Uneasy Street

by Sherman, Rachel

  REASONABLE CONSUMPTION AND BASIC NEEDS

  One way my respondents maintained this sense of ordinariness was to associate their expenditures with family life, children’s needs, and having a “normal” lifestyle. As Olivia told me, “I think we’re normal people, we buy normal things. We do normal things.” Talia, as we have seen, is a stay-at-home mother whose husband earns about $500,000 per year in finance. She told me, “We have a pretty normal existence.” Asked what that meant, she responded, “Just like, it’s not—I don’t know. Like dinners at home with the family. The kids eat, we give them their bath, we read stories. It’s not like we’re out at, like, Balthazar. … Out in [our summer rental] our life is really very—it’s very much like any other kid who lives in the suburbs. And you know, [in the city] we walk to school every morning. And you know, it’s fun. It’s like a real neighborhood existence.” By contrasting herself to those who dine at (fancy) Balthazar and alluding to family dinners and walking to school, Talia implies that she and her family are the same as any other family. Being “normal” thus comes to mean sharing priorities common to the (implicitly “middle-class”) majority rather than consuming luxury goods or experiences.

  Nadine and her partner, who lived primarily on Nadine’s family wealth, had lost money in the economic crisis, and their renovation had cost much more than they had expected. As a result, they had had to re-evaluate their spending, which they lowered from around $19,000 per month to $16,000. When I asked what they had eliminated, Nadine said, “Just, like, anything extra. I mean, there wasn’t that much extra. It sounds ridiculous [to say that], because sixteen thousand a month is so much. But, like, most of that is, like, house, school, child care, bills. I mean, things that are sort of fixed.” Nadine uses the word “ridiculous” to show she recognizes that $16,000 is a lot of money, but she immediately justifies these “fixed” expenditures by framing them as the basic essentials of family living—a very expensive ordinary life.

  Similarly, in conversations specifically about homebuying and renovation, respondents typically referred to wanting light, space, room for kids, accommodations for visiting parents, or a layout that suited their family’s habits. For example, Maya, the stay-at-home mother who described her work as a “job,” said of her house hunt: “View was not important. Light was important, space was important, being near a park was important.” She also wanted a summer house “because we don’t have a back yard” in the city. Chaz, a corporate lawyer, told me he and his wife had chosen their $3 million apartment because it had quiet bedrooms so their young children could sleep, was near a park so the kids could play, and was in a building with a doorman for safety. Ursula’s renovation had combined three prewar apartments; she emphasized family needs when she explained the combination by saying the original New York City apartments were “not built for families.”

  When I asked one respondent with a household income of about $2 million if she had done anything extravagant in their home renovation, she responded, “I mean, this is how pathetic this answer’s going to be. The fact that we have two sets of washer-dryers. That was my big, like, go crazy moment. Yeah. Of course, we did not need to have two.” When she showed me the second laundry room, she said, “This is my extravagance.” It is not entirely clear whether she thinks her choice is “pathetic” because it implies she values domestic duties or because it is not extreme enough to be considered “extravagant.” But either way, the assertion denies illegitimate excess by connecting it to an ordinary need.

  By the same token, many of those I talked with asserted that they would be fine living with less. Talia, whose renovation had combined two apartments in Manhattan, said, “I don’t have needs that would require—like, I just want to have food on the table for my kids.” Alexis said, “I mean, if [her husband] said to me, ‘We can’t have the two houses anymore, we can’t afford this, we have to make some changes,’ then we would. You know. I hate to see him feeling stressed.” Kate, Nadine’s partner, told me, “If all this were to go away tomorrow, I don’t think I’d actually be—maybe I’m wrong; check back with me if something happens—but I don’t think I’d be totally crushed. I think I’d be like, “Oh, well, we have to change things a lot and dig up that tuna casserole recipe and move on.”

