Kerre Woodham: Layby takes credit

My first proper paying job was working as a part-time waitress at the Prince Regent in Manners Mall three nights a week, when I was living in Wellington and training to be a journalist.

That was in the dying days of the Muldoon era, when New Zealand was pretty much a protected economy and those few people lucky enough to travel overseas had to cut off the labels on any clothing they'd bought abroad to avoid paying ruinous duty.

You saved for what you wanted, you accepted paying higher taxes was the price for living a comfortable lifestyle and you hoped that if you married well and worked hard for the next 40 years, you might be able to afford a three-week trip of a lifetime to Europe when you retired.

Within a few short years, I was a fully fledged journo, working for television and boy, how times had changed. It was the hedonistic, anything goes, 'course I'll have another, Lange/Douglas period.

Champagne practically flowed in the streets; European sports cars became de rigeur among the money-market set and fortunes were made and lost over the card table.

David Lange may have been prime minister, but it was Roger Douglas who set the tone for the times, his hand resting lightly on the economic tiller, his capitalist captain's cap set at a jaunty angle. New Zealand was transformed from a lumbering freighter, wallowing under the weight of its international debt, into a streamlined clipper, racing ahead of the gathering economic storm clouds before crashing on the rocks of 1987.

I'd had a couple of years of Muldoonism, when I'd had to scrimp and save and put things away on layby before I could have them, and I'd had the Douglas years when even a young, blonde bint, whose only assets were a willing disposition and a winning smile, could have a credit line to rival a Rothschild's. I know what I preferred.

But now it appears those old-fashioned virtues - saving and cutting your coat according to your cloth and putting things on layby instead of HP - are enjoying a comeback. In the United States and Australia, major retailers have recognised that if they want to keep customers buying and stock moving out of the door, they will have to be innovative, so they've gone back to the future.

Laybys, or layaways as they're called in the States, became popular in the Depression years. In the "greed is good" 80s, layby became passe. Not being able to afford something didn't mean you couldn't have it. Who needed layby when you had finance companies begging you to borrow?

But now, stores and e-traders are making a major push to sell the layby concept and consumers have responded positively as they become more resistant to taking on debt and credit is harder to come by.

Layby means delayed gratification and, as we all know, anticipation is the key to greater pleasure. It means having time to think about whether you really, really want something. If you have to wait, you value the object of your desire all the more.

When we were discussing the return of layby on radio this week, most of my callers could remember the first thing they put on layby - a bright red, three-quarter-length coat that cost the equivalent of three months' wages; a Wayne Parks surfboard; a bone china dinner set - and all of them said they'd taken on extra work to clear the layby faster. Most of them still had the item they worked so hard to buy.

Boring? Sure. Financially prudent? You bet. And safe as houses, too. In the middle of this bleak recession, those sort of adjectives are looking like virtues, not criticisms.

* www.kerrewoodham.com