ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

A local city worker walks past the French Quarter Aesop shop each evening on his way home from the office.

He knows everything inside is needlessly expensive; it’s just a bit of soap he tells himself.

But Bran Wilson knows that for every birthday, anniversary or Mother’s Day present, he can duck into this shop, spend a hundred or two and walk out with something guaranteed to be the right thing.

“They see you coming from a mile away,” he told our reporter.

“Rubbing their little hands together, probably with some fucking lotion or cream made from some rare plant from Azerbaijan or Belize. Last time I went in there to buy a thing of handcream, they might as well have picked me up by my ankles and shaken every last cent out of my pockets,”

“But what price can you put on getting the right present? It’s cheaper than getting one of those wookatook hoorang Dyson hairdryers. You’d never see something more expensive in your life! You could buy yourself a nice ex-cab AU for that kind of money! Anyway, that’s just my two cents.”

The Advocate reached out to Aesop for comment but they’d closed for the day to count their fat stacks of cold hard Claude Monet.

More to come.