  Thus something about not “really” needing the more comfortable aspects of an affluent lifestyle makes having the lifestyle more legitimate. This is another aspect of the legitimately privileged self in which, if privilege is not required, it becomes more acceptable. It is related to denying a feeling of entitlement, as I discussed in the previous chapter, and alludes to a capacity to work if necessary. The “real” self that is elucidated here is not dependent on this affluent lifestyle.

  LIMITS AND PRUDENCE

  We have seen that some of these consumers invoked the wealth of the New York City super-rich to cast themselves as “in the middle” and asserted, “In New York City, we’re not wealthy.” Similarly, many attributed the large amounts they spent (which they often called “ridiculous” or “crazy”) to the high cost of living in the city, implying that they didn’t have much choice. They lamented that family members who lived in other cities or suburban areas did not understand life in New York and thus thought them more privileged or extravagant than they actually were. Nicole, as we have seen, was an upward-oriented photographer with a household income of about $400,000 and assets of about $2.5 million. She told me: “What I say to [my husband] is like, ‘You can’t talk about what we pay for things to your family outside of the city. ’Cause they will not understand. They’ll think that we are the craziest people in the world. And we’re not. We’re, like, totally normal people. But, like, no one should be paying this much money for anything. You know? So, just don’t tell them.’” She was incensed that her husband’s ascetic parents thought she was “a consumer” (which clearly had a negative connotation) because she felt they were judging her as a spendthrift for using money in ways that were necessary in New York, including paying her mortgage, condo fees, and private-school tuition.

  My respondents also emphasized the minimalist or frugal elements of their consumption. Nadine said, “I don’t shop, you know? I wear the same stuff pretty much every day. I wear the same pair of shoes every day.” Several women mentioned buying clothing at inexpensive stores such as Target, Kohl’s, and Costco or at discount outlets. Other respondents gleefully recounted bargains they had picked up. Wendy, a corporate lawyer, had snagged a used $1,000 stroller for $100, which she “felt good” about; Beatrice, a nonprofit executive, had gotten a $20,000 dining table for $6,000. They told me about buying a used car or driving the same car for many years. Stephanie emphasized to me that she bought her clothes at outlets such as Zara and H&M; she also recounted in detail the ways she had saved money on her home renovation. David, an interior designer whose clients were of the same class as my respondents, told me, “Always, for every job, I always throw in Ikea and Crate and Barrel pieces. They love that. It makes them feel better.” I asked, “Because it makes them feel like they’re economizing?” He replied, “Yes.” In contrast to this talk of bargains, none of my respondents ever highlighted the price of something because it was high.

  These specific consumer choices are linked to my respondents’ broader framing of themselves as economically prudent, which I described in chapter 2. Nicole said, “We don’t take fancy vacations. We’re pretty frugal about, kind of, everything. You know? We don’t buy stuff.” Paul described his wife as “the woman who will price check, and this is not an exaggeration, Target versus Costco. It’s what she does. And so while she comes from money and likes nice things, she’s very prudent about what she [spends].” Chaz, the corporate lawyer, said of the renovation he and his wife had done, “I’m sure there’s people that want to put gold plating on their ceiling, but they’re not going to get that in return [when they sell] the apartment. I mean, we wanted to do whatever we think we could do within reason. And we absolutely did not have an unlimited budget, t
o do whatever we wanted in the apartment. I think it was within reason. And there was plenty of things that we thought we wanted to do, and decided, “Forget it.” Those who had bought high-end stoves, ovens, and refrigerators in kitchen renovation often described these as being necessary for resale value, even when they had no plans to sell the property.

