Your average Clevelander lives in a house worth $12,000 and dropping, is stuck in a $500 Hummer lease, puts on a suit to sit in a park for eight hours a day so that his wife won’t know he’s been laid off, and is considering eating the family Golden Retriever. You’d think the double-sided dildo budget would be pretty much dissipated. But according to a regional sex-shop chain boasting of boom times, you’d be wrong.
Ambiance, the sex boutique with seven locations in Northeast Ohio, is bragging that “sex sells in a slow economy.” Apparently May was a good month for the company, with sales up more than 20 percent from the same month last year, and its website numbers improved 44 percent. These are statistics sent to us from an Ambiance rep named Misty, though, so take them with a grain of salt. …
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2008.