Cheapness Studies

Luxury canned tomatoes

2010-05-28T22:36:00.005-04:00

Quick question: how is an increase in profits at Whole Foods indicative of a rise in "luxury shopping"? Yes, yes, "Whole Paycheck," but it occurs to me that any supermarket, however snooty, is an alternative to dining out. I can't speak for all the locations, but the NYC and Chicago ones tend to be a) in areas where supermarkets generally are kind of posh, and b) where there are lots of restaurant options for restaurant-inclined yuppies. Maybe people who used to buy groceries at Walmart have upgraded, or maybe, just maybe, the yuppies are just cooking at home more, which would if anything indicate a decrease in yuppie self-indulgence.

Shoes and scapes

2010-05-25T17:51:00.002-04:00

Oh much-neglected Cheapness Studies blog, what can I offer? Lately I've been all over the place, cheapness-wise - hopeless in terms of shoe purchases, but dedicated to cooking at home, but cooking with not-so-cheap farmers' market ingredients (garlic scapes are wonderful but at $3 a bunch...), but at least working between the semester and the onset of summer funding which helps offset shoeshoeshoes, scapescapescapes...

If anyone still reads this, consider this a call for suggestions.

Counting pennies in public

2010-05-02T19:51:00.007-04:00

This week's Complaint Box is about the annoyance of not getting change in full. When I got to the part where the writer, Steven Jay Weisz, mentions "several bloggers who have posted" on establishments withholding pennies, I was reminded that I'd done so here. No, you're not "the only one cheap enough to complain about it," just the only one to get the message out to a wider audience. We, the Cheap, demand our pennies!

The column is provoking ire, blatant anti-Semitism, and fine, some of the sort of over-the-top entitlement that gives cheapness a bad name. Yes, the man should have gotten his change, but no, the fact that he did not isn't the world's greatest tragedy. Nor, to his credit, did he present it as such.

As always, when anything related to tips and food service comes up, the 'This guy is so fancy, what with his eating in restaurants and having published this one thing this one time in the NYT, no doubt he's never worked in food service himself' brigade is out in full force. Given that the author is an actor who plays roles like a chauffeur on "Gossip Girl", it strikes me as very unlikely he's never once worked in food service or similar. His objection, like mine, is very much a principle-of-the-thing one: part of frugality is knowing exactly where your money goes. This in no way conflicts with paying (and tipping) fairly. But it does mean being one of those people - who wants to see the pennies, who asks how much the specials cost, etc., and then dines out only as often as the budget allows. Such behavior is not the height of social grace, but nor is it unfair to restaurants' waitstaff.

< tangentially related babbling >What's so odd with the phenomenon of tipping is how it both permits workers to be altogether stiffed, and allows for the conflation of work with charity in a way that just couldn't happen in other arenas. As in, say you're at H&M, and you get to the register with the new outfit that comes to $29.90. If pressed on the matter, you might, depending upon your own income, agree that the cashier could use the implicit ten cents more than you. But it will never come up - if you leave the store realizing you're out a dime, you figure you've inadvertently donated to H&M, which does not leave warm and fuzzy feelings. Meanwhile, every encounter with prepared food or drink requires an assessment of relative need and power. Sure, a 50-cent tip on a $1.50 coffee is excessive percentage-wise, but it will at least go to the server, and isn't the job of serving $1.50 coffee sadder than whatever job requires drinking it? What if it's the other way around, and the barista job is actually the less sad of the two? The barista not getting that tip has no way of knowing if the beverage is the weekly luxury of an office worker making $15k a year or the stingy choice of a latte-avoiding CEO, and the customer will register as 'entitled yuppie' regardless.

The expansion of tipping - both in expected amount and in type of establishment - seems to be a way of asking the haves to remember their privilege, yet one that targets the very purchases also purchased if not by the have-nots, then by the have-not-quite-so-much contingent. I suspect that no one ever tips on a $10,000 handbag, a $100,000 couch. (On delivery is another story.) Yet I recently noticed a tip jar at a vegetable stand at the Union Square Greenmarket. Not one of the pseudo-rustic organic ones, but one of the this-actually-spreads-out-trips-to-the-grocery-store-season-permitting ones. I mean, yes, in the world as it exists, the person selling the vegetables probably needs the change from the purchase more than the person buying them. The gap may not be as great as the anti-food-movement contrarians would have it (for example, many NYC farmers' market stands take food stamps, and it's not an oddity to see someone paying that way), but yeah, it's there.

But the presence of a tip jar reinforces the notion that ramps and kale are of a piece with lattes and macchiatos. Which they are culturally, perhaps, but not nutritionally. One is rich-people-nonsense that, as they say, spreads the wealth, while the other ought to be accessible to all. The jar also suggests that the person selling arugula is even more severely underpaid than suspected. It also promotes the idea that shopping at the farmers' market isn't just about getting good food, but also about donating to a cause, and not only donating in the sense that prices tend to be high, but literally paying above and beyond the cost of the food to show one's support for the endeavor.< /tangentially related babbling >

How neurosis promotes cheapness

2010-04-22T10:42:00.005-04:00

Some anecdotes:

-For a while now, I'd noticed that my cuticles are a mess. I'm not sure what one does about this (there are such things as cuticle oils, sticks, and nippers, none of which I'd know what to do with), so I decided to get a manicure, what would have been, I think, my fourth ever. Then I googled 'manicure hepatitis.' Saved: $12.

-Yesterday, I saw a woman with the chambray shirt of my dreams. I was all set to ask her where it was from, when the following thoughts popped into my head:

1) Given what this woman looks like (40-ish, very-slim-but-not-emaciated, massive diamond ring, perfect-yet-understated hair, all signs point to her being one of the mothers from the private school near where I teach), I can't afford the shirt, and it will be too depressing to know that the shirt exists but costs $3,000.

2) Given how flawless this woman looks, how put-together she is versus how put-together I'm not, it could be that the very same shirt on another woman (namely, me) would not be anything special.

3) She's so not going to want to interrupt her conversation with the other mom to help some shabby grad student mimic her style. Yeah, it was the perfect shirt, but I saved, shall we say, $98.

-Unlike the PhD students one so often reads about, who are convinced that after graduation they will have amazing jobs, I remain convinced that I'm one awkwardly-phrased email to a professor, one messily-formatted citation away from destitution. This, I find, inhibits my shopping tremendously. Money saved: incalculable.

Selective luxury in a restricted life, or should I shell out for a nice apartment?

2010-04-16T22:30:00.000-04:00

As I've written before, moving and starting grad school seem to have brought about spontaneous and substantial decreases in my monthly spending. The reasons for this are pretty obvious--I live a narrower life now, and there is less stuff to spend money on. No going out for drinks, no vacations, no health insurance premiums, fewer groceries even, because the store is so far from my apartment that I only go a couple times a month. The main recipients of my money are now my landlord, Amazon, coffee shops, sandwich shops, and Old Navy's online store (all stores are inconvenient to my house). I've even become willing to pay the $7 shipping fee, because the time it would take to schlep to the nearest actual Old Navy is just not worth risking that the hoodie I want isn't even in stock. I could read like 30 pages of Aristotle in that time!

The result of all this is that I've been saving a decent amount of money out of my stipends. All is well in Cheapness Studies Land, except that your thrift theorist is getting married this summer and needs to find new digs for herself and the future Mr. Self-Important, and the cat. Cambridge, while no New York, is a pretty overpriced place in its own right, where for $850 a month, you can have the privilege of residing in a tiny room of an elaborated three-story wooden shack with slanted floors, thin walls, and no insulation. And that is with roommates splitting the cost. Up to now, I have always apartment-hunted by prioritizing the rule that more people in fewer rooms equals less rent. But this rule no longer applies.

This brings us to the current forecast: as of June, I will be living in a 1.5 bedroom work of awesomeness, convenient to school, coffee, and groceries, and complete with a dishwasher. It is true that I don't exactly make tons of moneyz, and the future Mr. Self-Important is a law student, so he makes negative moneyz. But I don't think this should really be an impediment, should it? If I don't spend money on anything else, can it be ok? If I am 25 and married, can I be an adult person with level floors and brick walls and maybe even furniture purchased from a retailer not based in Sweden, even if it cuts into my savings?

I have tried to compensate for this irresponsibility by getting a part-time job, and promising myself to write articles this summer. That is my cheapness penance. I am repenting, and also doodling floor plans and possible furniture layouts in my notebooks during class.

On a related note, between silver clogs and luxury apartments, I think the mission of this blog has officially been subverted.

Context is everything

2010-04-16T17:54:00.002-04:00

I'd been feeling a bit guilty about having bought a totally unneeded pair of boots in Arizona. Sure, they were $21, but I'd just bought silver clogs, and there was really no way to justify this additional purchase. It thus made me feel slightly better to see the same boots through the window of a shop on the Lower East Side. I of course had to see how much they cost, and after a bit of poking around inside the boot to find the price tag, got the answer: $198. Granted, this doesn't make the fact that I spent $21 on boots any more noble, but it's reassuring to know that if this academia thing doesn't work out, I have a future in whatever career it's called if you buy lots of used clothing in one town and sell it in another, preferably on the Lower East Side. (Oh, my Ashkenazi ancestors would be so proud.)

Esprit. Who knew?

2010-04-15T22:28:00.002-04:00

I had time to kill on lower Broadway and found the nautical shirt (this, but with light blue stripes and not at all the odd shape you see in that image thanks to pinning) of my dreams for a whopping $8.99. (Least plausible ever "original price": $35.50. I believe only the previous price of $14.99.) This was that much more exciting because the Uniqlo sailor shirt I'd been on the lookout for a) is no longer being sold, b) would cost $15.50 if it were, and c) isn't as interesting. This one has buttons on the sleeves! Extra nautical! (As if I know what that would even mean.) My loyalty to the Japanese chain has, it seems, been broken.

The funny thing about the shirt, though, is that its size is different in different countries, as per the tag. In the US, as in Germany and the UK, it's a medium (that, I should note, fits me just right even though I'm a small or extra-small in other stores); in France and Italy, a large. Maybe the discount comes from the implicit reminder that the wearer would be considered "large" in Paris or Milan...

Failure to shop as pathology?

2010-04-12T17:50:00.003-04:00

Dear Prudence has received a letter from a man with a problem I'd have thought inconceivable: he's annoyed (see the first letter) that his wife refuses to shop for new clothes. I'd always thought that the role of men in heterosexual relationships was, among other things, that of cheapness-promoters. "Do you really need another pair of black boots?" Clichéd, yes, but I've found it's often altogether true. Men may spend elsewhere, but women notice subtle differences in clothing that causes many of us to buy what seems to many men to be a replica of that which we already own.

Anyway, the letter seems quite obviously to be about more than a mom feeling cozier in sweats. There's the question of why this woman wears rags to a wedding, and on the other hand of why her husband cares that she hasn't worn earrings in years. I mean, I have a tendency to lose earrings, and so tend not to wear any, but can't imagine my boyfriend or any other man noticing either way. I could imagine a man being upset if his wife stopped, say, showering, or gained 300 pounds. But who cares what their partner wears in public, unless it's at a meeting for your work or something like that? The guy seems way too concerned about non-problems (again, earrings?) while the woman seems truly uninterested in dressing up. What's her deal?

The husband hints at the possibility that it's about weight - his wife is not as thin as she once was, but not large, either. Could be. Or, as some commenters suggest, it could be depression.

Another possibility: Cheaporexia. Not as in anorexia, but as in orthorexia - the eating disorder less about self-starvation than about an attempt to eat healthfully taken too far. Women are stereotyped as shopaholics, wanting new clothes whenever possible. But we've been told that this is wrong.

Not only is buying new clothing frivolous and vain, confirming all the worst stereotypes about women, but it supports child labor (who if not an oppressed four-year-old made that new dress you're admiring in the shop window?) and contributes to landfills. Think of the environment! Moreover, money spent on personal appearance could just as easily be donated to Haiti relief or one's savings account, depending where one's guilt primarily lies. Sure, we all want to look appropriate at work, and no one's faulted for owning a suit for meetings when in theory sweatpants would do. But gratuitous clothes-shopping is, in our culture, sin, a particularly despised subset of gratuitous spending more generally.

The ideal woman would look amazing - stylish, put-together, well-groomed - but not shop. (A bit like the new idea that the perfect woman is one who's a cover model even without airbrushing - this, when the anti-airbrushing brigade is ostensibly all about making all women feel better about their own looks!) It could be that, on some level, the wife in the Prudie letter suspects that by not shopping, she's in fact more appealing - to her husband or more generally - than she would be if she did what her husband ostensibly wants. Because yes, he wants her in a nice dress, but does he want her coming home with shopping bags? Or, two dresses later, would there be a Lucy-and-the-hats situation?

There's always a catch

2010-04-06T18:15:00.003-04:00

In NY, food establishments can only meet two of the following three criteria: cheap, delicious, and comfortable. By "comfortable" I mean a number of things, but mostly chairs or benches rather than barstools, at least a hint of space between you and your neighbor, and no seats where you're perched on a stool, facing the street, during your meal.

Alas, two of my favorite lunch places fail the comfort test so much it's not even funny. Old favorite Taim (Waverly off 7th Ave South) and new obsession Dos Toros (14th Ave and 13th St), selling falafel and burritos, respectively, are both places where everything tastes fresh and delicious, where you'd have to have seconds to reach $10, and where you will end up getting a very messy food all over your face, clothes, and neighbors as passersby look on. By "you," for that last one, I mean "I."

Given that years of experience have not taught me how to eat falafel without a fork, I don't know what I was thinking with my forkless approach to the two soft tacos overflowing with rice, beans, salsa, guacamole, and hot sauce. Other people were picking theirs up just fine, but the same goes for falafel. It's not cheap ethnic foods, it's me. It was only by the second taco that I realized forks were available, but at this point 4th Avenue was strewn with the contents of taco #1. This was unfortunate both because I was sad to lose the contents of so much of my lunch, and because I teach next to Dos Toros, meaning I was fairly convinced my students or colleagues were about to witness the mess I was making. If I read anything on this semester's course evaluations about black beans, I'll know my fears were well-founded.

So what's the answer? Proper restaurant dining? More compact food items? Lunch at home? Abandoning shame?

Recipes overanalyzed

2010-03-29T21:13:00.007-04:00

Let me be clear. I say this as someone who bases many meals on pasta and even a good number on legumes, but are these not the most depressing, dreary-sounding (Puritanical?) recipes ever published? Yes, we've all heard a thousand times that no one's so poor as to need to eat fast food, because OMG lentils. Haven't The Poor heard of lentils?

My point, however, is less about the patronizing genre of Dear Poors, They're Called Beans, You're Welcome, than it is about the smugger-still I-know-what-real-poor-people-are-like one-upmanship in the comments at the Well blog. Rather than faulting these particular recipes for making any reader with taste buds crave a plate of fries (is it just me?), commenters are outraged that "budget" recipes include ingredients other than beans. Who would have the audacity to include olive oil in a recipe meant to be inexpensive? Sure, olive oil, unless you're getting the fancy stuff or using it as a base for soup or a beverage or who knows, adds a few cents per meal. But gosh doesn't it sound snooty! Let's make the yuppie food writer behind the recipe feel bad about not knowing what it's like outside her arugula-filled bubble! Privilege! And not white beans, that known caviar equivalent! How dare anyone suggest that beans are an appropriate ingredient for a budget recipe!

Once we've established that peanut butter is in fact foie gras, I want to know, what's accomplished?

/rant

Seriously, though, I'm not sure what intervention is going to make Americans - yes, including yuppies, whose healthy eating is highly exaggerated - stop eating crap. I suspect that I could rewrite these recipes to make them somewhat more edible-sounding (hint: don't pile broccoli on top of pasta; add a whole lot of olive oil, cheese, garlic, and, blood pressure permitting, salt to absolutely everything; and don't even start with something called "cabbage and bean soup" if you want meals to be something you look forward to), and that other home cooks could do the same. But would this make any difference? Do I ever cook anything (baking not included) that wouldn't sound like cabbage and bean soup to someone used to takeout?

And I don't see where the NYT is going wrong, promoting meals designed more for broke, faux-broke, or just plain cheap yuppies than for those trying to make ends meet in Palin country. Because who's benefiting from these things if not people who are only now realizing that four advanced degrees in Obscure Studies interspersed with extended finding-oneself traveling leaves one highly knowledgeable about where to get cumin and less so about how to pay for non-bean-based meals? If the recipes could acknowledge this a bit more openly, and admit that they're for people who have heard of but can't afford or would rather not pay for the absolute priciest ingredients, that might be a first step. (There are few foods not improved by the addition of a bit of $12/lb. bucherondin, but goat cheese...) As the recipes stand, they hover in a bland no-man's-land between SWPL and that town Jamie Oliver recently invaded. Nothing too 'gourmet', because then the NYT's being elitist, but nothing with even the potential to sway anyone from chicken nuggets.

Cheap clothes too toxic, let's hit Barneys!

2010-03-29T10:32:00.003-04:00

Oh no! We as a country are buying more clothes, yet paying less overall for them. We've already established the tragedy that is allowing those who are not super-wealthy to own more than one outfit, or to dress roughly according to the decade in which they live. Wouldn't it be so much better if the only clothes produced were made from vintage designer scarves ("'For one thing, it’s not mass-produced'"), and the rest of us were offered potato sacks in one-size-fits-all?

Apparently the chic-masses-scare-the-rich argument isn't enough, nor even is the landfill one, nor the think-of-the-little-hands-behind-that-dress one. Surely we are all going to get cancer from mysterious particles attached to our $5 t-shirts.

Micromicromicroeconomics

2010-03-24T14:53:00.003-04:00

Perhaps the staff at a certain coffee place decided that it was more annoying to dig up all those pennies than it was fun to make customers feel stingy for wanting even the tiniest bit of change. The iced coffee at this mini-chain is now, alert the presses, $2.50. If it hits $2.51, it's thermos time.

Does the health care bill cover dentists?