  Willa, who had both inherited wealth and annual household earnings of about $2 million, told me proudly that her architect had said she was one of his only clients “who keeps to a strict budget.” She said, “I feel we’re in a very comfortable position, where we do what we want. But we don’t live extravagantly—certainly don’t live beyond our means, at all. … I mean, particularly now that [her husband’s job is uncertain], like, we’re just kind of stockpiling a lot of things, and, like, not going on vacation, and not doing big stuff.” Yet she continued by recognizing that this practice primarily reinforced a mindset of prudence rather than actually making much of a difference in their financial situation. “But I mean, the reality is, like—the percentage that we would spend of what we have is relatively small. But it’s just the perception, I think, to us, of like, you know, this is not the time to go on vacation.”

  The “mindset” of prudence establishes limits on consumption; like the mindset of hard work, it characterizes a disciplined self. Some earners felt critical of others in their lives who could not get their spending under control, thus failing to enact such discipline. For example, Justin, the finance entrepreneur, described himself as “highly organized” in his personal finances. He contrasted himself to his spendthrift sister, to whom he had often lent money. He said, “I have this feeling, like, if I wrote a check for one million dollars and gave it to my sister, it would be gone. She would need one point five. Like, it would never—she’s insatiable. A lot of people are.” In contrast, he said, “I’m a disciplined person.”

  They also reacted negatively when it seemed that others might be judging them for spending too much. As I mentioned in chapter 1, Karen feared that her neighbors and friends might think it was “too profligate” that she and her husband were renovating. Speaking of one neighbor who had asked them how they could afford to do it, she described his habit of spending a lot on eating out and entertainment as a way of explaining why she might have saved more money. She also added defensively, “I mean, they have more stuff at their garage sale than we have in our house.”

  To women, spending on themselves was morally suspect, especially in terms of clothing, accessories, and body labor. They tended to highlight doing their own nails and their own hair, and they tended to pay for services such as spider vein removal, Botox injections, or Invisalign orthodontics with their own money, not funds from the family coffers. Sometimes they kept these expenditures secret from their husbands, marking them as illegitimate. Miriam, for example, said she didn’t want her husband to know what she spent on having her hair cut and colored, although he had tried to find out. She spent “more than I should,” she said, adding that he would be “shocked” if he knew how much. The reasonableness of these needs was sometimes a source of conflict between nonearning women and their husbands, as I show in chapter 5.

  The only consistently legitimate exception to the rule of frugality was spending on children. In keeping with their emphasis on family, my respondents almost universally spoke of kids’ needs as worth spending money on. Wendy, who generally watched her spending closely, had hired a full-time nanny for her daughter when she went back to work. She said that daycare was “a much cheaper option, but we felt strongly that having a nanny would be better for her, and we just felt like it’s safer and we were more comfortable with it. … When she was a tiny baby it was just hard to imagine not having a one-on-one situation where someone could always be picking her up and holding her, when she was really little. And I think that children who don’t have a one-on-one caregiver at that age probably turn out perfectly fine, but I really wasn’t willing to take the risk for my kid, since we had the money to have someone just focus on her.” Many moms took for granted that they would buy organic food for children, although they often said the cost was “ridiculous,” such as the $300–$600 per week that Zoe told me she spent at the grocery store. The fact that they are shopping for their children justifies the spending of money they would not want to say they had spent on themselves.

  Richard was one of the few respondents who acknowledged the allusion to family needs as a form of justification. He said that the reason for the renovation he and his husband had done to their home was that they had a baby on the way, and then he immediately referred to that claim as a “story.” I asked him why, and he responded:

  I think, in order to undertake a big renovation, I think for just me and [his husband], it didn’t feel somehow justified. Like, I felt the need to justify. Which I think is sort of a personality tic of mine. … But you know, in terms of undertaking renovation, the expense and the strain involved. And the stress. I kind of felt like we should have a good reason to do it. A good reason for ourselves, and also a good reason for the world, kind of. I mean, sure, we could have done all this just for me and [him]. But it kind of would have been like, “Well, we don’t really need to do it.” So I think the kid provided the need, and the justification, and then it became the story, in the sense of, like, we’re doing this for, you know, our child.

