“She arrived in our store at about noon. She was dressed in a black sweatsuit and looked nothing like a celebrity. I thought she was just a typical foreign tourist. But I knew something was going on because there was a guy like a bodyguard walking behind her with a transceiver cord sticking in his ear. Then I realized … that’s Paris Hilton! Her sister, Nikki, was there, too,” a female store clerk who helped with Hilton’s shopping tells Shukan Gendai.
Earlier this month, Paris made her first trip to Japan in two years, accompanied by her younger sister, on the invitation of a Japanese fashion label.
During her spare time, Paris wound up at the Shinjuku outlet of Daikokuya, a pawnshop chain that also sells secondhand luxury items and designer label goods at discount prices. Why the incredibly wealthy Hilton heiress was shopping at the discount pawnshop remains something of a mystery, but she appeared to have enjoyed herself.
“Nikki left pretty quickly, but Paris sauntered round the shop for over an hour and a half, looking really closely at a lot of stuff, picking up bags and looking at herself in the mirror,” the clerk says. “She bought 28 items, apparently taking a fancy to bags from Louis Vuitton and Chanel, but also picking up accessories like earrings.”
Paris’s shopping bill came to about 1.8 million yen, including a 5 percent deduction for consumption tax that she didn’t have to pay as a tourist. After showing Paris the sum, the filthy rich heiress began muttering something to one of her handlers, who appeared to be taking care of her expenses.
“Through an interpreter, the handler told us that Paris really liked our store, that she wanted to buy everything she had selected and that she would come back again the next time she was in Japan if we agreed to give her a discount,” the clerk says.
Haggling is not an accepted Japanese business practice, and store employees were surprised to see a woman with an estimated annual income of 7 million dollars begging for a price cut.
“We told her we’d give her another 5 percent off, as well as the tax reduction we’d already made. I figured I wouldn’t always get a chance to get this close, so I asked her for an autograph.
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