2010-03-23T00:59:00.000-04:00

Because my grad school health insurance does not. And it's been about a year since my last cleaning, so I've had some minor stirrings of concern about how I can avoid paying the $100 upfront cost of a cleaning, plus who knows how much for x-rays since my last ones are back in Virginia and filling any cavities that may have appeared. Here are the options:
1) The dental school: Apparently, dental students offer discounted "training cleanings" that very much resemble the experience of getting a discounted haircut from a stylist-in-training at a nice salon--it takes four hours, and then a professional has to jump in at the end and repair the damage. Also, no possibility of rectifying any cavities or other tooth distress.
2) The cheap "new patient special" at this place in Porter Square: Note the one-star review. Also the problem whereby money saved now means I can never go back again.
3) What's a few years without a cleaning anyway? I mean, nothing is aching or bleeding. So I should be ok, right?

Stay tuned for cheapness needs new glasses but doesn't have any insurance for that either.

Biggest small cheapness fail ever

2010-03-02T11:57:00.003-05:00

I was so very impressed with myself that this nail polish I wanted that cost $8 in the store, but that was sold out just about everywhere, was $6.75, shipping included, on Ebay - new, even, apparently. I don't usually shop online, but made an exception. Because I don't usually shop online, I remembered to change my billing address, but somehow missed that Ebay had my old shipping address, in Brooklyn, in a building whose front door is, on a good day, locked. I emailed the seller (also in Brooklyn), but it was too late. I caved and ordered another, realizing that my time is worth quite little, but not so little that I'll spend an hour on the train and another half-hour on foot to attempt to break into my own old building to get $7 worth of nail polish that for all I know either isn't there yet or has already been taken. So, uh, free mint-green Essie for the lucky residents of 7th and Union, I suppose.

The Cheapness Studies Guide to Tribeca

2010-02-28T13:48:00.001-05:00

Of all the posh Manhattan neighborhoods, Tribeca has a way of out-poshing them all. Sure, the Upper East Side has its socialites, but it also has recent college grads living far from the subway, its fallen-aristocrat types in inherited apartments, etc., etc. The Upper West Side? Wealthy people schlepping around so many plastic bags you'd never guess their apartments were worth that. East Village? Pricey but filthy. West Village? Magnolia-seeking tourists and adolescent fans of Christopher Street make the intimidating townhouse-owners (intimidating-townhouse owners?) seem few and far between. SoHo? No doubt it costs a ton to live there, but most of us are too busy using it as a mall to consider that it's also residential.

But Tribeca is for the rich. It holds no attraction for tourists, and its shops are more amenities for the super-wealthy than places the peons can go for new jeans and tees. The women have that casual-yet-polished, gym-honed look one expects to see in L.A., not New York, but with a stylish edge that comes from being one unpleasant trip across Canal away from SoHo.

The Tribeca I remember from high school was wealthy, sure, but it was more just these few loft-lined blocks and Nobu, Chanterelle, who knows. Now it seems to cover a much larger area, and the trust-fund-artists-who-try-to-look-poor seem to have been replaced by perhaps similarly artistic types who nevertheless don't have that concern. There were once many high-school-student-budget-friendly establishments (Taylors, Downtown Delicious), but these seem to have disappeared. So after moving to a neighborhood next to Tribeca, one whose main drag is, I suppose, Tribeca, I was relieved to learn that other options remain or have arrived in recent years.

So fear not, frugal visitors and (should they exist) Tribecans. The guide is below. Note that it is mostly about food establishments. If I bought things other than food on a regular basis, I wouldn't be able to afford the places I recommend here. I hope this will be just the first in a series of Cheapness Neighborhood Guides, for NY and beyond. We shall see.

Try these:

Bouley Bakery: On the one hand, hmm. On the other, the pain au chocolat... and canelles... And coffee there is what, $1.35? So it's not the best coffee in the city. They might very well have the best croissants in the city, at least since Payard closed, and if you can ignore the flakes of croissant caked onto the velvet banquettes and simply appreciate the charming atmosphere and, well, velvet banquettes, why not?

Takahachi: Fresh, amazing Japanese food under $50 for two, with drinks (and by "drinks" I of course mean one hot sake), assuming you're not someone who needs to leave a sushi place feeling stuffed. More specifically, the $3 vegetable rolls and $1-for-two vegetable tempura make the place the ultimate bargain for those who didn't want fish in the first place. Remarkable considering the neighborhood and the cuisine, but still a stretch for the frugal grad student. On the other hand, it's enough to make six nights a week of pasta worth it after all.

Whole Foods: Yes, Whole Foods. It's not technically in Tribeca, but it calls itself the Tribeca Whole Foods. Not only is this, relatively speaking, the 'cheap' supermarket (a depressing process of elimination, I realize - have I mentioned my feelings regarding Gristedes?), but the cafe upstairs has affogatto, i.e. a large serving of the ice cream flavor of your choice plus two shots of espresso, for either $4 or $4.50. Consider one can easily pay this for two shots of espresso that don't come poured over ice cream, not a bad deal whatsoever. And remember that any supermarket with a bulk section has that in its favor.

Housing Works: The Chambers Street branch is where I got a pair of $5 A.P.C. jeans that would probably close comfortably if it weren't for the above-mentioned entries. Basically, though, it's the best thrift shop around. Tribecan cast-offs are the greatest.

...and not these:

Kaffe 16somethingorother across from the Whole Foods: Curious if you can spend $3.50-ish on a cup of regular coffee? You can, there, last I checked. It is seriously a coffee place without an inexpensive option. The unexciting-looking baked goods hover at the same ridiculous price point. Yes, it's good to know that the beans were shade-grown by someone who makes more than my stipend, but the same is promised from places that mark up their coffee by far more reasonable amounts.

Every single restaurant on Greenwich: Jo and I took a walk down that street, looking for a place to get dinner, and while it's indeed lined with restaurants, they're all those giant loft-like spaces with elaborate bars and model-banker couples, or just people so head-to-toe expensively attended to that even before glancing at the menu to see that appetizers began at $12, we sort of realized this wasn't for us.

Century 21: OK, not in Tribeca, but closer to it than my apartment is, and also on that walk to campus. After comparing the selection and prices on various undergarments there and at the pricey-seeming Calvin Klein underwear boutique in SoHo, I realized that I'd pretty much been suffering needlessly in a mob of overexcited tourists - and at a store where you can't even try on the bras - for all these years. Maybe they have bargains somewhere in that store, but it turns out the stuff I'd been getting 'for less' all these years is, alas, cheap to begin with.

Furniture stores, art galleries, furniture stores that look like art galleries, Issey Miyake, realtors: Need I explain?

Gratuitous upgrades

2010-02-24T12:10:00.006-05:00

As I've held forth about since forever on this blog, I don't much believe in 'quality' when it comes to everyday clothes. They pretty much last till they don't, with many factors (stains, trends, weight fluctuations) affecting clothes' longevity far more than the hand-stitching or lack thereof. I own two pairs of jeans, each of which cost precisely $29.50 (do Uniqlo and Levi's have some kind of arrangement? I kid...), and honestly cannot see how any aspect of my life, including the all-important happiness-with-jeans aspect, would improve had I gone with a $150 alternative.

But! I do, unfortunately, believe that there are other arenas where quality is perceptible. Shoes are an ambiguous case - pay a bit more for certain types, and comfort improves, immediate deterioration becomes less likely; pay a ton, and there's a good chance you're hobbling around in heel-less eight-inch platforms. Food, cosmetics (except for nail polish, which need never exceed $8), shampoo, conditioner... These are tough. The trick is basically not to know that better is out there, because once you do, getting the cheap version will feel like a sacrifice.

Two examples, both of which are goopy and ridiculous:

$30 Japanese conditioner.

$2.60 Icelandic (but, oddly enough, locally produced - way to market to everyone!) vanilla yogurt cups.

I ought to have tried neither. Alas, too late. Both are so definitively superior to their reasonably-priced equivalents that it's impossible to claim no difference exist. The only answer - and perhaps the best cheapness advice I'm capable of providing, period - is that if a more expensive version exists of something you buy regularly, accept that it might be better, much better, but don't buy it in the first place.

How not to be cheap

2010-02-23T15:49:00.004-05:00

Do not pick the day of a 6-mile run as the one to try that Japanese restaurant in Tribeca you've been so curious about. Even if said restaurant is shockingly affordable by Japanese food and Tribeca standards. In fact, going near any meal that is not a huge plate of pasta prepared in one's own kitchen is, on such a day, a cheapness disaster.

However! $1 for two decent-sized pieces of vegetable tempura! (Of which I had... more than two.) A Cheapness Studies Guide to New York's Priciest Neighborhood may be coming soon.

Counting pennies

2010-02-09T19:07:00.006-05:00

The iced coffee I like best near campus, or anywhere for that matter, used to cost $2.25. Then it went up to $2.26, which was a convenient way to get rid of pennies, or an annoying way to acquire pennies, depending. (The place accepts credit cards even for tiny amounts, which indeed presents a way out of the dilemma I'm about to describe.) Then, all of a sudden, perhaps having noticed that their iced coffee was kind of a bargain compared to everything else they sell, up it leaped to $2.49.

This, I immediately decided, was not a fluke derived from the price-plus-tax, but rather a calculated attempt by the establishment in question to collect mini-tips from customers who otherwise wouldn't tip, or (as is my case) only tip at to-go establishments when ordering something more complicated than coffee poured into a cup. Who would be so crass - or put so little value on their time - as to wait for that penny? Unlike $2.99, $2.49 means you've probably already put in the time to find 50 cents in change, at which point you've already been holding up the line, wasting your time and that of the cashier, for ages.

My time might be 'worth' more than that of the average humanities grad student, thanks to NYU's new funding arrangements, but it's still not worth a whole heck of a lot, so my usual method is to pay with two dollar bills and two quarters, receive the penny, and dream of the day when I'll have accumulated four pennies in time to pay with two bills, a quarter, two dimes, and... you see where I'm going with this. So it was oh just a little bit awkward when, recently, the woman ringing me up asked, "Do you want your penny?" Because, um, I did want my penny, because pennies are currency, not everywhere takes credit cards, and some items do not cost something that's a multiple of 5. And because when I tip (again, fancy-espresso-drinks, along with, obvs, restaurants and bars), I tip more than a penny. So I said yes, that I did want the penny, in a polite yet confident tone. Nevertheless, I may never be able to show my face in that coffee shop again.

Cheapness done wrong UPDATED

2010-02-03T23:23:00.005-05:00

OMG girls, what we should totally do is channel our obsession with eating nothing whatsoever and then feeling all bad about it when we slip up and down a cheesecake into one great big no-shopping "diet." Wouldn't it be awesome if we could apply that purity impulse that once drove mankind towards religion and sexual restraint (or at least guilt) but makes us think just one chocolate truffle will make us obese to another clichéd women's pleasure: buying new clothes? Like, we can declare a teensy purchase at J.Crew "sinful," then collectively pat ourselves on the back for going a whole five minutes without buying anything other than accessories. We can merge the language of paraphrased-Christianity and fad-diets and create something uniquely painful to read, it will be super!

So I guess it's clear where I stand on "The Great American Apparel Diet." (Unfortunate name, but at least it's not The Great Forever 21 Diet.) But the whole thing's not totally off-base. If you're buying clothes about which you're not 100% enthusiastic, in designer-denim-induced-debt, buy less. And when possible, avoid purchases that already have it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time written all over them. Much as I have a momentary desire for these, it's unclear what buying them would accomplish, other than help the Japanese economy, and ultimately, post-second-round-as-thrift, add to the trendy-purchase landfill.

But does the whole thing need to be dressed up as cutesy 'diet'? (It's effectively the reverse of the Worst Advice Ever.) Despite occasional nods to wholesome alternatives to browsing H&M, the goal here seems not to be to abandon shopping for something more productive, but rather to give it up so as to blog self-righteously about how one was able to Resist the siren call of the H&M downstairs.

Still, as pleasures go, if you're not spending beyond your means, where exactly is the harm in buying some clothes, sometimes? Is keeping store employees employed not enough to cancel out the environmental and child-labor disaster that is, in 9 out of 10 circumstances, your new tank top? If your concerns are purely ecological, couldn't you just go used-only and shop away? But yes, given that people do not tend to shop exclusively in thrift stores except out of need or hipsterdom (or Finnishness - the Finns love their used clothes, apparently), there is an impact on the planet to take into account. But this is true of nearly all human experience. Should we all get standard-issue potato sacks and abandon Consumerism along with personal style? Has taking an all-or-nothing stance benefited Americans as food-dieters, and if not, why (other than the obvs - to sell books) embrace it for shopping 'dieters' as well?

UPDATE

See also Jezebel on this.

Today's cheapness accomplishments

2010-01-27T22:57:00.003-05:00

-A lovely neighbor (with a charming Bichon!) giving away her sofabed ended up leading to a new piece of furniture in my apartment. The bureaucratic procedure involved in moving a couch from one apartment to another in a non-shack-like apartment building such as this one made me almost lose hope, but the $60 (including a tip) moving fee meant a $60 couch that, like, unfolds and everything. If we had cable, Jo and I could, in theory, each spread out on our own couch to watch it. Whee!

-Lunch at home (because of couch-related confusion) involved a too-long-frozen bagel, testing the limits of the toaster's 'bagel' and 'defrost' capacities, but keeping the total meal in the $1-ish range.

-A stamp-card meant we'd 'earned' a free half-pound of Oren's Viennese Roast. Huzzah!

-After learning that the stylist who gave me the infamous $85 haircut switched salons, losing me one free bang trim (I think? does this carry over from salon to salon? would it be worth going to Williamsburg to find out?), I took matters into my own scissors and, while technically it's not even or anything, I much prefer the style of the self-inflicted cut to the ones I've had done professionally.

-I walked right by the coffee place with the iced coffee I like so much that used to cost $2.25 but is now $2.49 (?) and resisted temptation. The freezing weather may have helped in this regard.

And now for today's cheapness failures.

-Sure, the couch was only $60 in moving fees. But we already had a couch. This was kind of gratuitous, in that it's a studio apartment. A studio apartment we may never leave, now that we each have a couch.

-Breakfast out at a certain Tribeca bakery-market thing, which I've finally come around to having croissants and coffee at (but no more!) despite the startlingly severe and repeated Health Dept. warnings against said establishment, cost more than oatmeal at home would have.

-This evening, tempted by a $22/lb cheese, I asked for a quarter pound of it, only to find myself with more like 0.38, and post-couch-situation, not up for making a fuss. So, I spent too much on cheese.

-Did I mention the dangers of dining in Chelsea Market? The Thai food itself is a bargain, but the place happens to be surrounded by ever more delicious and pricey options. The $2 piece of Sarabeth's lemon pound cake that will be breakfast was among the cheaper baked goods in the whole of Chelsea Market, but was nevertheless an impulse buy.

Getting it for less

2010-01-19T17:01:00.002-05:00

Nothing shocking here, but still something to address in the cheapness and clothing discussion. (Via.)

A limited defense of slow fashion

2010-01-18T00:51:00.000-05:00

This is really Phoebe's topic on which I am basically unqualified to opine since I've never even read anything that used the term "slow fashion" that wasn't written by Phoebe, and my main guide to fashion at the moment is what the undergrads wear to the library. (I've been noticing a lot of sweatpants sloppily tucked into Uggs--this may be worse even than mom jeans.) HOWEVER. Last week, I had an eye-opening conversion experience to (what I think, based on Phoebe's descriptions is) slow fashion.

What happened was that I tried to consign my old clothes. This involved schlepping two huge shopping bags of stuff on the subway. Not only did I look like a homeless person en route, I was subsequently subjected to a 20-minute scrutiny of all my garments which felt distinctly like an intense personal scrutiny of my taste and judgment. Probably two-thirds of my stuff got rejected, but I did learn a very important lesson, and it is this: buying expensive clothes pays, at least when it comes time to consign them. Every single item with a J.Crew or Banana Republic label was accepted, and almost everything from H&M and Old Navy was denied (and that was, sadly, the majority of my offering). (Additional question: Who actually buys H&M from consignment stores?)

Moreover, even the deformed pricey clothes made the cut, including a J.Crew sweater I tragically ruined through machine washing (back before I discovered thrifty home dry-cleaning), rendering it at least two sizes smaller than the original and not quite proportional. And while this did give the saleswoman momentary pause, it did not ultimately lead to item rejection, whereas several mint-condition (on account of my having immediately reconsidered the error of my choice) H&M items did not get a second look.

The obvious conclusion of the day's adventure was that, if I want my clothes to have any resale value, I should henceforth shop exclusively at J.Crew, a view to which, like the many women who use "slow fashion" as a post-facto justification of their preference for expensive clothes, I can be quite amenable. Now, I understand that this logic is subject to some exceptions. For one thing, not every garment can have resale value. Underwear, exercise clothes, tights and leggings--basically anything that goes unnoticed or unseen by the general public will continue to be purchased at purveyors of fast fashion. Another problem is that the math doesn't strictly support the theory of recouping initial outlay on expensive clothes by consigning them. If I buy a $70 sweater at J.Crew and consign it two years later, I'll only get about $15 for it. It requires quite a bit of cost-per-wear imagination to believe that I wore the heck out of the remaining $55 in the intervening two years, though it's quite possible that, being a vain person, I would enjoy it more than a $25 sweater. But again, what would it mean to say my pleasure is worth exactly $55? And it's not as though J.Crew is the cost ceiling for slow fashion--the gulf between purchase price and resale value only widens from there. Finally, I suppose frequent consignment undermines the purpose of slow fashion, which seems to consist in wearing every $200 blouse for the at least 30 years.

Still, I think there is something to be said for this plan. Usually, expensive stuff is nicer--it fits better and looks better. (How long it lasts is rarely relevant given that I don't wear anything for 20 years, and so don't work as hard as I could on making my clothes last.) Since I have a monthly shopping budget to which I mostly adhere, it is quite likely that I would buy less stuff if I bought more expensive things less often. Plus, I would really like an excuse to shop only at J.Crew at this point in my life while I am trying to fight the sweatpants-in-Uggs powers and hang on to what I can of my hard-won and now receding pre-grad school adulthood.