  Richard’s allusion to “a good reason”—for himself and his husband and for “the world”—highlights the internal desire to justify the expenditure of renovation. Richard interprets it as particular to him (“a personality tic”), but in fact many of my respondents seemed to share this desire, even when they did not recognize it as explicitly, and to assuage it with reference to family.

  Both these gendered ideas about women’s spending on themselves and the greater legitimacy of children’s needs are clear examples of “earmarking”—putting certain monies into particular, morally loaded categories.3 Another category my respondents created was the notion of the “treat” or exceptional spending—often associated with travel. Olivia described her three-week honeymoon as “very luxurious.” She said, “That was a real, like—whoo! You know. But again, it was our honeymoon. We sort of felt entitled to do that. Or, I wouldn’t even say we felt entitled. But it felt okay. We could kind of rationalize it, I guess.” Justin described himself as “price-insensitive” on travel. He said, “I want the best hotel room, on the best island. I don’t do it all the time. But when I go, I want to go to the top place.” He said he might spend $500 or $1,000 a night on a hotel. “When I’m on vacation, you know, it’s rare. So I want it to be just blockbuster. But I don’t spend a lot of money on clothes or a watch. Like, this watch [indicating his watch] is thirty dollars, but I’ll spend ten thousand on a one-week vacation.” Ursula described her husband as spending a lot on vacations, which gave her “sticker shock.” But, he told her, “‘You know what, I don’t want to think about it. I said in my mind this is how much this vacation is going to cost. And I don’t need to come [in] under.’” Luxury spending is categorized as exceptional. Thus these consumers don’t have to “think about it” or include it in their otherwise disciplined spending choices; it stands outside their self-conception as prudent.

  MATERIALISM, OSTENTATION, AND DISPLAY

  When my interviewees talked about their own expenditures as “reasonable,” of course, they were always implicitly indicating what kind of spending is “unreasonable.” As the previous examples suggest, they construct unreasonable consumption as materialistic, self-indulgent, unnecessary, and excessive. Nadine told me, “The way that I grew up, husbands rewarded wives with, like, new jewelry, new car. That whole thing. And I always thought that was sort of hideous and horrible, and why would you spend ten thousand dollars on a piece of jewelry? And why would you buy a new car for eighty thousand? And I still think that.”

  Many of my respondents were critical of consumers who seem to make purchases based on their economic value rather than on their exceptional, experie
ntial value. Nicholas, an inheritor, described his reaction to a hotel his wife had suggested for their vacation:

  It’s like fifteen hundred dollars a night, and you know, like, they massage your toes before you go to bed, whatever it is. And my crass response is, “You’ve got to be a fucking asshole to do this.” They’ve got to be an asshole to spend that much money and think that, like, there’s some value [to it]—it just seems so senseless to blow that money, other than a lack of imagination or this sense that makes you feel like [part of] a group of people who do that.

  Danielle, who prided herself on planning cheap vacations, said, “I judge people who have very fancy vacations. … Like you didn’t imagine it, or you didn’t figure it out or something. You just plugged in.” Valuing uniqueness and individual customization, these interviewees also draw a strong boundary against an excessive focus on spending for its own sake.

  Maya was more upward-oriented than Danielle or Nicholas, and she didn’t value this kind of unique experience as much. Yet she also critiqued materialism, explicitly using the language of “values,” when she talked about choosing a private school for her daughter: “[Where] economic diversity comes into play, it might not even be that it comes into play, but it’s in the way people—it’s in the values. We do not want a school where everyone comes in private driven cars, where the children are all dressed out of Jacadi and where all the moms carry Chanel bags. Right? We want to be in a place where none of that shit matters.” Maya slides from talking about “economic diversity”—presumably referring to people with different amounts of monetary resources—to talking about consumption choices. She values not exposure to significant economic difference but rather a particular way of inhabiting privilege. The indictment of materialism is a moral indictment as well—but it refers to a particular use of money rather than to the possession of it.