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Comment by Phillipharryt | Hacker News Reader

So I've actually done a fair amount of research on this speech, and there a few skipped points most times people report on it.

Firstly the audience loved the jokes, they laughed at them all. It wasn't like he delivered them to stunned faces and immediate shock. The only thing that brought him down was a newspaper reporter noted it down and newspapers pushed it as an artificial scandal. Everyone buying 5 pound earrings knew they were of very low quality, they just didn't want it being shouted at them in their daily news.

Secondly it wasn't even the first time he had publicly made these sorts of jokes, in fact it wasn't even the first time they had been published in the papers.

This was entirely a newspaper driven downfall, they wanted to see him fail and wanted to sell papers about a scandal, so they did.

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Plus it was only the Ratners brand that was damaged. The Ratners group owned a shed load of other Jewellery brands and they were unaffected. The group renamed itself Signet Group and rebranded some the of Ratners stores and closed the rest.

The group carried on and became one of the biggest jewelery companies on the planet.

The speech scandal was merely a blip in the history of the company.

Well it was the Ratners group that lost 99% of its listed value, so not just the Ratner's brand that felt the damage. It definitely affected Gerald more than it did the company though, but there was definitely a touch and go moment there where the group nearly went under entirely. They've managed to recover really well and after it rode it out properly (they fired Gerald a couple of years later then rebranded) they returned to the original stratospheric trajectory.

> it wasn't even the first time he had publicly made these sorts of jokes, in fact it wasn't even the first time they had been published in the papers.

> This was entirely a newspaper driven downfall

That first point is good evidence that the jokes weren't very responsible for what happened.

But it seems like it's just as good evidence that newspaper coverage also wasn't very responsible. Why attribute it to the newspapers this time, when they tried and failed before?

Maybe different kind of newspaper? Like a tabloid compared to a respected paper, but that is just an educated guess, I don't know the actual story.

At the risk of alienating the same people that Gerald Ratner did (and in full knowledge that all generalisations are false), the people buying the stuff he sold didn't read the broadsheets.

It was the tabloid press, targeting their readers, that brought Ratners down. I don't know why they did it though apart from increasing their sales by generating buzz about a subject maybe.

Fair enough question. They didn't try and cut him down before. They just reported his quotes, and had a laugh at them, it wasn't even front page news. But this time they decided it was worth cutting him down, and it was on all their front page with titles like "Ratner sells 'crap'" etc. Previously it was popular to report on him because he was shaking up the industry, and once he'd taken a large portion of it, it became time to create scandal around him. The papers used him for news on the way up, pushed him and then rode him all the way back down again.

Newspapers report on people all the time and then switch when it suits them, it's always trying to move with people. It's also worth noting the reporter, Harry Arnold, worked for The Mirror, a less than reputable rag. Arnold knew ahead of time that Ratner was to make these jokes (heard about it through his assistant I believe) and was there waiting for the moment he could quote him. The scandal was prepared before it had even happened. They didn't force him to say those things, but they sure made an enormous deal out of it.

It wasn't the newspapers, 1991 was the peak of the 1990 recession in the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1990s_recession#Civil_un...

Either way, I guess it's just one of those stories people like to tell because it confirms their biases (always insert your elevator pitch into every conversation, always be super positive about your product, etc etc.)

Raters was well placed amongst jewellers to ride the recession. I remember the news coverage of this well - the decline in sales was rapid and directly attributable to the speech, and the implication that his customers were mugs.

Based on what? they were selling cheap costume jewellery to the working and lower middle class, both of which were exceptionally squeezed by the 10 years of thatcher that had just ended.

Luxuries are typically the first thing to go for those close to poverty in a recession.

I would argue that Ratners were uniquely placed to suffer the worst in a recession, and that they hadn't collapsed during the aftermath of Black Monday is the bigger surprise.

The people listening to his speech were wealthy people, of course they were not insulted, but his clients who bought the stuff were

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