In his latest column for the New York Times, Rob Walker takes a swipe at terms like ‘frugality chic’ and tries to take a more reasoned look at consumer spending in a time of downturn. While Walker normally chooses to focus on the history and raison d’être of a certain pop-culture product in his columns, this one tells us to stop trying to make recession so cool and just come to terms with the fact that we’re just not spending:
The truth is that we have long had mixed, even contradictory, feelings about consumption… “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Jimmy Carter declared in 1979 in his “crisis of confidence” speech. “We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” It’s hard to imagine anyone, then or now, arguing otherwise. But who, at the end of the 1970s, would have predicted the emergence of a new normal that included gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s and McMansions?
Somehow the normal of hyperconsumption persisted despite the collapse of the Internet bubble, the vulnerability exposed on 9/11, two wars and stagnant wages. Through it all, consumer spending hardly wavered, the personal savings rate plummeted and personal debt mounted. We were told our willingness to spend more — on fair-trade coffee, eco-friendly totes, organic dog food — demonstrated a fresh consumer sophistication that would change the marketplace. Now, suddenly, our values are reflected in cheap shirts from Costco.
A new normal that revolves around buying lots of stuff while bragging about our bargain-hunting skills doesn’t seem to reflect changed values… If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism.
Consumed – Talk Is Cheap – NYTimes.com
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