BUSINESS ABROAD: The Cut-Rate Crock of Gold

“It is astonishing,” said the Philosopher, “on what slender compulsion people will go to America.”−James Stephens in The Crock of Gold

At Rineanna, a concrete isle amid County Clare’s mud flats and emerald-green farms, the astonishing compulsion of people to travel to and from America keeps Irish cash registers dancing around the clock. Better known as Shannon (for the nearby river), Rineanna is the Times Square of transatlantic air travel, the crossroads where 12,000 aircraft and nearly half a million passengers each year swoop in for gasoline, food and rest.

Shannon’s main 7,000-ft. runway is Ireland’s biggest; its pub is the only establishment in all the Emerald Isle where a thirsty soul may legally wet his whistle at any hour of night or day.* But Shannon’s greatest compulsion is the airport store, where cameras, cashmeres and cognacs, watches, whisky and Waterford glass are stacked in duty-free profusion. There the traveler may buy one ounce of Chanel No. 5 for $7.50, one-third the New York price (and $2 less than it costs in Paris). A German Rolleiflex camera selling for $309.50 in New York can be bought at Shannon for $82; Irish whisky for $1.50 a fifth, v. $6.30 in the U.S. Its cut-rate counters have made Shannon a crock of gold for the government: travelers of all nationalities spent nearly $3,000,000 there in 1955; the airport earned more precious dollars ($1,739,785) than any other individual enterprise in Ireland.

Specialise: Stew. Built by the Irish government in 1945, Shannon in 1947 became the world’s first free international airport, i.e., goods and passengers in transit are not subject to customs inspection or duties. As the postwar travel boom got underway, a small kiosk in the corner of the passenger lounge did such a brisk trade in Irish linens and dolls that the airport authorities decided in 1949 to build a full-fledged shop. They placed it strategically between the restaurant, which serves every national dish in the world (specialite de la maison: Irish stew), and the bar, where passengers last year downed 83,000 glasses of Irish coffee (at 40¢), a calorific combination of whisky, coffee and cream (TIME, Aug. 29, 1955) hymned as being rich as an Irish brogue/strong as a friendly hand,/sweet as the tongue of a rogue,/smooth as the wit of the land.

“You Could Sell an Elephant.” Shannon’s counters wind higgledy-piggledy through the lounge, confront the passengers at every turn, show goods from all over Europe. Thanks to U.S. customs laws, which allow returning tourists to bring in $500 worth of purchases (including five fifths of liquor) duty-free, Shannon’s shop has zoomed ahead of the Blarney Stone as Ireland’s most profitable tourist attraction. Such is its fame that when Sabena, Belgium’s airline, inaugurated nonstop Manchester-New York service, passengers forced the airline to reinstate the Shannon stopover.

Realizing that homing Americans (some 75% of Shannon’s westbound traffic) are often pinched for cash, the shop in 1954 started a mail-order business that allows tourists to bring in their purchases duty-free up to six months after their arrival in the U.S. Top-selling items: Irish whisky (50,000 gals, in 1955), French perfumes, German cameras (1,000 a month), Swiss watches, and American cigarettes at $1.40 a carton. Last week, with 90,000 mail-order catalogues floating through Europe and the U.S., Shannon started expanding its counter space for the second time. Said an old Shannon hand: “You could sell an elephant here if you went about it right.”

* Thanks to an ancient and honorable law which provides that a person who has traveled or is about to travel 50 miles is entitled to a drink, whatever the hour.