The Spanx of denim

2010-01-15T16:16:00.006-05:00

The writer who brought us surrogacy chic, who famously posed flat-bellied and high-heeled alongside the barefoot woman carrying her child, then again with the child, as an of-color, uniformed servant looked on, has seen the error in her ways, and is now addressing a more serious topic: after having another baby, this time the traditional way, her midsection isn't what it once was. Crisis! The woman needs a new pair of jeans.

Afraid that the mere fact of biological motherhood will cause her to suddenly appear in one of Kmart's less inspired creations, Alex Kuczynski decides the time has come to do as any other wayward 15-year-old would in her situation: make a cutesy remark about how the father of her children will totes leave her now that she's gotten huge; watch "Tyra"; and look for designer jeans.

And designer jeans she finds. Starting at a mere $178, you too can experience what Kuczynski charmingly describes as "trompe l’oeil-anorexia," otherwise known as jeans that fade to lighter down the middle of each leg, otherwise known as... jeans. They're all dyed like this. OK, not all, but it's harder to find jeans that don't share this feature than ones that do. (A glance down at my own legs reveals the same technique on a $30 pair.) This, along with the subtle addition of a certain percent stretchy material, has more or less defined jeans since forever.

It doesn't offend me that Kuczynski's all about the $200 denim, so much as that she's purporting to be an expert on Fashion, yet is on this bandwagon several years too late. The 'premium' look is the default, to be acquired inexpensively either new wherever jeans are sold or used in their brand-name form. Meanwhile, the jeans featured in the SNL "Mom Jeans" sketch she links to - high-waisted, pleated, and almost aggressively unflattering - are in fact so-very-now among not only moms but hipsters and fashion types. Oh, the trend is being mocked, but that just means that everyone is now out secretly buying a pair (see: leggings).

However, as this is Cheapness Studies, I'll attempt a more general point along those lines, which is that whatever anyone says, no, jeans are not an 'investment.' Buy whichever you like, at a price you're comfortable with, but by all means don't announce - to yourself or anyone else - your intentions of wearing them 'for years.' Other garments, if you must, but not jeans. Their capacity to stop fitting/look out-of-style within minutes has to exceed that of any other garment, perhaps making the very concept of jeans something a true advocate of cheapness would urge against.

Local grad student brings down H&M

2010-01-07T21:36:00.004-05:00

Here at Cheapness Studies, I've defended 'fast fashion,' or chains like H&M (and my own house of worship, Uniqlo), which are often accused of being inherently wasteful, encouraging us to buy according to 15-minute trends, thus creating landfills entirely made up of harem pants and jeggings. My argument: cheapness means buying cheap clothes, but pretending they cost a fortune. Do this - that is, buy fewer clothes from the chains, and take better care of them - and you will find that the clothes They told you would fall apart instantly keep just fine, year after year.

But! H&M is apparently the devil after all, but not for the reason usually given, i.e. the low quality of their goods. A CUNY grad student discovered that the store on 34th Street destroys unworn clothes so that if they're not bought by H&M customers, no one can have them. And, as the NYT sums up: "It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly."

Of course, if 'slow-fashion' stores are to blame for the same practice, blaming H&M for not charging more for its clothes (see passage in this post and accompanying comments, along with prior comments at Racked) seems a bit beside the point. It's quite possible to condemn H&M's behavior without attributing it to their clothes being cheap, if even expensive goods get this treatment.

Where does all the waste come from? No doubt landfills see more H&M than Prada. But per shopper, who buys more, the woman with a shopping cart at Old Navy or the one with a personal shopper at Bergdorfs? Fast fashion means more waste overall, but more options for those with less. Are fast-fashion stores really purveyors of disposable goods any more than places slightly more upscale? In total, no doubt, because there are so many more of them, but per person? The near-infinite presence of new-looking H&M at both vintage and thrift stores suggests such chains are, in fact, used by some well-off (or non-frugal) women as a source of so-very-now get-ups, but, because this is not how I myself shop at such stores, and I'm neither impoverished nor a cheapness saint, I question whether this is the normal approach to them.

Cheapness resolutions

2010-01-01T22:26:00.004-05:00

2009 was a good year on the cheapness front. I rarely get breakfast out, and I managed to move into a new, much nicer apartment with the same rent as the old hovel. I've discovered bulk foods (OK, not quite discovered, but found sources that are not as inconvenient as Sahadi's) and a new way of making canned tomatoes into amazing pasta sauce (hint: lots of red pepper flakes and garlic). I've found one shade of nail polish I like, thus eliminating Duane Reade impulse purchases.

But there's always room for improvement, and on that note, in order of most to least realistic:

-Less Uniqlo. Not no Uniqlo, which would be futile, but when the new +J line comes out later this month, I will look, but not feel the compulsion to buy, particularly because I'm not in the market for a pastel-colored puffy vest.

-One cheese at a time, two at most. More simply does not get finished. (The cheddar, Parmesan, and Stilton currently in the fridge are, believe it or not, an improvement. Sometimes I'll count and realize I've reached seven.)

-No more monthly Metrocards once the snowy season ends - an hour-long walk to school is still quite doable, and through the less-obnoxious streets of Tribeca and SoHo, preferably combined with an NPR or Slate podcast, a painless form of exercise.

-No coffee beverages purchased outside. (Why do I even pretend? However much coffee I have at home, I'll want more later, and there are currently at least four good coffee options near campus. A thermos... makes sense, but between library books and teaching materials would go where exactly? And I'm not getting the $3-plus drinks anyway, so guilting myself out of this would be a tough one.)

-Make my own pastries. (Here, the time-is-money issue arises, as does my recent rediscovery of a patisserie oh so conveniently located between a subway I can take and my office. Since I will be taking the subway.)

Bliss!

2009-12-24T18:26:00.003-05:00

Me: How much are those slices of pie*?
Cashier at pie shop: $4.
Me to Jo: I'm not getting it then. (Keep in mind, we'd walked nearly 20 minutes to get to this pie shop.)
(Insert endless agonizing over how these were actually more like two slices of pie, so maybe $4 was OK...)
Me to cashier: (Something affirmative regarding the pie.)
Cashier: I'll give you another one as well, since we're about to close.

It's the little things...

*A brief return to the Americanness discussion here and here: Apparently, 'American' is defined by considering a) pumpkin pie, and b) peanut butter foods worth eating. In that case, call me doubly American.

Rampant materialism

2009-12-20T19:01:00.002-05:00

What keeps me from posting at Cheapness Studies is that post-exam, I have bought. And bought. Not all for myself, but not all not for myself, either. There were $5 jeans, but also $80 (but fabulous!) ballet flats. There were these $10 leggings, and from the same den of temptation, just before the exam week, these, on sale, but still. Only one book, because of the backlog of unread-because-not-on-lists purchases, and because there was definitely a 48-hour period when I could not look at bound pages of any kind.

Part of this relative binge has been the knowledge that I'm about to go ascetic once more - this is just the moment before the next deadlines - but now I can do the next batch of work in leggings with stars on them. Part has also been the knowledge that a combination of Askhenazi heritage and old age (and like Swann, my Judaism appears atavistically, in my later years) prevents me from engaging in the level of drinking that's expected after such a semester. So, like Jewish women before me, where others drank, I shopped.

I worry, however, that where there was once expertise on seven lists' worth of French literature and history, there's now in-depth knowledge of New York shopping. I realize, for instance, that from this list, which I only just found, I've been to numbers 1, 5, 9, and 26 (but not the branch they mention) recently, and in the not so distant past, 4, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 36. That, and 7 and 38 both sound excellent... Luckily, tomorrow's a work day once more. The cheapness shall return.

And another

2009-12-15T12:47:00.002-05:00

Did you know that buying loads of designer goodies is actually thrifty? Did you? Another entry to this unfortunate bandwagon. (Granted, this from a blogger whose comments policy bans all criticism, not merely trolling, personal-life and body-image commentary, and the sorts of things that are reasonable to discourage. I mean, why have a comments section on a fashion blog, then announce "I’m not looking for pointers"? But I digress.)

Remember, people: 'cost-per-wear' is just the reverse of the advice about how small purchases add up.

Sold out

2009-12-14T20:54:00.003-05:00

Are we really supposed to be horrified when talented designers accustomed to making clothes the price of a grad-student stipend create a line for Target? According to Erika Kawalek, the Rodarte team sold out by doing just that.

The article itself is a bit confusing - the author announces that she just returned from China, and implies that the Target line was made there, but never says this outright, so for all we know it's not. But it has to be from China, and the result of poor labor conditions, for the argument to make sense. She calls the Target line's garments "Rodarte for Target clothes are commodities" - what, then, are the clothes from the pricier line?

And, um: "Rodarte is synonymous with craft, which means $3,000 to $12,000 price tags, but nobody calls the Mulleavy's elitist or out-of-touch." Because I read too many fashion blogs, I'm aware of who these sisters are, that they look much more 'normal' (read, non-emaciated) than most women in the industry, and wear jeans and not terribly cutting-edge sneakers, so I suppose compared with an Anna Wintour, a Karl Lagerfeld, the phrase "out-of-touch" wouldn't come to mind. But anyone responsible for clothing in this price range is part of the problem, if we are defining down-payment-on-house-priced clothing as a problem.

We are thus once again being confronted with the "slow fashion" argument. Hand-crafted, artisinal, quality, Investment Piece, blah blah, who cares that most of the clothing women actually wear-for-years is from places like Target. Kawalek writes of how the designers' regular line "practically howled with the sadness of environmental degradation, while at the same time inspired a poetic but equally practical mend-and-make-do approach to self-fashioning." Yes, because the solution for The Environment is to make clothing that costs $12,000, so that no one can afford it, so that no clothing - worn-to-shreds or otherwise - ends up in landfills, because there's no clothing left. As in, of course, it must be better to carry your great-grandmother's Hermes purse than a tote bag or backpack - perhaps if my own ancestors had carried purses and not pushcarts, I'd do the same.

OK, I realize the above is as populist as I've ever sounded, ever. My point, though, is not about Real Women who Wear Target, but about, once again, the nonsense that is pretending that there is Quality clothing, which is worn for years, and on the other hand, disposable junk. $40 clothing is only disposable junk if for you, the default is $4,000.

Van Masters

2009-12-07T23:14:00.002-05:00

What is the message from this Salon article about a grad student living in a van?

-Stunts pay, if not in cash long-term, in publicity short-term?

-People who claim, "Living in a van was my grand social experiment" should consider a reduction in adjectives? (Other people can call your choice to live in a van "grand." You, the van-dweller, do not have this privilege.)

-People who are "worried" that Facebook groups will form on the topic of their "grand social experiment" could try to sound a tiny bit more sincere?

-Men who pose shirtless online and offer up statements like "I had a penchant for rugged living" must appeal to someone, or else they would not do this?

-College graduates whose parents offer to pay their rent and who nevertheless go for something like living in a van are living in a van because they can leave said van at any time without getting a new job?

-Don't go to a humanities grad program that doesn't at least pay your tuition?

Cans, deposited

2009-12-07T01:11:00.000-05:00

I forgot to mention, my roommate and I finally accumulated three bags of cans and went down to the bottle deposit place to get our due. Unlike in New York, apparently, regular stores don't accept deposit cans, so you have to go to some dank, smelly warehouse in east Cambridge to claim your reward. And, as I predicted, this warehouse was full of homeless people plying their trade. Also, you have to sort and arrange your own cans. After all that, we got fully $3.20 for our efforts. This is barely enough to buy a latte.

I concluded from this adventure that in order to get the most out of this deposit law, one really needs to have either 10 beer parties a month or 10 soda-guzzling children. But I still intend to go back in June and get another $3 worth of thrift.

If you can afford X, you can afford X+Y

2009-12-05T12:28:00.006-05:00

A popular argument in favor of the much-debated cosmetic surgery tax is that if you can afford to spend a ridiculous amount on personal upkeep, surely you can afford to spend a bit more for something worthwhile - in this case, health care for others. While the proposal itself does not bother me, the suggestion that if you can pay Amount A, you can also manage Amount A+B, does.

Leave aside for a moment the specific issue of cosmetic surgery. The question here is whether one's intent to pay Amount A should be taken to mean that one could just as well pay A+B, as though B does not change the price and thus the affordability of Unnecessary Item X. My argument is thus not that purchases should never be taxed, but that we should not pretend that taxes have no impact on the affordability of said purchases, even if such purchases could be classified as rich-people-nonsense. If part of the hope with this tax is to discourage consumption of something foolish, fair enough - I'll leave opposition to the more libertarian among us. But it seems the thinking is more, these spoiled, vain fools have money to spare.

Why does any of this matter for those of us not looking for nips and tucks? Because the principle of assuming X's affordability implies X+Y's affordability extends to realms that have nothing to do with taxes, Botox, or spreading the wealth to the less fortunate. Example: at every food store where a per-pound item is selected for you, you have to ask for less than you want to get the amount you're effectively asking for. But if you forget to do this, receive significantly more than you'd asked for, and complain, you will learn that this is just the amount the item comes in, or that it's tough to cut some item (fish, meat, cheese, etc.) to a particular weight (which is plausible in some situations, but does not excuse, say, extra olives, walnuts, etc., and is in any case often used as an excuse to oversell items well beyond the range of error). The store's message: 'If you can afford not to eat only prepackaged foods, you can afford an extra third of a pound of whatever it is you're having.' Only someone cheap would argue over a sliver, or order a quarter of a pound in the first place.

Leaving aside the question of whether cheapness should be penalized (and why wouldn't those on the selling end frown on frugality?), the implication here is that all consumers of X spend a set percentage of their wealth on X, and thus that only those with a particular economic status buy X in the first place. Which, whether X is a nose job or arugula, is false. Different people budget differently. Two people can be said to have a spare $400 to spend on nonsense, but one person's 'spare' $400 might come from his spare $4 million, while another's might be the result of months' worth of lentils in lentil sauce.

So, readers whose knowledge of economics extends beyond what's taught junior year of high school, does any of this make sense?

Shopping repression

2009-12-04T23:11:00.000-05:00

When I lived in DC and had a real life, I shopped at least once a month. It was easy--I had lunch breaks, and DC had convenient retail. My shopping was not extravagant, in part because I had a lot of time to waste waiting for things I liked to go on sale. Now that has changed. Everything in Cambridge is inconvenient except the Gap, and I make no moneyz, so I rarely shop.

This is apparently only a good cheapness strategy until Black Friday. That's when free shipping starts. Also, free returns. And then, you know, what do you have to lose...?

The answer, as you might expect, is your money. I bought lots of barely justifiable stuff on Black Friday (it was cheaper then!), which arrived, turned out not to look that great, and had to be returned to the store (no free returns on this). It was almost like I had repented of this terrible sin. But, unfortunately, returns require a trip to the mall, where other stores also live, and the sinning began anew. It's just that it's been so long since I had been in an H&M... And then these pants were on sale in exactly my size for only $20...Besides, what if I don't get to shop again for another three months? It's all totally justifiable, bank account, I swear!

Anyway, the moral of this story is that the binge and purge method does not work in any realm of life. Indulge your shopping desires regularly in moderation.

Cheapism

2009-12-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

FLG sent me this link a while back for a kind of CNET for not-just-electronics that suggests the cheaper version of stuff you want, but also warns against products whose cheapness is not worth it (a temptation to which I am regularly subject). The site is still a work in progress, but could be good for christmas shopping cheapsters.

Lessons in home decor

2009-12-03T15:03:00.004-05:00

I'm sure I wasn't alone in identifying with this Greenwich Village couple's attempts to redecorate "On the Cheap," spending a mere $5,000 and using a decorator. Ah, to be young and carefree!

Or, as an alternative, you can go with a couch former roommates found on the street, and for flair, instead of throw pillows, use signs.

Such as:

Jo, who knows me well, got me this "No Peddlers" sign at a hardware store in Downtown Brooklyn. I'd been sort of obsessed with this sign for months, given that a) I'm descended, I believe, from the very peddlers this sign was probably designed to keep out when it first entered this hardware store in 1920 or whenever, and b) it's just such an anachronistic word and problem. No Smoking, Post No Bills, No Solicitation, No Spitting... but peddlers?

Below is a surprisingly inoffensive image of "The Old Jew" from Curmer's 1840s illustrated encyclopedia of French "types" that I believe captures something of my own Ashkenazi heritage. (via Gallica.bnf).

The best home decor includes 19th century as well as more modern touches:

Keeping with the Semitic theme, this sign, made from piece of paper that welcomed us to a Tel Aviv hotel bathroom, offers a positive message if I ever saw one.

Slow Fashion

2009-11-11T23:30:00.003-05:00

Why is it that even when they have a point, the various slow-things-down movements - Slow Food, slow art-appreciation, anything else asking us to unplug and return to a simpler time, a slower time - are so very irritating? Is it because we're all in a race of one kind or another, and those telling us to slow down are doing so so that they can get ahead? Is it because pro-slow can mean anti-cosmopolitan which can mean xenophobic?

Or maybe it's because well-meaning attempts to get us to stop being such wasteful Westerners sometimes manifest themselves as pseudo-environmentalist, pseudo-pro-labor arguments for choosing Chanel over H&M, from someone clearly more concerned with helping people not wear what everyone else does to the ball than with landfills. (Via.) The blogger situates himself in a branch of frugality that eschews the obviously correct answer - buy cheap stuff and not much of it - in favor of the more fun-sounding 'buy expensive stuff but not much of it', praise the gods of Quality and I Will Wear This For Years, and feel both smug and thrifty.

Anyway, agreed that the less we spend on clothes, the more disposable we consider them. But! For whom, outside the fashion-and-socialite industry, are 'cheap' clothes that disposable? (And is donation of still-intact used clothes no longer socially acceptable?) For whom, outside these rare exceptions, does the fact that a skirt costs $40 mean huzzah, time to buy a new one every week? No doubt, if I owned a $4,000 dress, I'd take ridiculously good care of it, and could perhaps mimic Golden Age sartorial behavior, wearing just one set of clothes per season, thus saving The Workers and The Environment. But I'm rather fond of my $30 corduroys from Uniqlo, my $17 dress from H&M; for me - and I'm not claiming poverty here - these were monetarily-significant purchases. Designer clothes would mean inability to pay rent; the clothes I own and wear are not "fast fashion", purchased and tossed without a second's thought, but just... clothes. My 'cheap' clothes must be awfully well-made, because they have a tendency to last for years.

