"We Can't Afford It"
Or can we?
So I’m thinking about something sort of adjacent to inflation and grocery prices. My mother, like a lot of kids in the postwar years with parents who’d seen the Depression, grew up hearing “We can’t afford that.” Buying store brands, wearing hand-me-downs, forgoing toys, always being told to turn off the light, what do you work for the electric company?
And then I look at the fixed (or very slightly variable) costs in our home—the mortgage, the utilities, the internet, the cell phones, the car insurance and home insurance—and I think of what a vanishingly small percentage of our overall budget a super-tight grocery bill would represent over a luxurious grocery bill.
I could forgo a coffee from a shop, or buy store brands, or never buy premium steaks or fancy fish, always look for the cheapest brand of coffee to make at home, the cheapest variety of onion or potato, etc.—in fact I do some of those things—but I also think about how I could basically do that stuff for a year or two and it would be less of a savings than, say, selling one article to a magazine. Or getting in a few more hours on a side gig. And I think about how I might be in a better mood to write if I have a nice dinner, or if treat myself to a coffee shop visit, and I think I might actually make money—on net—by not always squeezing myself and negotiating down everything I want all the time.
But my case is unique, because an independent writer has to find ways to keep creativity flowing, which can cost money indirectly, by doing things and experiencing things and going places that spark ideas. And those costs, in the context of my work, basically function as investments.
What I’m really wondering is—was it true that my mother’s family couldn’t afford the tastier brand of deli ham or the cute drug store toy or some new clothing? Did obsessively turning off every lightbulb when you left the room ever amount to real, measurable savings? I guess I’m asking, am I just really fortunate, or is the whole idea of trimming your budget on food sort of a Depression era holdover or a thing you do because you conflate the ability to make choices—I can control this expense—for the ability to actually meaningfully reduce your expenses?
I’m not writing off the existence of desperate poverty here. The thing is, I’m wondering in what my mother’s family was poor. They had a stable roof over their heads. They were able to move to suburbia eventually. They had multiple children and put them through Catholic schools. They never went hungry and had occasional treats. My grandmother was educated, but spent most of her life as a stay-at-home mother.
Not to get all wasn’t-it-so-much-better-in-the-Fifties, but this family that scrimped and saved and understood itself to be rather poor enjoyed, in many ways, a standard of living that feels unattainable even for a lot of upper-middle-class people today. What the hell is going on here?
To put it differently, or to ask a laterally related question: how poor do you have to be to reach the point where things like grocery savings or trimming the electric bill really accumulate into something meaningful? It seems to me that my own household’s ability to maintain our lifestyle or household would break down well before we got to the point where saving 20 cents on ketchup by buying Hunt’s instead of Heinz (or whatever substitution) would make any possible difference.
So are Millennials poor savers? Were groceries (and energy prices) really that much more expensive two generations ago? Or was America just desperately poor in living memory in a way that nobody under 40 can imagine? Like, wow—if large numbers of people were so poor that they literally couldn’t afford name-brand groceries, this must have been a desperate country. Yet at the same time, families sent three kids through college on one parent’s income.
Obviously one reason I’m thinking about all of this is the inflation we’ve been experiencing. But the other reason is this whole discourse over whether Millennials spend too much on food and lifestyle stuff, and if that explains (or contributes to) our lower rates of homeownership. That’s an old narrative, but I’m always thinking about it, because I’m always trying to figure out if there’s a grain of truth to it or not.
It’s almost like we don’t believe how affluent we are. It’s interesting that avocado toast became the go-to symbol of overpriced foodie lifestyles. As if an avocado is really that much more expensive than any other fruit or vegetable. I guess this is sort of what people mean when they say “vibes”—that, say, avocadoes feel fancy or exotic or whatever, even though by weight they maybe cost about what peaches cost. But nobody would ever say, “Millennials eat too many peaches, that’s why they can’t afford homes!”
I guess part of what’s going on here is the share that each category of expenses makes up compared to all expenses. Lifestyle things—travel, restaurants, fancy groceries, toys, consumer goods and electronics—were more expensive in the postwar era relative to now. But the real big things—college, childbearing and raising kids, weddings, childcare, healthcare, possibly cars, and especially housing—cost relatively more.
There are any number of reasons for this, from higher labor costs (childcare, construction) to bad government policies (higher education, housing). But it’s interesting how rarely it’s spelled out that we’ve seen this divergence.
So that explains why young people today seem like spendthrifts—because in absolute and relative terms alike, lifestyle stuff and consumer goods have gotten really cheap. So what explains the combination of remarkable success and opportunity for the families who scrimped and saved but weren’t absolutely desperately poor? Did their savings pay off, or was a middle-class life just that much more attainable? (And yes, of course I know a lot of people, especially Black people, didn’t have the same opportunities, and many still do not.)
This one might get some comments. Comment away!
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One of the things I think people forget is that goods that are more expensive today are quite different than the goods we could purchase 50 years ago. Health care is a perfect example. Before the 1970’s hospitals did not have intensive care units. If you had a heart attack on the street, there wasn’t much they could do other than pick up your carcass and take it to the morgue. Cancer therapies? Cobalt, radiation, and surgery. Chemo was in its infancy. Medications like statins did not exist so managing heart disease wasn’t a thing. There was no bypass surgery, no stents, no valve replacement—heart disease just progressed on its own and people died. Health care was cheaper because the product had vastly fewer features and wasn’t consumed for nearly as long.
Housing—land was cheaper because it was more available. Construction—go look at a house built in 1960 and you would find single pane windows, very little insulation, one outlet per wall, a small kitchen with cabinets made of birch plywood, probably not even a dishwasher or space to install one. Three bedrooms, 1.75 baths, a living room, and a double garage. Maybe 1600 square feet. En suite bathrooms were not a thing, nor were walk in closets. It’s not like you could opt to purchase those things even if you did have money to pay for them—they just were not available unless you paid an architect to design a custom home—and even then the amenities were limited by the buyer/designer’s imaginations, and nobody back then thought you needed an entire room to use as a closet.
Cars—same. No air bags, no catalytic converters, no third row seats, no all wheel drive, no air conditioning or power windows, no speakers. It didn’t cost as much because the bundle of products known as a “car” just wasn’t as elaborate.
For my Mom, who was born in the 30s, it was real trauma. Her mom was extremely frugal. She was crazy frugal - even irrationally so: she would turn off the water heater at night so we would have no hot water in the am.
But I don’t think for either of them it was a current cash question, meaning balancing the monthly budget. It was about saving as much as possible against a future crisis. It was less cost than stability of the economy. Because of the laws passed in the FDR years, our economy became much more stable than it had been, allowing us to be lax about “saving for a rainy day.” But they were a product of the more pure kind of capitalism we are returning to, where crises were real and devastating.
We should also confront the idea that we are profoundly wasteful. As a world leader said (can’t remember who, but years ago), “Americans flush their toilets with drinking water”
I try to be frugal because our consumption, regardless of affordability, will end our civilization.