liven up his traditional light evening meal. "Today," says Alfred Peters of Michelsen's, which claims to be the largest importer of caviar in West Germany, "it's nothing for the lower classes to come in here and purchase caviar [at $50 a pound]. They are the new gourmets."

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