"Are you being served?"

2009-11-08T16:50:00.005-05:00

Saturday night, I was good and ready for dinner beyond what-to-put-on-pasta. Jo and I ended up with lamb chops from the new food-movement-friendly butcher shop in Chelsea Market. Humane treatment (or as humane as killing an animal for deliciousness can ever be) plus a frou-frou cut meant over $20 for barely enough meat for two. Which is to say, it will be a while till we do that again, but it was plenty delicious,* it was still less for two, even given additional ingredients, than an equivalent meal would be for one at just about any restaurant. I know this because I never dare order such a dish at a restaurant, certainly not along with a glass of wine and a cheese-involving salad, because this whole meal would cost... I don't even want to think about it. And the quality of each ingredient was, hands-down, far superior to anything a restaurant even remotely in my price range might provide. Restaurants promising menus rooted in market produce tend to go beyond even a grad-student splurge. Whereas occasional fancy-ingredient home-cooked meals are very much doable.

So far, all I've given an account of is the obvious: it's cheaper to cook than to eat out. Yet restaurants exist, presumably for reasons beyond some people's need to throw money away. Granted, certain contexts call for a non-home environment - a second date, a business lunch, any meal consumed by someone who lives with many kitchen-hogging roommates. And depending what you're used to cooking, some cuisines will remain permanently beyond your repertoire, either for lack of knowledge regarding 'secret ingredients' or for lack of a necessary skill or cooking tool. (If I had a pizza stone, a tandoori oven, the ability to roll sushi and have it come out looking like sushi...). But restaurants typically offer versions of what we could all easily make at home ("arugula, pear, and Gorgonzola salad, $9'), and what those of us with dishwashers can easily enough clean up from.

To enjoy dining out, you need to consider it a plus, rather than a drawback, that food is prepared by someone other than yourself, and that a perfect stranger, rather than you or your dining companion, fetches each dish for you from the kitchen. Despite the hundreds of comments here and here from waitstaff along the lines of 'we're not your servants', dining out is, even for the respectful, non-obnoxious customer, about being served. Otherwise, why would restaurants even offer basic salads, ice cream bowls, and other items simple to prepare for yourself? A diner should, of course, treat staff with respect and follow the local tipping standards. But a customer who followed this advice and spent each meal out feeling grateful not to be too poor to dine out somewhere fancy, and thinking how tough - no, almost tragic - it must be to be a waiter (i.e. reacting to restaurants as Larry David does to chauffeured cars in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"), could not possibly enjoy the meal. While my past experience in food service (limited) and other fetching-stuff-type work (more extensive), along with my current salary, prevent me from feeling the requisite rich-yuppie guilt on the rare occasions I find myself in a restaurant, I still, for whatever reason, find someone making me food I could easily make myself, and someone else handing me that food, more of a negative experience, all things equal, than a positive one,** and certainly not worth spending too much of my earnings on. I like the variety restaurants permit, and the possibility of inspiration for home-cooked meals to come, but do not think that if I earned more, I'd be spending much more at all on restaurant dining.

So, fellow cheapskates, is eating out worth the price?

*I have also discovered that everything, absolutely everything, or at the very least, fish and meat, tastes better after first being marinated in a mix of rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Jo just made a sarcastic remark about me putting this next on pasta, but I think he might be onto something...

**This could, again, have something to do with the fact that when I say "restaurants," I mean real restaurants, which I have been to, but am also on some level picturing the sort of places I go to more often, where grad students might go to splurge - this means places where the one waitress speaks ill of each set of customers as they leave, to the one person making the food, in the main dining area, because the food-prep and dining areas combined are four square feet, or a certain spot in Chinatown where a paper napkin I'd blown my nose in and was about to take to a trashcan outside was quickly snatched by a waitress who proceeded to use said napkin to 'clean' the table for the next customers. Who knows.

Cans: not so great, actually

2009-11-03T23:16:00.006-05:00

Now that I own a lifetime supply of canned tomatoes,* Mark Bittman informs us that can use means IMMINENT DEATH due to toxins in the material that lines cans, or, if not quite that, that "for the moment, it appears we’re looking at boxed tomatoes." We might be looking at boxed tomatoes, but I am most definitely looking at cans. Many, many, many cans. Cans purchased because they were on sale, on sale, perhaps, because other Whole Foods shoppers got the memo before I did.

Meanwhile, Jo and I thought the sale was due to a revelation that the Italian-seeming cans are actually a domestic product. While local is in, canned tomatoes fall into this category of foodstuffs still deemed inferior if not from the assumed location. San Marzano tomatoes are not, in fact, San Marzano tomatoes. Thank you, Red Hook Fairway:

Cheapness note: those same cans are going for 30 cents less at Whole Foods than the Fairway sale price, suggesting the predictable difference in concern about toxins of shoppers at the two stores.

*An artistic rendering of my apartment:

And for fun, a sign on a men's shoe store in my neighborhood:

Halloween costumes cost money... UPDATED

2009-10-31T20:06:00.005-04:00

...but they don't have to cost much! After much soul-searching, I've decided to go as a can of San Marzano tomatoes. These have been on sale for forever now at Whole Foods such that we now have a lifetime supply, so in terms of costume-making materials, their easily-removable labels came to mind. Three of them are to be a belt around a silver dress, worn over silver leggings - together these will form 'the can'. Red keds and red nails will, if I'm feeling energetic, complete the look.

Photos forthcoming, assuming this does not look too ridiculous.

UPDATE

Photo credit: the party hostess, via Facebook

The best of cheapness

2009-10-30T18:51:00.003-04:00

This is not by any means a sustainable answer to how not to spend any money, ever, but it's certainly the best: don't leave the house. Stay home with a 400-plus page autobiographical novel about a French professor's irrepressible love of pretty young things (and yes, this is my homework), and you will find yourself going the frozen-toast, instant-oatmeal route in no time.

The Money-and-Time debate, continued

2009-10-25T12:29:00.006-04:00

When sidewalk guilt-peddlers ask you to donate to Greenpeace, to a cause promoting gay marriage, or to the ACLU, they ask you not for your money, but for your time. "Do you have a minute for the environment?" Not everyone has a dollar to spare, but all among us who can reasonably expect our lifespans to extend more than one minute into the future might want to consider offering the following minute to a cause so much greater than ourselves. In this, they one-up the "a penny for the homeless" folks down the street - "just one penny is all we ask" is still a request for money, which we accept people might have to hold onto and reserve for their own uses, including charity more thought-out than giving to someone who happens to be asking at a major intersection. Time, however, is seen as basically infinite. Sure, "time is money" - but that's only for high-powered lawyers who bill by the hour. I could not, as a grad student, say with a straight face that my time is money. My time is... time. I value it as such.

The Park Slope Food Co-op (an institution I alienated myself from early on and proceeded to walk past daily for two years, living around the corner from it but stubbornly refusing to join, admittedly in part because I imagined they might have a picture of me somewhere in the back as someone not to allow in, a not entirely unfounded fear given that what I wrote was written up in their newsletter) is premised on the idea that time is not money. OK, it's premised on a number of causes and ideas, but fundamental to the project is the notion that one is getting a discount on groceries. As explained in the most recent take-down of the supermarket-that-isn't:

Unlike many co-ops — including the Flatbush Food Coop in Brooklyn, where guests are allowed to shop without joining and members who don’t want to serve work hours can pay a slight markup for items — Park Slope has one of the stiffest work requirements: 2.75 hours every four weeks for each adult member of a household.

It also has some of the best bargains. The organic spinach that costs $2.97 at the co-op fetches $3.99 at the Whole Foods in Union Square; 17 ounces of Bionaturae Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil costs co-op members $7.80 and Whole Foods shoppers $13.99.

After a moment's consideration, it becomes clear that whatever markup there is at Whole Foods (and, by the way, Whole Foods sells perfectly good 365-brand olive oil for far less than the cost of this overly-voweled organic one) comes from the fact that to shop at Whole Foods, you are not required to work at Whole Foods, and can indeed head there after a day of your own job, shop, go home, and be done with it. Now, I could hold forth once again on how the work requirements of the Co-op are largely about yuppie liberal guilt at being served in a regular supermarket by a cashier from a different class and often race background, and how the We Are All Cashiers Now approach actually takes jobs away from would-be cashiers looking for paid work, but that's not the issue here. The issue here is that if you have to work to get a discount on groceries, you are not getting a discount on groceries.

The same is true, apparently, of apple-picking. I don't believe I've ever picked an apple, but Daniel Gross had me convinced to fully despise apple-picking, once he framed his argument as being anti-terroir:

We've been educated (or bullied, depending on your outlook) by foodies like Alice Waters and Dan Barber to adopt the European concept of terroir—the best stuff to consume is the stuff grown in closest proximity. For people in the Northeast, that's fine in the summer, when the Union Square greenmarket bursts with locally grown exotic greens, yellow squash, and heirloom tomatoes of such flavor (and cost) as to make a gourmand weep.

But in the fall, while the region's landscape lights up with foliage, the farm stands' color palette becomes more drab: potatoes, root vegetables, pumpkins, gourds, and, of course, apples. And so, to the pick-your-own orchards we go.

I could hold forth once more on my deep suspicions of terroir and my conviction that it is a fundamentally racist and anti-Semitic ideology, but the issue here is, once again, money and time, so I'll attempt to focus on that angle.

Gross argues that apple-picking is basically a scam for orchards to place the time and labor burdens of their own businesses into the hands of consumers, who must in fact pay for the pleasure of working. Again, coming at this with no apple-picking prior knowledge, I can't say I'm shocked - the same is apparently true of the DIY archeological digs in Israel, and one could argue that the ever-rising price of coffee drinks coinciding with the ever-reduced services we expect coffee-shop workers to perform (pouring in the milk yourself is generally a good thing; attempting to bus your table into a hard-to-locate and already-full tub of dishes at an understaffed coffee bar is not) falls into this same category.

In all of these cases - moments for the environment, volunteer shifts at the Co-op, apples and archeological shards plucked by consumers, tables bused by paying and often even tipping customers - it starts to look like time has a different and if anything more important value than money for the yuppie mired in guilt. By showing his willingness to take the time to do a task a previous generation would have conferred on an underling, the yuppie of today shows his discomfort with the class system, and that he doesn't see himself as too busy and important to stop and be The Worker at a few particularly visible moments, as appropriate. The archeological shards are perhaps a case not so much of yuppie guilt as Diaspora-Zionist guilt, but the principle's the same. Offering time rather than (much) money might ultimately mean a lower commitment, but it's often a more visible one.

Those penny-pinching Jews

2009-10-21T10:27:00.004-04:00

Is cheapness a bad thing? If not, why are two Southern politicians accused of anti-Semitism for admiring Jewish frugality?

The answer's easy enough: any mix of a statement about 'the Jews' as an entity mixed with a comment about wealth falls into the realm of Jews-and-money, of classic anti-Semitism, and as such is more or less the equivalent of referring to someone black as "articulate" - what's ostensibly a compliment is, given the context, not quite.

But at the same time, I'm struck by how different this evocation of Jews-and-money is from those politicians of a previous generation (in Europe, say) might have made. These guys want America to be more Jewish - granted according to their own warped idea of what 'Jewish' means. Often, right-wing politicians might have seen 'Jewish' financial acumen as modernity at its most offensive, and sung the praises of small-scale life, a slower pace, dare I say local agriculture. (I just went to the Union Square Greenmarket, where there were I want to say more people taking artsy photographs of the produce than actually shopping for produce.) Yes, things change, although Emile Zola was telling anti-Semites to learn from the Jews' money skillz ages ago.

But are Jews even frugal? Given that four of the six tight fists here are of the Mosaic persuasion, one might say 'yes.' But in my vast experience of Jews and non-Jews - I've got friends who are both, have dated both, and have both in my family - I'm going to have to say, meh. Jewish thrift is a bit like Jews' alleged aversion to alcohol - some relics remain, but that's all. At this point, everyone's heard about how for a long, long time in Europe, Jews were forbidden from owning land and from doing just about anything but peddling/money-lending to earn a living, and so came to have certain skills that turned out to be particularly valuable in the modern world, leading to jealousy, genocide, the works. But sufficient time has past since my family had to peddle anything that I have no special skills in this regard, and I am, it seems no more thrilled by discounted canned tomatoes than certain non-Jews with whom I shop for discounted cans of tomatoes.

But was the Jews-are-frugal stereotype ever even supposed to apply to women? Or is the expectation that The Jew earns and saves, while The Jewess spends and spends? Either way, I don't know what it says about my own prejudices, but when I first read about two South Carolina Republicans thinking Jews are good savers, my first thought was that neither had probably ever interacted with Jews before, regardless.

Dollar off delights

2009-10-19T10:21:00.001-04:00

The canned tomatoes were on sale! I knew it! At least I returned, with Jo, before it was too late.

Report on DIY dry-cleaning

2009-10-15T15:15:00.000-04:00

In the comments of a previous post, I lamented the hidden costs of wool and cashmere sweaters buried in the maintenance problem. You can buy 'em for cheap, but then you have to dry-clean when they're dirty, which, within a couple of years, means about a 500% mark-up on the retail price. In response, one of the commenters helpfully directed my attention to DIY dry-cleaning.

This is not dry-cleaning per se, since it is largely based on soaking the sweaters in water and seems like it wouldn't do much for stains, but my sweaters weren't stained so much as just sweaty, so I figured this method was worth a shot. So I bought a mini bottle of baby shampoo, squeezed some into a huge salad bowl (my sink is too gross for any cleaning to conceivably take place in it), filled it with water, and let my sweaters stew in it like marinating steaks for an hour. Then I toweled them per these instructions, and although drying had to take place on a different towel and took somewhat longer than might be hoped given that my apartment is not only dirty but also freezing, the results look good. The sweaters retained their shape just fine, and no longer smell overworn. Total cost: $2.19, for the baby shampoo. Cheapness success!

My roommate did think this was weird though, so maybe this is one of those thrift achievements not worth bragging about socially.

You know you're cheap when...

2009-10-13T16:43:00.001-04:00

... you're at the store and you see that the canned tomatoes you usually buy are on sale, a dollar off the usual price, and - after deciding that you'll also need to call your boyfriend and alert him to this excitement so that he too can bring home many, many cans - proceed to bring to the register more cans than you know full well you could carry home (and you will be carrying them home, because you're too cheap to use that Metrocard)... only to get rung up and see that this sale was not entered into the system... only to stand your ground, while the cashier first attempts a price check and then just goes herself to check the price, only to tell you that it wasn't these cans that were on sale, but some other product. Boo.

Entertain me

2009-10-11T18:37:00.003-04:00

My apartment, for reasons that are not worth going into here, lacks both TV (still) and Internet (once more). During the course of a cold that may or may not have come from swine, I got through nearly all the DVDs we own. Netflix offers some entertainment, but on the one-disk-at-a-time plan, this can mean entire weekends DVD-free. Yes, there are free movies at MOMA on Fridays (and brave are those who visit the restrooms once those end), and DVDs that can be borrowed from the public library, but these things require effort. Fixing the TV and Internet situation once and for all would - again, long story - cost an unacceptable $100/month. Going to the movies, however, means paying $12 or whatever ridiculous amount it now is for the privilege of sitting in a pile of foul-smelling artificial-butter popcorn. Reading books for entertainment - how quaint! - is never less appealing than two months before an oral exam. So what's left? Must I up the Netflix to two-at-a-time? Hire a court jester? Stare at walls and use my imagination to project onto them stock sitcom scenarios? Help!

The anti-frugality brigade: the food edition

2009-10-09T17:30:00.001-04:00

The food movement can't seem to decide where it stands on frugality. On the one hand, we're told that cooking at home saves money, that we should be buying raw ingredients in bulk and eating virtuous 20-cent meals 'recession friendly' meals rather than the fried deliciousness we now consume. On the other, we're informed that we should shop only the fresh-produce-and-meat aisles of the supermarket, that is, if we absolutely must shop at a supermarket - we should really be setting aside a couple hours each day to farmers' markets, butcher shops, fishmongers, cheesemongers, and other quaintly-titled artisans - and that's before any cooking-time enters into it. We are told that we should - if we care about health, taste, and the environment - spend a larger proportion of our incomes on groceries. Which is it?

What seems like contradictory advice is just lecturing directed at different audiences. The grains-and-lentils bit is meant to argue against the notion that anyone's so poor as to have to eat at McDonalds, while the 'mongers suggestion is aimed at those of us who, the movement wants us to believe, could eat well if only we stopped being so damn cheap.

So, a couple things. Is price even a proxy for health-promotion when it comes to groceries? With restaurant food, it certainly is not - most of what a fancier place serves resembles fast food grease-wise but comes in larger portions. For better taste, to an extent, although attempts to gussy up basic foods - English muffins, potato chips, candy bars - tend to produce inferior results to the low-end brands. What about for sustainability? Shouldn't local foods that are in season - and, in theory, that taste best - be the ones that cost less? I can see how, as it stands, some better food choices cost more than some worse ones. But shouldn't we be striving for a situation in which good foods cost less? Isn't asking the middle-class-and-up consumer to spend a greater proportion of his income on groceries - 'like they do in France' - asking not only something unrealistic, but also something that will make those same groceries a major burden on the less wealthy?

But more to the point: is denouncing consumer frugality really the best road to go down? The food movement has come under so much criticism for ignorance of the poor that, to its credit, it has, I think, become a bit more self-aware when it comes to those for whom 'where does each ingredient come from?' artisinal grocery shopping is logistically inconceivable. But consumers with somewhat more choice in the matter are blamed for wanting to keep costs low, as though thrift is in itself suspect, at least when it comes to food. Which it is, if we're looking at all who sell food-movement-approved establishments as particularly worthy charities, not as places where consumers, you know, consume.

If you have to ask

2009-10-04T15:46:00.002-04:00

Everyone knows that baked goods are cheaper to make at home than to purchase on the outside, that the markup on a brownie is far greater than that on, say, steak. But baking takes time, and sometimes you're outside and want a cookie or whatever, and you must make peace with the fact that you're paying vastly more than the ingredients and labor seem they could possibly add up to. This much I can accept.

