Monster Shopper

In her latest Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, Alexandra Kuczynski, the obscenely wealthy daughter of the Wall Street banker and (despite his Franco-Polish descent and naturalized US citizenship) current prime minister of Peru, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, shrieks at the spot of uncleanliness diminishing her shopping pleasure at the SoHo Apple store.

After noting the absence of staff to wipe down with "antibacterial spray" the keyboards and mice ("gripped by grimy hands all day long"!), she continues in the eloquent literary style that has won her a prestigious column at the paper of record:

On my last visit I saw one young man sneeze voluminously into his hands, then type on the keyboard and grapple with the mouse. Yuck! Two seconds after he left the station, a woman and her child began to fiddle with the mouse and keyboard. Triple yuck!

Of course her disgust at the unhygienic displays of the young mother and child might have been slightly more affecting had she not, some paragraphs earlier, admitted to throwing an iPod Mini — "ear buds and all — into a garbage can on Fifth Avenue" in a fit of annoyance, thus polluting the city with the electronic device's toxic heavy metals without a second's compunction.

Her obsessive self-regard and narcissistic sense of entitlement have rarely been on better display.