Luxury Is Worth Less These Days

What would Solomon Gump say?

It seems his carriage-trade establishment, Gump’s, has fallen into the hands of a New Jersey company best known for its mail-order catalogues and its history of running the once-celebrated but now-closed chain of Automat waiterless restaurants in New York. Horn & Hardart exchanged more than $2 million for the assets of the San Francisco company, which runs a landmark store and a mail-order business.

The seller, Tobu Credit Co. Ltd. of Japan, relinquished the 132-year-old operation at the suggestion of creditors who found that Gump’s worldwide reputation as a purveyor of luxury goods was no match for the economy’s long downturn.

The rich apparently aren’t that different after all.