What I can't accept are baked goods that are price upon request. Many, many New York bakeries and coffee bars decline to affix prices to individual items, or to list prices on a menu of some sort. The idea here is that baked goods are, even if being sold for exorbitant amounts, inherently 'from the heart', and that the homey experience of a pastry would lose something if crude and cold numbers entered one's line of sight. Such establishments assume most people will be too ashamed to ask, because to ask is to admit that you're the sort of person who'd get that muffin if it were $1.75, but that $2.25 isn't going to work for you.

Well, I am that sort of person, so today, at a bakery in Tribeca, I asked the man behind the mini-cake counter how much the cake I was interested in cost. I also asked what it was, because the display lacked labels altogether, not just those involving price. I learned that what I wanted was an opera cake, and that it cost somewhere between $4 and $5.25 - the guy didn't know for sure and apologized for having not put up labels, but did not offer to find out where on the spectrum this particular cake fell. He was, however, quite confident that $5-ish was the most a cake could possibly cost.

Now, normally this would send me running in the opposite direction, but a) the cake was to be split, so I could think of the price as half whichever amount, and b) more to the point, we were at this bakery in the first place because we'd just gone to a brunch place, seen that French toast there cost $11.50, and, disappointed, decided to just buy some bread and stuff and have lunch at home. The cake was meant to compensate, and even $5.25 for two seemed less ridiculous than $23 plus tax, tip, overpriced restaurant coffee...

So we're at the register, and the woman ringing me up enters the amount for the cake: $6. I started to try to correct her, but realized I didn't know how much the cake cost, and she looked at me like I was insane when I started telling her about how we'd received an estimate on the cake from the man behind the cake counter, and that $6 fell above our estimate. Who gets an estimate on a pastry? The cashier then told me that the man I'd asked didn't know what he was talking about, in a tone that implied that I'd been quite foolish to look to that guy - that is, the guy working in the pastry area - for such information. Yes, what was I thinking?

This is where I should have said forget it. But a momentary lapse of judgment later, there I was with a baguette and a $6 cake, both of which we proceeded to take with us grocery shopping. During which I mentioned to my boyfriend, oh, maybe 20 times (his estimate - accurate, I think) that I could not believe I'd bought this cake, and that now we couldn't even enjoy the cake, given the circumstances under which it was purchased, not to mention the price.

(I realize, given the experience, that although I'm unlikely to return to said bakery after this incident, I have not given its name, an omission that normally comes when I think there's a good chance I will want to return somewhere and do not want to burn the bridge entirely. I mean, they have really good croissants, and until I find an alternate source...)

It's moments like this that I think about that time in class when my students and I all discuss our weekend plans, so as to facilitate use of the future tense. And I think, trust me, kids, you don't want to know.

There's no such thing as a brought lunch

2009-09-30T15:17:00.003-04:00

Well-meaning advice-givers will tell you that if you want to save money and eat right, you should bring lunch. Well-intentioned grad students named Phoebe have tried this approach, but found it lacking.

For one thing, bringing lunch means, if not an extra trip to the store, an extra bag to carry to campus, given that The Backpack is permanently at-capacity as is. The 'bring dinner leftovers' approach sounds so efficient, but if I make too much of a dinner I like, I just finish all I made right away, such that if there are leftovers, it's because whatever it was was so-so to begin with. And with lunches prepared specially bread's always stale by the time it comes out of the bag, plus add up the price of all the ingredients - purchased, inevitably, at various NYC establishments - and the difference is hardly that of making coffee or pasta at home.

But I just spent $8.17 (with tax) on a sandwich, and I'm ashamed. (I'm not counting the $1.75 on tea - the second of the day - because this is an investment in my not coughing for the whole duration of the class I'm about to teach, as I so charmingly did on Monday.) This can't be right!

Cheapness success!

2009-09-25T16:24:00.004-04:00

Near the end of my first month of grad school, my monthly credit card statement is the lowest it's been since I first got a credit card (the years I had one in my name but attached to my parents' account in college to "build credit" but not actually use not counting). This is extremely surprising to me, since I didn't make any kind of extra effort not to spend money this month, and indeed, even went a little overboard on used book purchases. But, the only thing I've spent more than $100 on this month has been books, and, to be fair, it is the beginning of the semester. What I did not spend on was going out because I have no friends and no time, happy hour because it's illegal(!!) in this state, and transportation because I have nowhere to go. Apparently, grad school is habitual cheapness utopia! All you need to do is move somewhere near a school where all the shopping is unaffordable and where you don't know anyone and have no time to do anything but read, which will require only minimal monetary investments in the form of books, coffee, and sandwiches. If this trend holds for the rest of my time here, I may well become not only happy with grad school, but extremely reluctant to leave.

However, I did decide to celebrate my savings by buying a dress, so maybe the savings engendered by the grad student lifestyle will only serve to fuel end-of-month online shopping splurges.

Where that money went

2009-09-24T11:45:00.001-04:00

Do you ever find yourself looking at your bank account and thinking how much more would be there if only certain purchases hadn't been made? (Note the passive voice, absolving responsibility.)

Such blanket solutions as 'make coffee at home' get you nowhere, because you enjoy that mocha, and would notice if you gave it up. There's sometimes a perverse joy in eliminating something you'd miss, but let's assume non-perversion. What you should give up, then, are the purchases that add nothing to your life.

My own list would include: pants that fit properly that one day at the store and never again; certain books bought on a whim (although these were usually in the dollar range) or for classes I took freshman year of college prior to figuring out the library, grocery items or meals out that were sort of eh in the end, coffee that was hazelnut-flavored with no warning (ugh!) ... purchases that, in short, I could not have known would be mistakes.

With clothes, cost-per-wear is a fabulous idea in theory, but there's the slight matter of you don't know how long something will last, or how long you'll want it to last, until the time comes. I thought red Keds were a brilliant idea and at $35 so sensible a purchase, but morning after morning I wake up with no desire whatsoever to have red Keds on my feet. Looking back at apparel purchases generally, I find no patterns - according to practicality, price, or any other quantifiable - leading me to which turned out worth it and which did not. And of course with food, until you taste it there's no way to know. Failure to stock up on staples means the dreaded eating out, but doing so means overestimating how many times any one person will actually want microwaved edamame in a given lease period.

So, is there any way to systematically isolate bad-idea purchases? Or is the answer to learn to like red Keds, hazelnut coffee...

How cheap is too cheap?

2009-09-14T21:02:00.007-04:00

An important part of cheapness is the specific psychological reaction of the cheapster to a rare bargain find. The cheapster feels both that the hunt for cheap is a kind of epic adventure worth the perils and travails required, and a sense of gloating vindication when the cheap item is finally secured. At least I do. (And I am not alone: watch the Dupont Circle video in this segment and look for the Korean woman who recounts all her eBay finds.) I don't mind if I have to go to ridiculous lengths to get my cheap stuff, like wheeling my Craigslist desk more than a mile to my apartment because it doesn't fit in Seb's car. That is part of the experience, and it is a noble labor which I can then relay to other (entirely uninterested) people as part of my narrative of miserliness.

But how much should I be willing to undergo for the sake of a bargain? Seb, for example, thinks that I am willing to go so far to get a bargain that I am not thrifty at all--I am just a militant Scrooge with no sense of dignity or ability to appraise the value of my time. We've talked before about the slippery calculations involved in ascertaining opportunity cost of time, though that measure is what is supposed to stand between me and professional beach-combing for lost pennies. Otherwise, all that remains is my outsized sense of accomplishment at finding a discount.

So here is the dilemma: Massachusetts has a can and bottle deposit of five cents a container. So...? I mean, it only takes 20 empty Diet Coke cans to earn me a whole dollar. On the other hand, I think homeless people do this for a living.

On another spending on grad school stipend note, while certain expenditures have been restricted lately (shopping, haircuts, frilly things like that), my budget for books has simply faded into oblivion. Whereas I used to hate buying them because it would just mean more heavy boxes when I inevitably moved, I am now in the midst of an Amazon free-for-all. Why print out excerpts at 50% of readable size when they are just so cheap, and I may need them at some point, for papers, or generals, or things...

Cheapness podcasts and more

2009-09-09T15:06:00.004-04:00

-The WNYC Leonard Lopate show has two recent podcasts all about our subject of interest. One's from the pro-cheap Lauren Weber, whose book I now have to read. The other, which I have yet to listen to, is an interview with Ellen Ruppel Shell, who (as I know from a previous podcast - jogging will do this) argues that bargain-hunting is sociopathic behavior, or some milder version thereof, and that because we are cheapskates unwilling to pay for quality the way our grandparents did, today, They Don't Make Things Like They Used To, and the market's divided between disposable crap and frou-frou designer goods. I was not sympathetic, but will save this podcast for the next run and see if I can be convinced to feel bad about paying $5.90 for Uniqlo tank tops.

-Storage spaces - worth it or evil? I get why in many cases they make no sense, but, as with credit cards, if used right, they can save tons. If you need storage for two months (of which one is free, thanks to a promotional offer) between apartments and are not paying rent in that time, you will be glad when you don't need to up and buy all new clothes, books, and furniture. If, however, you refuse to part with stacks of old newspapers and decide to rent them out their own studio apartment, perhaps self-storage is not your friend.

-Finally, shoe repair: the essence of frugality or a scam that preys on the thrifty? I just dropped off three boots (note: not three pairs of boots) in need of various rather desperate adjustments, and the total cost could, yes, buy another, if inferior, pair. But I did it anyway. Why?

So, read, listen and discuss!

The Brooklyn tax

2009-09-02T19:57:00.007-04:00

After two years in a fourth-floor, absolutely-no-frills walk-up in Brooklyn, I've moved on up to a lower Manhattan elevator building, to an apartment of the same size as the old one, but with laundry on the same floor, and with a dishwasher. A dishwasher. I haven't used it yet, on account of still needing to unpack my dishes, but soon, soon.

How did this happen? Did I sell out, abandoning grad school for something sensible? Ha! Did the recession benefit sad little renters like myself after all? Not so much - in none of the many, many neighborhoods in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn I looked into did it appear that rents had gone down - if anything did change, it was the creativity of scammers, which has skyrocketed. Astoria remains a dishwasher-free zone, and the Village is still a place where the proximity of bars is supposed to make $20,000 a month seem reasonable for a hovel too small to fit more than a twin bed and a vial of whatever drug makes people think such apartments are a good idea.

Yet I'm paying neither more nor less than I was in Brooklyn. I attribute this to the fact that with my old place, around the corner from the Food Co-op and across from the most precious cheese shop known to man (albeit one I went to all the time, because, cheese), the money that might have gone to quality-of-life concerns such as dishwasher-laundry-proximity to school instead went to the Brooklundian Mystique. I have to face facts that I was paying for the privilege of living in an outer borough whose ethos perfectly matches that of our moment, a privilege I never saw as such, and consequently that I'm glad to be rid of.

I used to think Brooklynites who claim they wouldn't trade for Manhattan if given the chance were just being defensive, claiming to enjoy the slow pace and small scale and women in practical shoes while secretly pining to get back where the action was. With some, no doubt that's the case, but Brooklyn, hip since I don't know, the late 1990s? earlier still?, is today above all so very now. Brooklyn is helicopter parenting. Brooklyn is Obamania. Brooklyn is local-sustainable. Brooklyn is ostentatiously rejecting modernity while benefiting from whichever aspects of it you see fit. Brooklyn is wealth posing as poverty. New Yorkers often stand accused of thinking themselves at the center of the universe, but today's Brooklynites can't be faulted for seeing their own experience as basically the dominant culture of 2009 America but more so.

But which Brooklynites? Surely not all. The 'new' Brooklyn, the one of - pardon the clichés - recent elite-college grads; moms who couldn't imagine feeding their kids non-organic milk; artsy drifters with family money (trust-funds or otherwise), is often said to be just a tiny, if well-publicized, corridor in a huge and diverse borough unexplored by Corcoran and Western European tourists. The 'new', according to this understanding, is highly visible to NYT-reading, NPR-listening, Michael Pollan-worshiping white folk, while the 'old' or 'real', however, remain the borough's essential truth.

But if you count up the number of neighborhoods that have fully or partially 'switched' (setting aside Brooklyn Heights, which was posh in prehistoric times, and neighborhoods like Gravesend where wealthy and arguably white people are nevertheless separate culturally from new-Brooklyn mores), you get: Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Clinton Hill, Fort Greene, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Windsor Terrace, parts of Bushwick... I might be forgetting something, but this gives some sense of just how substantial a force new-Brooklyn has become. Again, these areas are not uniformly canvas-tote-bagified, but in all of them, that influence is felt.

Perhaps we're looking at a full-on transformation of the borough, starting with neighborhoods a quick subway trip to Manhattan, but one that will eventually extend so far out as to make a contiguous upper-crust paradise all the way to the Hamptons. Bensonhurst, beware.

Craigslist: a study in the long-term effects of the cheapness/quality trade-off

2009-08-29T21:09:00.004-04:00

Having just moved (again), I've spent the past two weeks browsing Craigslist in a concerted effort to furnish my entire apartment for no money, and this is my question: Does anyone actually buy stuff from Craigslist for more than $100, give or take?

My mentality--and I assume that of most other people my age--when furnishing a place through Craigslist is that the whole setup will be temporary, hence my disinclination to purchase "real" (read: expensive, solid) furniture and my resorting to Craigslist in the first place. I want to buy the cheapest, lightest, easiest-to-transport version of the thing I'm looking for--$25 collapsible bookshelves, $20 laminate desks, etc. The goal is to furnish on the cheap, then re-sell for even cheaper when I move out, and repeat the process in the new place (until at some point in the extremely distant future, I finally settle down somewhere for good, and the first thing I will do then is have a bed built out of living trees so it can never be moved again). By buying cheap and selling slightly cheaper instead of buying at retail and selling for way less to compete with the even cheaper resold stuff on Craigslist, I lose the least amount of money in the process of moving.

So, when I'm browsing the options on Craigslist and come across such things as $300 solid oak dressers or $700 mahogany dining room sets, I ignore them entirely even though 1) the discount on these items is substantially bigger than the discount on the recycled Target and Ikea junk I actually buy, and 2) they're obviously way better quality. The reason I don't buy a $300 dresser is pretty obvious, but I do note that this dresser probably cost over $600 originally, whereas the ubiquitous Ikea "Malm" dresser made of pressed sawdust and cardboard(!) that I buy instead for $60 only cost $100 originally and is, obviously, a piece of crap. The solid oak dresser is by far the thriftier buy, if thrift is taken to mean quality+price and not just pennies saved.

So I wonder, what becomes of the $300 solid oak dressers when everyone my age adopts my version of home economics? I assume that old rich people are still buying new, expensive, solid furniture, so there remains a market for producing it. But I doubt they're buying it on Craigslist for $300, because people who think in terms of solid oak probably don't overlap much with people who think in terms of Craigslist and driving around town sticking mismatched used things in the backs of their Toyotas. As a result, the people who would otherwise buy expensive furniture with the thought of reselling at a reasonable discount later are doomed in their efforts, and thus is the market for cheap crap from Ikea enlarged. And for places like Target and Ikea, which are in effect competing with Craigslist for the same cheapo furniture buyers, does this pressure drive down their quality even farther so that they can beat the $25 resale price tag on their own merchandise?

Basically, what I'm asking is: will my cheapness result in a massive furniture apocalypse in which the Malm dressers and custom-made, hand-crafted teak dressers are the only two options left?

DIY Eiskaffee

2009-08-28T16:32:00.003-04:00

The best thing in the whole world is the Eiskaffee at Florian Steiner, in the Neuenheim section of Heidelberg. On the remote off-chance any of Cheapness Studies's three readers are currently in or around the Lutherstrasse but not up for spending the requisite 4.90 euros, here's a step-by-step guide to recreating that nectar of the gods in your own home:

-Prepare some cold-brewed iced coffee. You'll only need half a cup or so for the final product, but it's good stuff to have around. Instructions here, but you can skip the step where it says you need to dilute the mixture with water. It will be diluted plenty by the other ingredients. Once brewed, refrigerate.

-Chill an elongated, conical glass. Or just do as I did, because I don't have one, and use a mug slightly warmed by the dishwasher.* Do what you've got to do.

-While that's brewing, get some ice cream. The classic Eiskaffee is with vanilla, but Florian Steiner's used Ben and Jerry's (carbon footprint be damned), either the chocolate-brownie flavor or the cookie-dough one, and either way, it was spectacular.

-Before assembling the final product, you'll need one more ingredient. The all-important difference between the typical Eiskaffee, which is amazing, and the Florian Steiner one, which is almost indecent to eat in public, is that the latter uses foamed milk on top rather than (shudder) whipped cream. To foam milk without any device specially designed for this, heat a small amount of milk (a third of a mug) in the microwave for 30 seconds or less, then quickly pour it into a small French press. Then, using a vigorous and vaguely obscene motion, push the assembled press up and down, up and down, until the texture turns into something indistinguishable from the top of a cappuccino.

-Assemble: Put a scoop of ice cream at the bottom of the glass, followed by the cold coffee (no ice needed), followed by the foamed milk, so the whole thing looks something like the Platonic ideal:

Strange fact: in this photo, my nose looks hooked, which it does not in any other I've ever seen of myself. (Prominent, yes, hooked, no.) Something to do with being in Germany? Anyhow, no photo of the DIY one, because in a mug, it really does just look like a cappuccino, latte, something along those lines.

*I am - you guessed it! - staying at my parents'.

Cheapness tip: do not wear clothes as intended

2009-08-24T14:27:00.003-04:00

All attempts to dress like an adult - a chic one at that - are rendered futile by certain shopping habits I can't seem to overcome. These are as follows:

1) Not shopping: I will look around a store, perhaps even try some things on, decide I really shouldn't buy anything, and leave empty-handed. This is probably a good thing overall, but explains those cotton tank tops from 2003 that I still think of as among my better clothes.

