Ten things the decade gave consumers - for good or ill

BIG WEDDINGS: Chocolate fountains? Check. Ice sculptures? Check. Designer outfits and a €5,000 dress? Check. Change out of €50,000? What? Are you nuts?

The clearest sign that we’d lost the run of ourselves during the boom were our lavish weddings. We blew such huge sums on “The. Best. Day. Of. Our. Lives” that the wedding industry realised it could charge whatever it wanted once the W-word was spoken. It all got so overblown that wedding planning became as viable a profession as banking.

BUDGETING

Sorry, what’s that now?

NY SPREES

It's far from popping over to the Big Apple for a spot of Christmas shopping that most of use were raised, but in the new economic "reality" we thought we were living in during the noughties, New York shopping trips were de rigueur. The "savings" were enormous – once you excluded flights, hotels, restaurants and tips.

FREE MUSIC

“When you download music you download communism” went the tagline on a spoof poster early on in the decade as the internet gave the world free music. The music industry had a total conniption and fought a long, hard battle to shut down services such as Napster and Audio Galaxy. It ultimately succeeded, but it was like trying to stop the tide, and file-sharing using peer-to-peer systems became impossible to police. Apple made a fair stab at getting people to pay for music for the iPod, but the genie was well and truly out of the bottle.

FIVE-YEAR PLANS

Remember the SSIAs? Ah, good times. We’d so much cash and were spending it so wildly that Charlie McCreevy had to teach us how to save for a rainy day. For five years we put money aside every month on the understanding that the for every €4 we saved the minister would give us €1 as a reward. Then when cashing-in time came, the foolish among us blew it on fancy new cars and holidays, while the wise old heads bought Anglo shares.

DIAL ONE NOW

When it came to customer service, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Actually it was just the worst of times. There was a time when you’d ring a company and get to speak to a person – a real live person, who knew stuff – but then businesses discovered automated phone systems and condemned us to a decade of listening to impersonal and vague menus that would lead us round in circles.

FLAT-PACK RAGE

You could almost hear the roars of red-faced rage across Ireland last summer as people struggled to assemble cheap but complex pieces of flat-pack furniture, bought in Ikea. After years of waiting, the shop the size of nearly three Croke Parks opened in Ballymun in July. By the end of October, a million customers had been through.

YUMMY DRUM

It was like, so, totally going to happen at some point, but when Dundrum Town Centre opened its doors in spring 2005, we got our first real upmarket mall, and it immediately became clear that the Ilac Centre was not, in fact, the epitome of high-class indoor shopping. Harvey Nichols and House of Fraser lured shoppers with their promise of previously impossible-to-find designer clobber, and millions were sold on the notion. Despite the downturn, some €540 million was spent in the centre in the 12 months to the end of March 2009 – that’s a lot of Ugg boots

GHOST TOWNS

Who would have thought at the beginning of the decade, when people were queuing overnight to buy houses off the plans in developments in the midlands commuter belt that within 10 years they’d be living beside ghost estates where newly built houses would never be sold.

STEADY EDDIE

He spent the decade showing us what to do with our money and pointing an accusatory finger at retailers, ministers, banks and Celia Larkin, and while some people moaned about Eddie Hobbs’s hectoring tone and miserly ways, we’d have been poorer without him.