2) The kids' section: Yesterday my friend Nick and I went, among other more notable places, to the Gap. Before even looking at the women's stuff, I'd already tried - and ultimately rejected - both this girls' sweater and this boys' jacket. While I'm small enough for some kids' clothes, I'm not shall we say built for them, but this fact has not stopped me in the past. When choosing between one item meant for someone with curves, and an ill-fitting version $10 cheaper...

3) The underwear section: Why buy a dress when a nightgown will do? (Note: I am probably a foot and a half shorter than that model, so the thing is far less scandalous than it might appear.)

4) Refusal to wear garments as intended: It's my belief that if a shirt is long enough, it's a dress. Shirts are cheaper than dresses! Who are marketers to tell me how to wear this or that stretch of cotton-blend sewn together in Indonesia? What I fail to take into account is that shirts, with some exceptions, are quite clearly shirts, and that the ones that look like dresses in the store (and by 'the store' I mean H&M, where shirts-that-can-be-dresses now go for $7.95) are one round in the dryer away from being shirts. And it's not as if I need any new shirts, what with all the shirt-successes of 2003.

5) Self-declared retro revivals: I will find something from years ago that is not what they call a 'timeless piece' and think, 'I haven't worn that in a while,' and all of a sudden, the studded belt I adored when I got it senior year of high school has made its triumphant return.

These factors, and I'm sure others, prevent me from achieving the heights of glamor that would otherwise be mine. Till then, I've gotten a non-studded belt (70%-off at agnes b.! the upside of the recession forcing beautiful-clothes shops to close branches) to 'accessorize' the Gap nightgown and the H&M sort-of-dress t-shirt. Surely this will make all the difference in the world.

Brooklyn: no cheaper to live in than Manhattan?

2009-08-21T11:18:00.002-04:00

Pardon the NYC-specificity of this question (although there are surely analogous questions for other cities re: charming outskirts versus aseptic downtowns), but I'm feeling not so bloggy at the moment. When I am, there will be a longer post in which I answer my own question, but till then, readers (reader? anyone?), comment away.

Making excuses, the European edition

2009-08-04T16:08:00.005-04:00

The exchange rate, along with my schoolyear-only stipend and the impending cost of a new (Manhattan, fingers crossed) apartment, makes me frugal indeed while away. The way I deal with the euro is not to calculate what each purchase would be in dollars, but just to set a higher standard than I normally would for what’s a necessary purchase. I think of euros, then, as really big dollars, or just shift my cheapness up a degree, and that seems to amount to what a more mathematical approach would. That, and I eat a lot of wheat bread and this bland but strangely addictive Austrian cheese.

The one place I make an exception and lose all sense of euros is at the café. When it comes to cappuccinos, which I rarely order at home, here I see a "2" next to the item and simply must have one. Cappuccinos in NY are rarely below the $3 mark, so it's like I'm getting a deal! I know rationally that a 2-something euro cappuccino is not in fact cheaper – or much cheaper – than its NY equivalent, but for whatever reason, for this item, I decide it’s acceptable to pretend a euro is just a dollar, nothing more. Part of it could be that here, there’s less of a gap between what a regular coffee costs and what a fancy one does – anything purchased on the outside is by definition fancy, and sometimes a person is outside and in need of a coffee, and with an upgrade so simple... Or maybe it’s that caffeinated purchases are work aids, or can be justified as such, and for whatever reason the books on my orals lists keep being 500 pages long. It could also be that here, whole milk is a given, and cappuccinos really are better with whole than skim. But in all honesty, I think it comes down to two being a smaller number than three.

Cheapness abroad

2009-07-26T14:31:00.005-04:00

It can be cheaper to spend the summer in Europe than to stay put, if staying put means a Brooklyn apartment that, if renewed, would have been well above post-recession market rate. So, for that and other reasons, here I am, ready to offer tips on not spending any money, ever, in the land of hideous exchange rates and beautiful housewares, pastries, books, shoes...

I will now judge the Cheapness Studies merit of entire countries on the basis of brief experiences in tiny parts of each. Those with deeper knowledge, you're encouraged to correct as necessary.

Switzerland: We flew to Zurich because the flight was the cheapest one that got us vaguely near Germany, our ultimate destination; however, the price of the bottle of water we shared at the Zurich train station about canceled out this benefit. Had there only been water fountains somewhere obvious, or water for less than the price of a glass of wine in NY, I'd have much more fond feelings towards Switzerland, which I am indeed judging on the basis of this one incident, along with similar ones flying through there in the past. Is everything in Switzerland that expensive, or just things in transport hubs, as a way of exacting revenge on those who are only in Switzerland because for whatever reason flights there seem to be cheaper than to elsewhere?

Italy: Like Italian food? Your best bet, if you can't afford a villa in the countryside, is to stay put, or to travel somewhere that isn't Italy, assuming wherever you are has decent Italian groceries, restaurants, or both. We chose Italy for our vacation because of its proximity to Switzerland, and because the guide books we read through at the bookstore made it look most appealing. And while obviously a week in Italy is not to be sneezed at, the anxiety it provoked, budget-wise, was significant and unexpected, a definitive Cheapness Studies fail.

Let me explain. Hotels (well, hostels and hotel-ish things near train stations) were OK, sightseeing was as always mostly free, but eating was tough going. Dining out in Italian cities was if anything worse than reported, rip-off wise. Our first attempt - a place not far from our hostel in Milan - took advantage of being among very few places open in the area (at the time of our entering, the only we'd seen) to charge 5 euros a person as a cover charge. Our total meal, one not-terribly-glamorous dish a person, water only to drink, came to 51 euros. That scare had the positive effect of making us remarkably stingy from then on, but I still shudder to think of it, and wish the meal had at least been unusually good.

Tourists come to Italy to eat well, but judging by a week's worth of encounters in Milan, Bologna, Florence, and Rome, many working in the Italian food-service industry seem interested in making this as difficult as possible. It is expected (hoped?) that tourists will be too flummoxed by the Italian language to order off a non-translated menu (although Italian restaurants outside of Italy regularly have menus in Italian), and so will stick to officially-designated tourist establishments. Tourists sophisticated enough to have figured out what spaghetti bolognese is are still asked, by unwritten law, not to seek this out in a place frequented by actual Italians. I didn't much care who the fellow diners were, nationality-wise, and was not seeking an 'authentic' experience, but I didn't want to be ripped off time and time again, and the more languages the menu comes in, the worse value your pasta.

It is, in theory, possible to eat well for cheap in Italy, even near sites, on main streets, etc. The cafeterias (more like lunchtime cafes) where locals - often quite chic, particularly in Milan - dine well for barely any euros at all, are hardly hidden off-the-beaten-path establishments, and are in just about every city. We ate in some, but generally speaking the servers' and cashiers' hostility even to polite foreign intruders with some high-school Italian and without Pub Crawl t-shirts is such that the affordable and delicious dishes ostensibly available - visible, at any rate, behind a counter - require so much strained interaction to obtain that your best bet will ultimately be supermarkets.

As the week came to an end, I found myself nostalgic for linguine at home, at 33 cents (US) a portion, slightly but hardly much more if made bolognese. While I did have fun generally in Italy, and ultimately didn't spend that much, everything having to do with food was stressful, and for a country where food's allegedly a selling point, this is not ideal.

Belgium: We were not in Belgium as tourists, so I can't really report on that angle. All I can help with is to say, beware the Belgian HEMA - the amazing, affordable housewares are in fact cheaper still in the Netherlands, perhaps because the chain is Dutch, so if you're going to be in both countries, restrain yourself. What you should do is get a 1.30 euro scoop of creme brulee ice cream, a 30 euro-cent French novel at a Flemish thrift store, and things of this nature. And supermarket chocolate. Oh yes. In fact, just about anything from the supermarket will be a delight.

The Netherlands: I have just about no idea what things cost in the Netherlands, because I don't speak Dutch, and so entering most stores was too intimidating. There's a cheapness tip - failure to communicate is a quick way to set frivolous purchases at zero. Yes, people speak English, but I didn't feel like bringing it out, which was OK for getting coffee, going to supermarkets, and that's about it. With limited human interaction, it's still possible to get rolls and cheese enough for a week for a couple Euros, although that cheese will be Gouda or something very much like Gouda, Dutch cheeses not varying quite as much as French, Italian, Belgian, even American these days... But overall, Leiden was a Cheapness Studies success. While Jo was at a conference, I read orals-list readings down by the canals, in disbelief that work could feel so much like vacation, and, yeah, ate a lot of those rolls. However, fast food in both Leiden and Amsterdam - chosen both times because we'd imagined it would be both quick and affordable - is only the former, and is - going by that sample of one hamburger place and one falafel stop - all but inedible. So, either investigate Dutch specialties or stick with the rolls.

Germany: The best thing here in Heidelberg in terms of not spending any money, ever, is that in this city clothing- and shoe-store windows are not the wanty-inspiring religious experiences they are in, say, Paris, or even Cologne. Yes, it's still Europe, and things are still just a tiny bit different in that way that makes them seem fun to own and prance around in in the US, but for the most part, they look to be both more expensive and less chic than back home. Whenever I've passed a store here and thought something along these lines looked nice, I realized the store was either H&M or (I'm embarrassed to say, given their current windows) American Apparel. I will have no problem holding out until my current clothes start to fall apart and just doing another round at Uniqlo as needed. (If there is some avant-garde-boutique neighborhood in Heidelberg, I don't want to know about it!)

Meanwhile, the most enjoyable aspects of being here are cheap or free. Jogging down by the river and across various bridges, and ending up with an 80-cent cone of tiramisu ice cream, can't much argue with that. Frying up a plate of spaetzles with some onion, salt, and pepper, is the quickest route to a cheap and delicious meal. Beer and wine are also on the shockingly inexpensive side. Falafel, too, is about half the price as in Leiden and was, at this one place right off the main tourist drag, the most meticulously-made falafel sandwich I've ever seen prepared, as well as quite tasty. Aside from the 4.90 Eiskaffee (basically a very cold iced cappuccino where instead of ice, there's a scoop of ice cream) I find that here I can be most responsible. I still justify the Eiskaffee as being both a coffee and a dessert, because otherwise I will never be able to get one again, but other than that, I may well still be coming out ahead as versus staying home and handing over all those potential Eiskaffees to a NY landlord, as I will promptly be doing in the fall.

The thought of the money I'm saving cools me off

2009-07-24T17:20:00.003-04:00

Since this article captures a practice I have been implementing for two years already without the impetus of recession, I enjoyed it as a means of self-vindication against my (many) detractors. Surprisingly, very few people are able to see the virtues of life without air-conditioning. I'd think it would be obvious.

First, you can save fully hundreds of dollars a summer. The people in this article claim to have saved thousands, but either their house is massive or their local energy costs tremendous, because my poorly-insulated five-BR house never costs anywhere near that much to cool. So let's put the savings at hundreds. HUNDREDS of dollars. That is a lot of money. Think of how many cups of work-escape coffee that will buy you.

Second, there is no second. This is a blog about saving money, and not using air-conditioning pretty much only saves money, but A LOT of money. Maybe it will bring your family closer together or help you lose weight as the interviewees claim, but I have not tested either of these assertions, so I can't say. It will sort of get you more in touch with nature, if only to the extent that it will familiarize you with the actual temperature outside, which it's possible you haven't had many opportunities to know. Then, after a particularly hot day, your un-cooled home will have retained all the heat of the afternoon, likely forcing you outdoors into the waiting arms of Nature (and her insect friends) in the evening. However, I bet the Pennsylvanian quoted in the article as an advocate of "rolling with nature" would not also endorse spending a winter without heat, so I suspect that this non-cooling for the sake of natural living platform is a limited one.

But most of the complaints about life without air-conditioning are overblown (!). Sure, it's hot and that makes you sluggish and sleepy. But anything under 100 degrees is perfectly livable for most healthy people. If you don't know what to do with yourself in the heat, may I suggest a nap? Maybe a few hours with a book? Or, you could head over to those places whose air-conditioning you're subsidizing and get your money's worth (the library), or to those places whose air-conditioning is like a free gift to you (the mall). Perhaps what should be added to this article is that life without residential cooling builds community. How about that, yuppies?

The article also points out that keeping the air off can kill your cat. This may be true. My cat becomes sluggish in the heat, but I hope that putting out extra water dishes around the house will keep him hydrated so that I will not have to abandon this great money-saving tradition for the comfort of an angry beast.

The real problem of life without air-conditioning is convincing other people that it's really not a problem. For example, my roommates, who ask, "Why is the air always getting turned off?" (Conveniently, the thermostat lives right outside my bedroom and I am the Supreme Controller of House Temperature.) They do not understand my logic, which I have articulated for them several times clearly enough, "The thought of the money I'm saving cools me off."

This blows

2009-06-29T22:28:00.003-04:00

So the DIY haircut grew out into the predictable not-quite-mullet form, with a long piece in the back that was too involved to just chop off. I figured the time had come for professional intervention. I figured wrong.

Running out of ideas, I headed to a chain one rung above Super-Cuts in the classiness hierarchy, noticing that a cut was $45, a full $15 less than the ones to which I'd grown accustomed prior to the DIY revelation. A cut with a blow-dry was $70, but given that summer weather has finally arrived in NY, I figured there'd be no need.

Once again, wrong I was. The hairdresser assigned to my case informed me that without the blow-dry, my haircut would not be even. The whole purpose of this haircut was the evening-out of my hair, but it struck me that if they openly offer such a thing as a cut without a blow-dry, surely such a thing is possible, assuming a client not obsessed with perfection. A client, that is, such as myself. It occurred to me that, if this was being pushed on me despite my short hair, the $45/$70 disparity is probably just a PC way of saying what the salon feels is the difference between a men's and women's haircut, regardless of length. Hmm.

So it wasn't that I was wrong about an even haircut resulting from a cut without a blowdry - that much was achieved. Where I erred was in assuming the hairdresser would just go with it once I said that this was what I wanted, minor imperfections being the price I was willing to pay. She kept repeating that I really should get the blow-dry as well, on and on until finally I just explained outright that I'm a student and $45 is possible for me in a way that $70 is not. She either didn't hear or didn't choose to acknowledge this the first time, so after several more urgings to get a blow-out, I repeated my occupation status. She seemed suspicious and wanted to know where I studied. When I said which school (not specifying the program or anything), she held forth about how very smart I must be, which, no hard feelings to my university, surprised me. No one refers euphemistically to going to school 'in Greenwich Village.' I was getting suspicious.

So anyhow, you don't want someone cutting your hair who's angry at you, and by requesting no-blow, I'd set things up to go in this direction. Hoping to mend things, I said very early on in the cut, before much change was detectable, how lovely it looked. This seemed to work, in that superficial way things do when the baseline hostility level's already been established.

Onto the haircut itself: everything about it, other than the price, reminded me why I'd left salons behind in the first place. As someone with hair that's thick not in a Pantene-commercial way, but in an I-can't-fall-asleep-with-it-wet-without-looking-like-I-need-to-be-committed way, I don't especially enjoy when a straight-and-fine-haired hairdresser spends the whole time telling me that I have so much hair, while taking every opportunity to thin it out with special scissors for people with so much hair. Yes, yes, a ton of hair, I'm well aware, yes, it's better than not enough hair, but no, I really have no response to the thickness of my hair being pointed out every time I get my hair cut. (One hairdresser once referred to the thickness of my hair, which was making a blow-dry - included in that cut - take forever by saying 'so hairy', while giggling. That was the best, by far.)

I could tell, as my hair was being cut, that the back was not so much being evened out as turning into a classic men's haircut. Not what I'd asked for at all, but not totally unreasonable for an angled bob, and perhaps pleasant for summer. It was when the hairdresser gelled the back into a bangs-free version of this that I got concerned. Had my cheapness gone that far?

Long story short, after shampooing out the gel and styling the results in a way that did not involve anything being 'spiked', it looks like no hat will be necessary. Beyond that, I'll say no more.

You Need a New One

2009-06-23T22:45:00.006-04:00

Most of thrift is about balancing what you need or want to buy with how much money you've got to spend. But there's an extra category: the things you neither need nor want to replace nor wished to buy in the first place, but that Society tells you you really ought to 'invest' in. Not making these purchases, They inform you, means that you are socially-inept, unhygienic, or just stingy to the point of ignoring your own needs. You might be OK using the same soap for your face and body, wearing the same dress to the office and a bar, and these are things no one would even know about if you didn't tell them, but if you did tell them, They would be horrified. Teenagers, who famously care what others think, are particularly susceptible to the You Need a New One message, but they're hardly alone.

So, some categories to watch out for:

Specialization: To an extent, this is something we're all guilty of. Using different products for shampoo and soap, say, or different outfits for formal and casual occasions. But there are degrees. This is particularly relevant when it comes to kitchen utensils. Anything designed just for a banana, a tomato, etc., can probably be skipped.

Replacements: It's clear enough why 'I needed a new one' is so often summoned as the reason for a purchase. It's not that you wanted a new pair of shoes, but that a particular pair wore out and needs replacement. (I, for one, cannot buy shoes without going through these motions.) But let's get real: not everything that wears out needs replacing, and not everything wears out when They say it does. A commenter here insisted recently that running shoes must be replaced after a certain number of miles and/or years. To me this sounded unnecessary, and I may not be as off as all that. Says one expert, a marathon winner and running-shoe salesman: "I know the shoe companies say 500 miles. I never go by things like that. I go by feel. When you’re on a run and you land on a rock and you feel it on your foot, when that happens you know your shoes have lost a lot of their cushioning or support and you might be wise to invest in another pair of shoes." Indeed. My running shoes are as hideous as can be, and are quite old, but until something changes perceptibly in the fit, no change is necessary.

Personal maintenance: As the recession lifestyle articles courageously reported, it is in fact possible to paint your own nails, rather than go to a salon. This did not surprise anyone other than women from Magical Lifestyle-Journalism Land. But forget about the lavish and the urban. Many basic expectations are, in fact, unnecessary. As MSI has investigated, a daily shampoo is at most a necessity according to season. And, a hint for those of us whose 'ethnic' hair is coarser and thus less societally-desirable than 'white' hair typically is - our hair takes forever to get greasy, so barring intense workouts or extreme heat, we can go the every-other-day (or, dare I say, every-two-day) route year-round. Yes, our hair gets interesting in the rain, but not having to shampoo every five minutes in order to avoid clumping at the scalp is a blessing indeed.

And, more generally, when it comes to beauty products, if you don't already use it, and 'it' isn't deodorant, toothpaste, or eyeliner, best not to start now.

Relaxation: Massages, yoga, days at the spa, months in the wilderness. I sympathize with the need to break up arduous tasks (like, say, returning 26 books to the library, from one's apartment in another borough, all in one go) with treats (say, iced coffee). But the notion that everyone These Days is just so stressed, that Life Today is so fast-paced that we all need to decompress, and that this decompression must manifest itself in ways more involved than parking one's self for a solid three hours in front of reality TV, has gotten out-of-hand. So while I don't advocate denying one's self the small indulgences that make life bearable, I think we'd all be wise to consider the restorative powers of staring at a wall or, failing that, a gossip website, before signing up for anything for which the promised de-stressing will be accompanied by a stress-inducing bill.

In other words, spending 'for others' has its place - going out with friends, gifts - but spending on yourself should not, with some obvious exceptions, take Society into account.

Bringing back the victory garden, indoors

2009-06-23T15:11:00.000-04:00

I've been considering how I could go about growing my own herbs for some time now, even before FLG suggested it. It wouldn't really be a move towards actual cost savings in the way not washing my hair would, since I don't currently buy fresh herbs very often. It would a kind of hypothetical cheapness, since I could be paying more if I were paying anything. Plus, I like projects, and basil.

The problem is two-fold, however. First, the garden needs to be indoors so that I can eat basil all year. Second, it needs to be cat-proof. I've considered two options in this direction:
1. I could grow it under artificial lights in my closet. The downside of this is that the LED lamps cost at least $50 (not thrifty), and also that I couldn't use my closet for more useful ends, like clothing storage. Plus, I'd have to constantly explain to people about the "herbs" I'm growing in there.
2. A chicken-wire covering for the plants so that the sun can reach them, but the cat's teeth can't. Chicken wire is only a few bucks, so the cost wouldn't be a huge issue, but it's possible that space constraints in my new apartment will be. How can I convince my roommates that the best use of half our living room floor is for a chicken-wire domed indoor farm?

On a related note, I was recently hunting for Amazon cart filler to get my order up to $25 and qualify for free shipping, and I realized this is always a bad idea to do at the last minute when you just need to stick something--anything--in there to avoid a shipping charge. I typically select ridiculous things like cat toys and muffin pan liners because I don't have time to take stock of all the little things I actually do need. So, to remedy this problem, I started a shopping list on Amazon dedicated specifically to cart filler items that I need generally but not urgently. Now, whenever I think, "Oh, I could really use an X at times like these," I add it to the list. So that next time I need to add $4.70 to my cart, I will remember to buy a tape measure or a flashlight or, now, chicken wire for my basil farm.

When cheapness goes too far: or, tales of my weekend

2009-06-22T11:11:00.004-04:00

Like my co-blogger, I'm in the process of moving apartments. Technically this means putting stuff into storage, running off to lower-rent lands, and returning come the fall, in the hopes of finding a recession-priced townhouse in the West Village, by which I mean studio apartment within walking distance of NYU. While we have hired (Brooklyn's least expensive!) movers for the furniture, the storage space happens to be on the same bus route as our apartment, and it was cheaper to 'claim' the storage space early, so we figured we might as well start the move ourselves. For whatever reason, the fact that a street fair blocked the entirety of that bus route did not stop us from thinking this course of action made sense. My arms are now in fine shape indeed. Jo suggested I try weight training, but to go to the campus gym in the summer now costs $50, so boxes it is.

Speaking of carrying things, here's another area where frugality adversely impacted my quality of life. After carrying around a backpack with every-expanding holes at the bottom and an ever-thickening layer of filth (as happens to things you put regularly on the floor of the subway) for some time, it occurred to me that perhaps the bag had had it's day. Which it had, so I threw it out. What I didn't do was buy a replacement. Because that would require the exchange of money for stuff, stuff that isn't fun in any way, and I figured that through some combination of tote bags and reused plastic shopping bags, I could get through the great Library Book Shift of 2009. I figured wrong. Thank you, Brooklyn Industries, for having one of your periodic bag sales just in time.

**************

In news of thrift on a larger scale, colleges are now cutting back on 'extras'. Predictably, in that the linked-to story is a lifestyle piece in the New York Times, and one that allows comments, after reading about some rather extreme college perks (how many schools ever had HBO in student rooms?) you get to hear from the ranks of those convinced that bratty Kids These Days demand luxuries beyond what they, when young, would have dared ask for.

But is it really the kids who demand these perks? I agree that there's been a trend in abandoning austerity-for-character-building's-sake, and that we no longer as a society believe one must be in a permanent state of physical discomfort, ala British boarding school of yore, in order to get an education. But I simply don't believe the undergrads care about the landscaping, the 'free' laundry, the fancy gyms, and so forth. These are things colleges do to one-up one another. Sure, there's some sense, if a student looks at nine schools with Perk A, that if the tenth lacks that perk, it's perhaps a worse-funded or less-brand-name institution. But it would have never occurred to individual undergrads to ask for most of what's now offered, to set the spartan-to-lavish scale where it's currently at.

Moving expenses

2009-06-18T20:50:00.004-04:00

Right now, I have no profound theoretical things to say about thrift because I'm busy trying to figure out the very practical problem of transporting myself, Sebastian, our stuff, and my cat from our (more or less) happy homes in Washington to our new, chillier homes in Boston in the next month. This is proving to be incredibly expensive.

I managed to find what looks like a decent apartment through a friend, which has saved me the hypothetical money and stress involved in flying out to Boston and scrambling to find a place and sign a lease within a few days, then paying a broker's fee for it. Sebastian, however, has not found a place, so I'm still flying out to Boston next week to help him look for one. Money not saved.

Then there is the problem of schlepping our stuff. I've done a long-distance move once before, from Chicago to Washington the summer after I finished college. That one was somewhat less complicated though thanks to my lack of worldly possessions and angry feline companion. This time, we have probably a small apartment's worth of furniture between us, and the cat can't fly on planes (IMPORTANT THRIFT ADVICE: Pets use up valuable resources and cause endless headaches. Don't get them until you are established and can be reasonably certain that you'll never move anywhere again.) Hiring movers and driving ourselves and the cat is one option, but last time Seb hired movers to move his stuff, they were expensive and lost so much of it that it was impossible to re-assemble half the furniture on arrival.

The other option is renting a large-ish truck and driving it the eight hours ourselves. We lean in this direction. So here is my question: What is the thriftiest way to move? Which truck rentals are the cheapest? Where can I get cheap boxes (that will hold heavy things--not the liquor store boxes mentioned earlier)? What is the best way to find an apartment in three days? Which furniture should I keep and which should I sell? How can I make this process as smooth as possible so that Sebastian and I don't kill each other before we even arrive? Any ideas?

Thrift and financial independence

2009-06-17T15:33:00.009-04:00

Here's something to liven up Cheapness Studies: the story of how all my disposable income for the semester went down the drain, in a mere few seconds in Red Hook, Brooklyn, this afternoon.

Right after driving and parking just fine during my last driving lesson, I up and failed the test, first by not signaling as I pulled out of the spot (after repeating to myself endlessly, for hours, 'signal and gear, signal and gear'), then by, for what I believe was the first time ever, hitting the curb while parallel parking. Fun! And then I did something really financially irresponsible: drowned my sorrows in a $2 iced coffee. But I have that coffee to thank for the fact that I'm calm and at my laptop now, not still teary, self-pitying, and ashamed, over by the Ikea.

I attribute the failure to a number of factors: having still not had the recommended hours of driving practice; having spent barely any time in cars even as a passenger (unless subway cars count); having no depth perception or coordination whatsoever, taking lessons in a part of town (Chinatown) not exactly conducive to driving; being basically incompetent at life (which is, let's face it, what it feels like to be 25 and have just failed one's second driving test)... but most of all I pin it on amount the lessons cost. Every step I made, I kept telling myself, if you forget to signal before pulling out of the spot, if you forget for even just one second the car is in reverse, you are throwing all your money away. And it's not only the money already spent - I'll need to pay again to re-take the test. This thought led me to a chain of other thoughts - perhaps if this is such a problem, I should work in a more lucrative field. I started imagining the process of not only reapplying for a permit (mine being about to expire), but of getting started in business or corporate law, just as my dissertation is starting (in my head and in outline form, at least) to take shape, all so that, if I ever happen to be in a situation that requires driving, I can not only do so, but do so with the approval of the state of New York, and also, say, pay for professional haircuts on a regular basis.

Once the panic stage lifted, I realized the practical thing to do is just to get the new permit, then wait until I do live somewhere where driving makes sense, and perhaps take the test there, without a dozen forays through the streets of Chinatown first. Obviously the lessons were not a waste - when not being examined, I can apparently sort of drive, which, after starting from zero, is something. But there was a panic stage, which was... strange. Of all the tests I've taken in my life, one that I don't actually need to pass shouldn't feel like the biggest deal of all.

But let's move on from the driving (or lack thereof) to the question of how cheapness relates to where one's income comes from, still - apologies - from the realm of personal experience.

Senior year of high school, I remember being very aware that, unlike high school, college had tuition, and that even if I got a job there (which I did), my parents would be the ones mostly paying for my education, and I'd only be self-supporting after graduating. This was a lot of what attracted me to the University of Chicago - I felt plenty guilty for being in a situation that permitted me to go to a private college, and figured if I would go that route, it had better be a place where I'd work far too hard and have no fun whatsoever. Ultimately Chicago proved less sober and monastic than it had appeared in my masochistic high schooler's imagination, but the sense of being in debt to my parents absolutely affected my behavior in college. I don't think, for instance, I ever, even once, missed a class.

And my college-era spending did, on some level, have that 'would my parents approve?' element, because even money I'd earned would hardly cancel out the fact that I was not even close to financially independent. I would not call home and ask whether it was OK if I got a mocha or a beer, but the nagging sense that nothing I bought was really with 'my own' money certainly played a part in my not having the world's most debauched college experience. And it's not even that my parents were particularly strict when I was in high school - it was, as I neurotically understood it, the principle of the thing.

And yet, the driving lessons I paid for with money I earned were endlessly more nerve-wracking than any college class. Now, perhaps this has something to do with the fact that driving a car down Delancey in rush hour is not contemplating Proust in a wood-paneled seminar room in Hyde Park. But I sort of think that's not it, that whatever illusions I may have had in college that by not having too much money-requiring fun, I somehow avoided being a brat, thrift is fundamentally different when it's money you've earned and when it is not. However little I spent in college, these days I'm stingier still.

While I'd like to attribute this to my having finally learned the value of a hard day's work, I think it's more that whatever I (theoretically) save now goes to the theoretical Idiotic Selfish Purchase, one for which I and I alone would be responsible. I don't want to make such a purchase, nor do I even know what one would be (a very belated sorority membership and trip to Cancun?), but again, it's the principle of the thing. Thrift I engage in now is on some level about independence, as though with every dollar I don't spend, I've bought myself something nice.

That which seems like it would be cheap, but isn't

2009-06-12T14:55:00.002-04:00

Everyone (here, presumably) wants a formula to save money. If only it were always as easy as yesterday, when my boyfriend and I were about to spend $40 ordering moving boxes online, after an extensive search for cheaper options... only to get home to find that the store downstairs was throwing out more (clean, dry, what are the chances?) boxes than we knew what to do with. Yes, I'm pleased.

But it's rarely so straightforward. Just as the theoretically no-fail diet plan, 'don't eat as much', has yet to replace the more involved ones ('cut out carbs'), 'don't spend so much' fails to have the allure of the much catchier 'cut out lattes'. In my experience, however, the quick fixes... it's not necessarily that they don't work, but they still need to be applied with caution. 'Do X, not Y' is not, on its own, enough. For example:

-Cooking/bringing lunch: Usually true, but it depends what you're cooking/bringing and what you're eating out. Pizza and falafel (and vegetarian sushi, and soup, and bagels, and so on) are not necessarily unhealthy meals, and are typically cheaper options than cooking anything with special ingredients, anything that you haven't cooked before and thus may not turn out edible, etc. Cooking for one or two, unless it's something you know will keep and will turn out well enough for you to want to eat the thing again, is not always as efficient as getting something single-portioned on the outside.

-Dressing casually: To be low-maintenance is to be a jeans-and-t-shirt sort. But the arrival of chains like H&M and Forever 21, with cheap, fashionable dresses, coincided with the trend in pricey 'basics'. Assuming nothing's on sale, the frilly dress may be $30; the jeans $200, the t-shirt, made out of that ultrafine material that has made women's t-shirts in recent years less durable the higher the price, $40. (This is only true, however, for women: to my knowledge, men's suits remain the gargantuan expenditures they've always been.)

-Running: The only free sport. Kind of. To not injure yourself, you (allegedly, but I fell for it) need the special sneakers someone claiming running expertise recommends for someone with your exact foot-shape. But good news is, unless you run a whole lot, they will last forever, because your size won't change and they were never in style. The real issue is the increased food and shampoo consumption running requires. No, cost-wise, jogging is not skiing, but it's not free, either. Not if you make the mistake, as I have, of ending jogs at Whole Foods. (Which is, by the way, the most yuppie combination of activities known to man. There's nothing like waiting on that line in your gym clothes.)

-Making your own damn coffee: While this is drastically cheaper per cup than even Bouley Market's miraculous $1.35 cup in Tribeca, New York's priciest neighborhood, coffee out is often a substitute for more costly on-the-outside expenditures. Meeting friends for coffee is cheaper than getting drinks or a meal. Got an hour to kill in SoHo? Better to spend that time reading in Starbucks (where, granted, you don't really have to buy anything) than at the Banana Republic down the street.

-Brooklyn: Yes, this one's very NYC-specific. Contrary to what one might think after reading about the trustafarian Williamsbourgeoise, rents are often lower in Brooklyn than in Manhattan, or at least that's how I ended up in Park Slope and not somewhere less hippie-influenced and closer to school. But now, popping up everywhere are precious little gourmet shops promising sustainable, local, and artisinal, and these are the only places with good cheese for miles, and they know it, allowing them to charge far more than the Manhattan institutions - Fairway, Zabars, even Citarella. So, this one is not only NYC-specific, but also specific to those who buy a lot of cheese. That said, that still leaves, I'd imagine, close to a million people.

Alas, it takes more than a glue gun and Bedazzler for DIY wealth.

2009-06-11T14:51:00.002-04:00

I love Etsy for getting cheap pretty handmade earrings and cool fabric handbags. I get things like pure silver earrings for $13 and well-designed fabric hobo bags that would cost more if I were into designer It bags made of leather, or even brand-name fabric handbags. Thus, I would have celebrated Etsy as a way to be thrifty with respect to a few things, especially if you're into unique designs that are handmade. But it's not a great way to make money, given the profit margins and the fact that a tightwad like me balks at spending $35 on a crocheted headband. Keep in mind, I've spent 3 months and $30 on merino wool yarn for a scarf to give to my boyfriend, so I understand I'm paying for better materials (sometimes) and labor and the very idea of craftwork. But even if this is a nifty new way to buy and sell fine craftwork, it doesn't seem, given the economies of scale, a great way to make a living. I hope that the craft makers, artisans, etc. are not relying on my very sporadic (okay, I have only bought from them twice) meager purchases to stay afloat In This Economy. It seems as though that's not a great business model or career plan, and possibly "peddles a false feminist fantasy":

I have a theory, and it begins with the demographics. The average age of an Etsy seller, according to the site’s 2008 survey, is 35—women’s prime childrearing years. Nearly 60 percent have college degrees, and 55 percent are married. The average household income is $62,000—well above the national mean. In other words, the Etsy.com seller is often a married woman with (or about to have) young children, with a higher-than-average household income, and a good education. These should, in sum, be highly employable women. So, what are they doing, often pursuing hobbies, or working only part-time, on Etsy?

I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.
On the site’s user forums, newbies are forever asking if it’s possible to create stand-alone careers on Etsy. They get some encouragement but the answer from most veterans is no. “Technically ... yes,” krugsecologic says, “but I’m a stay at home mom—so REALLY that’s my full-time job. So this is not my family’s only source of income ... thankfully:).” Indeed, many posters admit that their husbands are the main breadwinners, and their work on Etsy amounts to little more than a glorified hobby. (Less than a quarter of the site’s sellers describe themselves as full-time artisans.) Kymsart777 is more blunt: “I would be on welfare! LOL … I wish!” And meringueshop advises flatly: “very few people ... make a full time income from Etsy.” Yet the same thread gets started again and again. (“I'd love to be able to quit my day job and do this for a living” writes beachflowerdesigns, a mother from the Midwest. “I'm going to keep trying though!”) This is the dream that women express over and over on the site.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with women choosing to work part-time or for less than they could earn in other professions. But like those flyers you sometimes see tacked up on lampposts, or late-night television ads, Etsy actively fosters the delusion that any woman with pluck and ingenuity can earn a viable living without leaving her home. Etsy has a business model that’s akin to the lottery’s. It preys on the hopes and dreams of working moms and other women, while delivering genuine financial success to only the very, very few.

After decades of being encouraged to forego the unpaid “women’s work” of our mothers and grandmothers, we are tired of being divorced from our hands and from the genuine pleasures such work can afford. This is the female version of Shop Class as Soulcraft, the recent book by Matthew Crawford, the philosopher-turned-mechanic. Women, too, hunger for concrete, manual labor that has an element of individual agency and pleasure beyond the abstract, purely cerebral work found in the cubicle or corner office. It’s become satisfying again to sew, cook, and garden. But unlike our mothers and grandmothers, who were content to knit booties for relatives, younger women want to be recognized and compensated for their talents. Crawford has mastered specialized motorcycle repair not just because it makes him happy, but also because it’s work that’s embedded in a particular place and context, with a corresponding pay scale.

It's interesting that the author of this article frames this as a problem endemic to those seeking work/life balance. I don't disagree with her characterization, but that's because I'm not looking at a particularly rigorous study of Etsy's sellers and their motivations. The author at least supports her argument with some statistics about the gender composition and age and occupational status of Etsy's sellers, but for all I know the author cherry-picked the quotes about how the sellers are only able to break even/sustain their avocational livelihood because of their spouse's income. In any case, if we take this theory of Etsy's economic ghetto of SAHMs, it's kind of sad that in the quest for work/life balance, one part of the equation gives too much ground to the other. At another site under the Slate umbrella, telecommuting is disparaged as being too hard on small businesses, and because:

I firmly believe that you should expect employees to show up for work, whenever possible, no matter what kind of company.
The reasons for this have nothing to do with checking that people are actually working. It's about efficient communications, building company culture and camaraderie, and sharing the daily bits of work and personal experiences that create a shared sense of purpose.

Academics have the benefit of more flexible hours than most, with the ability to work from home if necessary (even if the vast number of meetings, service/committee work and the general value of being in your office and roaming the halls talking to your peers and students generally make it so that you're usually at school). But much research by the likes of Joan Williams and the Work/Life Law Center shows that people are not generallly more productive the more hours they spend at work beyond a certain number, and this over-valuation of "face time" hurts women, particularly young mothers.

Still, if this article is to be believed, the solution to institutional problems with family leave isn't to quit your job, become an "artisan" and break out your glue gun, hoping that you can sell your crafty wares and become a self-supporting hipster. If anything, I'm not even sure that the vision is a "feminist fantasy," as the article argues. Is it every feminist's fantasy to spend hours doing traditional women's work and getting paid for it? Keep in mind, I spend hours upon hours baking, knitting, and craft making (or at least I used to, then I realized that no one needs yet another decoupaged photo frame or pencil cup). I like my hobbies, but I don't think it is or will be my fantasy to knit for a living as I stay at home with my baby (I guess one never knows though, this academia thing often feels wearying, and so occasionally knitting does sound better). If that is your feminist fantasy, great! But feminist fantasies are not monolithic. But in general, despite the pleasures of flow and working with one's hands, the time it takes to knit a scarf or handmake something, and the cost of good raw materials, it seems that the most one can expect is to break even, given the low profit margins. That's not exactly my fantasy of a livelihood, mainly because it isn't a sustainable one. And yes, I am sort of annoyed by the tweeness of it all, that such a fantasy about the best career centers around beads and yarn, which seems to be a fantasy limited to hipsters of a certain socioeconomic class and education level who supported financially through other means.

A better perspective on women and work and making it In This Economy: the American Prospect's series on "When Opting Out Isn't An Option."

Waist size, price tag

2009-06-10T14:24:00.005-04:00

In the wise words of Miss Self-Important, on the eternal question of why women who write (sometimes) about clothes are taken less seriously than men who write (sometimes) about sports:

As far as I can tell, Megan McArdle is no less serious a blogger (insofar as one can be a serious blogger) than, say, Ezra Klein, who blogs on many of the same topics. But most people do not speculate about what size his pants are and whether he can get a date in his comments section.

And, more to the point:

Fashion is closely tied to bodies and love lives, and all the other subjects that are inappropriate for public discussion. Blogging about fashion usually means blogging about your fashion--it indirectly reveals things about your body, your income, your friends--in sum, your private life. And when the snipers come out, it makes some sense that they'll take aim not at the shoes, but at you, since you have armed them with all the relevant information and personal insults hurt more.

True, true. This explanation helped me understand why, though on my home blog I upfront call myself a Zionist, the greatest fury my online writings have ever provoked have been times I've written what I thought were innocuous posts about clothes. Even writing about clothing in general, your words will, fairly or unfairly, be read as statements about your own shopping habits and proportions.

One response would be to directly reveal all of this. Which is precisely what Virginia Postrel, the writer most cited as the 'exception' woman who can write about clothes and still be seen as serious, does in the lede of her 2007 story on jeans and vanity sizing: "As a teenager, I squeezed into size-12 jeans. Over the past three decades, I’ve put on about 20 pounds, mostly below the waist. I now wear a size 6."

Once that's out there (and self-deprecatingly so - imagine the fury if she'd opened with, 'I'm a size six, and finding jeans is so hard'), the speculation can end. We know the author's size, as well as her weight history, allowing us to move onto the more universal question of sizing generally.

But, as always, money complicates things. The only time Postrel mentions cost is to point out that custom-fit jeans are, at $900, "pricey." No one would disagree there; the danger is in making any sort of statement about what a pair should cost. (As I learned after mentioning my joy at finding a flattering $30 pair, only to learn that $15 was the socially-acceptable limit.)

So, questions, for my co-bloggers and others:

-Is it possible to talk about cheapness and clothes without inviting comments on our imagined incomes or sizes? Is there a proper way to deflect these, other than, 'No, you may not have the code to my bank account, nor my size at H&M.' I know that it's possible to blog about clothing without blogging about your own clothing (far more interesting is to blog about Zana Bayne's clothing), is it always really about you, in a way that other topics are not?

-Are size and income always off-limits? Obviously complaining about how the Chanel boutique is out of the dress you want in a size zero will get you as much understanding as confessing to being a Williamsburg hipster whose parents pay for her loft, but I'm not, of course, referring to extreme cases. This being a cheapness blog, the cost of clothes relative to funds already has come up, and surely will once more. And for all I know, my major complaint about clothing - that jeans These Days are cut to show the top of the underwear or worse, is in fact a statement about my size, and women with some other build (smaller? bigger? differently-proportioned?) don't experience this.

-Gender! Obviously. The relationship between cheapness and clothes relates at least as much to gender as it does to class. Female spending is more conspicuous because we often wear our most frivolous purchases. (I'm wearing the offending not-quite-$30 jeans right now.) But must every mention of clothes, by a woman, be accompanied by a discussion of the nonsense men also purchase, or can that just be assumed?

Status and spending acculturation

2009-06-09T12:18:00.004-04:00

Helen has an interesting post arguing in part that elite schools are primarily "a training ground for America's future elite and only incidentally a place to train future intellectuals," and in light of this, these schools should take more seriously their mission to give "middle-class kids instruction in how to act rich—these habits of self-presentation have as much to do with future success as talent does."

If we accept that a Yale education is primarily cultural rather than academic, then the kind of acculturation that should take place there depends on what habits we would like our ruling class to have...Yale emphasizes the ways that it broadens students’ horizons, but never the ways it narrows them. When Yale offers free fellowships to study in China or subsidizes a trip to New York to catch a Broadway show, it bills these luxuries as instruction in how to be open-minded and well-cultured. In fact, these trips are, more than anything, instruction in how to be wealthy.

When Yale sells these tourist’s-eye-view glimpses as a genuine education in worldliness, it leaves students thinking of themselves as in the ruling class but not of it. Really, they're just as insular as any elite.

I think there is much to be said for this claim, though I suspect my fellow-cheapsters will disagree, and that it does relate in a narrow kind of way to the problem of thrift. I didn't attend a particularly exclusive or high-status school by East Coast terms (though it was certainly expensive), but I did attend a school that was, in terms of the students who populated it and what they aspired to, significantly higher class than my prior upbringing. I have no great claims to the standard pre-college deprivations--my family was neither poor nor uneducated, nor were most people I grew up with--but my parents did comment after my second or third year in college that my time there seemed to have influenced my tastes, and not towards greater thrift.

Before college, I had never bought a pair of jeans over $25 and I thought Starbuck's was where the rich drank their fancy, inscrutable cocktails. In college, I still liked that sentiment, but a real "deal" was a pair of $70 jeans marked down to $40, not the shapeless, stretchy $25 ones from Target. Clearly this attitude shift was not the result of a higher income--I was just as poor in college as before it, and more if I considered the cost of my education as personal debt, which I mostly did not. I'm pretty certain that some combination of my friends' spending habits and the sense of status-raising promise (probably entitlement) that everyone at Chicago imbibed dramatically changed my own expectations about money and how to spend it in a way very similar to the kind of class acculturation Helen describes. I still wanted to be thrifty, but I desperately did not want to be trashy, which I took to be anything lower class than the class our graduation from Chicago implied we would join. (Do you see how ambiguous this status game is? Status acculturation seems to go hand-in-hand with status anxiety. Endlessly elusive and self-absorbing.) I wanted to live in a way that anticipated how I expected to live once all the promises of my expensive education were borne out and I was 45 and paid private school tuition for my children and owned a row-house in Lincoln Park, where I walked my labradoodle.

Of course there were obvious limitations to what could be done, and everyone at the same time relished the image of their faux-poverty by eating at places like Depot and decorating their apartments with curbside furniture finds (this was before the Great American Bedbug Infestation). But that was all for ironic show. The real thrift, such as there was in college, was channeled into finding a good price on a nice interview suit that would last a few years. (Miss Self-Important hadn't gotten that far in the acculturation process yet though, and decided that buying the pieces separately at two different sales would be wiser. This proved false. Now her suit does not match.)

This status acculturation process continues apace after college, where I live in comfortable entry-level with no dependents affluence. Recently, a friend sent me an invitation to Gilt, which sends me daily sales on designer clothes I would never buy. They are substantially discounted, but only in the sense in which a previously $800 dress on sale for $250 dollars can be considered to be discounted. Nonetheless, I look at the sales each day, and I am starting to believe that maybe a $160 dress, marked down from $425, is not such a bad deal. After all, I have seen them every day for weeks already and these are the cheapest of the cheap. To which my friend Alex replies, "I think it's a reasonable amount for a nice dress, but more than you would have spent a few months ago. This is how people get acclimated to spending money such that the NYTimes articles about discount designer shopping become relevant to you." That's terrible, I reply. "Yeah, I stopped looking."

Faux-poverty =/= cheapness

2009-06-08T16:40:00.005-04:00

There's something that needs to be cleared up early on in the Cheapness Studies experiment, and that's the difference between The Cheap and the Fashionably Faux-Poor, otherwise known as hipsters. It can be easy to confuse the two, because both are sets whose spending is or seems in conflict with their wealth or social class. Both can be found rummaging in thrift-store bins, scouring used-book sales, and, alas, cutting their own hair. And the 'it's hip to be frugal' lifestyle pieces that keep popping up further confuse matters - if thrift is in, are The Cheap just one more set of hipsters obeying Hipster Rule #1, which is of course to deny one's own hipsterdom?

Before things get blurrier still, some ways to tell cheapness apart from its evil cousin, faux-poverty:

-Dress: Faux-poverty is always for show, whereas cheapness can be but doesn't have to be - some exercise cheapness discretion from the confines of a cheapness closet, while others shout their cheapness from the rooftops. But an openly cheap person will, for example, buy a designer dress on sale, hoping to use her money as efficiently as possible for an upcoming event that requires such an item. When someone points out in a tsk-tsk tone that the item's designer, the dress's cheap owner will mention, with pride, the steep discount. Whereas the faux-poor do not buy designer clothes, however low in price, and will in fact be willing to spend more than the cheap do on their sale items for clothes whose faux-poor cred is self-evident - 'it's thrifted' or, for the very ironic, 'it's from a Walmart down South', being your key words.

-Financial responsibility: While cheapness is not always about money saved, and can merely be entered into for it's own sake, it is done with the idea, however buried in one's mind, that one must be saving for something. Faux-poverty, meanwhile, is not about savings, but about a perpetual state of being 'so broke.' And sometimes the faux-poor are as broke as they claim, because they can spend huge amounts of well-hidden money on intentionally-'distressed' jeans, gritty-looking lofts, hand-rolled cigarettes, drinks at expensive but 'downtown' bars, and so on. They're not getting blow-outs or manicures, flat-screens or yachts, but they might well be spending, all the same. If someone faux-poor also happens to spend very little - and this has been known to happen - it's just a coincidence.

-Class: Faux-poverty is a statement about authentic membership in (some fantasy version of) the working class. Thus the overalls, flannel, mullets, and tattoos, and the preference for converted industrial spaces and homes 'down by the docks'. For the faux-poor, nothing could be worse than for it to be revealed that you grew up in Greenwich, CT, and attended the finest Northeastern boarding schools, and not on scholarship. (Witness every last Williamsburg resident telling all who'll listen that they don't, unlike everyone else in Williamsburg, get their rent paid by their parents.) Meanwhile, to be faux-poor, by definition, you did not grow up poor.

Whereas there's no requirement, for the cheap, to have any particular family background. While cheapness and economic self-sufficiency go hand in hand, and while poverty does not, of course, allow freely choosing not to buy the new fancy car, that's about where the relationship to class status ends. A person can be cheap because he grew up poor and can't imagine spending freely, or because he grew up rich and watched his parents save to get that way. There's no one route to what amounts to the same result. Cheapness is not about sneering at those who, as luck would have it, were born to wealthy families - if anyone's sneered at by the cheap, it's those who spend thoughtlessly. Who your parents are is sort of besides the point, except insofar as cheapness can be instilled in one's offspring.

-Chic: Cheapness isn't chic. Think of when, on Seinfeld, Jerry says, in reference to George spotting a dime on the floor while without his glasses, "Maybe cheapness is a sense." George Costanza? Not chic. (Referencing Seinfeld in 2009: even less chic.)

Cheapness goes to the market

2009-06-07T20:34:00.006-04:00

In some thread, somewhere, about local-sustainable and all that, someone asked a question I thought needed to be asked: why does food from farmers' markets, which cut out the middle-man, and which promise only to grow what's appropriate for the region/season, end up costing so much more than even groceries from upscale chains? I go often to these markets, and... yeah. Asparagus at $4 a small bunch, bell peppers at $4.50 a pound, newly-trendy scraps from the garlic plant, $6/lb, and so on. And, either because this food really is fresher than equivalents elsewhere or because I've been brainwashed by the great Alice Waters hovering like so over Park Slope, I recently bought some, not tons, of all of the above.

So are the prices just a question of economies of scale (as in, the food at markets actually does cost more to produce), of look-what-the-rich-urbanites-will-pay-for-'rustic', or something similarly obvious? Is the idea that the desk-job-having urban consumer feels guilty questioning the price of items the farmer must have worked really hard to grow/slaughter, when it's the farmer himself (or someone we assume to be a farmer) selling the goods? I'm not hating - I remain a fan of the farmers' markets, and happily give them whatever they ask so long as the resulting extravagance will at least end up garnishing a 40-cent mound of pasta. But I am curious about the reason why even the stands not promising 'organics' make Whole Foods seem the more sensible option. So if you know, by all means...

(The new and much-hyped gourmet market that just opened on Flatbush, where the ice cream is $9 a pint but 'housemade'? On that, I'm not conflicted in the least.)

Credit cards are a cheapster's best friend

2009-06-07T16:28:00.003-04:00

As Phoebe pointed out earlier, the "financial advice for recent grads" is an editorial genre fraught with peril. It's usually about 90 percent totally obvious advice (newsflash: cooking at home is cheaper than restaurants), 5 percent useful for people who've never considered the concept of money (don't take out loans to buy depreciating assets like a new laptop even though you may think a laptop is really useful), and 5 percent wrong, like this advice to avoid credit cards lest they tempt you into financial sins.

The view that credit cards are evil conduits to oblivious profligacy is not that uncommon. Recently, I've tried to convince two different friends who were trying to save money that credit cards would help them do that, and both were very suspicious. But it's true--if you follow the one iron law of credit cards, you can in fact save money, have an easier time taking out loans on appreciating assets later, and get all kinds of nice perks like cash back and restaurant coupons* for your virtue. That rule, as I'm sure you all know, is to pay off your full balance every month, always, no matter what.

When you buy your peace-of-mind-saving latte for $3.29 at the beginning of the month and don't have to pay for it until the end of the grace period 30-60 days later, that $3.29 has accrued an additional couple cents for you in an interest-bearing savings account, and by the time you have to withdraw it to pay, it is itself worth slightly less than the original amount you paid for the latte thanks to inflation. A credit card is a convenient, brief interest-free loan that rewards you for responsible repayment with an occasional dinner at Olive Garden. Hurray!

Obviously, a credit card can be your undoing if you're already a profligate spender and just need a ready means of payment to behave like a maniac, or if you break the iron rule and start carrying even modest balances. But I suspect that for the dispositionally tight-fisted with a mortal fear of debt, that's not really a problem. I try to put everything on my card unless I'm somewhere that's cash-only. But I've never been tempted to purchase a pony or a Marc Jacobs dress with it.

Sometimes I do think that credit cards are an evil force, since their business model requires some people to break the iron rule of immediate repayment and go into debt, which may, in sum, make us a more profligate culture, though a much more transactionally fluid one. Am I contributing to financial irresponsibility and a massive culture of debt in order to feast on unlimited salad and breadsticks? No doubt some of Mastercard's debtors would be in some kind of debt anyway, but probably not all. Or does the benefit of immense financial convenience outweigh these costs? In the meantime, yes.

*One thing though about the rewards: beware the free airfare offers. They often require you to book through their travel agents and charge "booking fees" to redeem them. I prefer 1-2% cash back schemes, since even free Olive Garden breadsticks, nice though they may be, are not as good as cash moneys. Also, CapitalOne allows you to customize the image on the card, so that you can become that ridiculous person who has a photo of her cat on her credit card.

Pasta, undressed

2009-06-06T17:40:00.005-04:00

One of the most popular searches leading people to my home blog is, no-quotes, 'what to put on pasta.' Every time I see this, I think, how boring are people? Unlike those searching for 'hipster porn', 'sheygetz jewish woman', and 'is watermelon fattening', the pasta folks have perhaps not the most fertile imaginations.

Or so I thought, until I found myself with what looked like as many bags of pasta as days left in my apartment. This was months ago - once discovering the 99-cent bags at Whole Foods, and weaning myself off the marginally superior but once-$2-then-suddenly-much-more DeCecco boxes, I started hording the bags. And kept doing so. (My boyfriend warned me I might be going overboard, but did I listen?) And now, I have officially run out of things to put on pasta. I have tried everything. Every pasta dish I've ever seen on a menu and thought, 'that looks interesting,' I've made. (Turns out broccoli rabe, at least as I made it, is of no use.) Every interesting-looking Greenmarket vegetable has found itself on a bowl of pasta, as have non-vegetarian toppings of all kinds. Every possible variant of tomato sauce has made its way from cans of tomatoes to the pan. Every food I eat otherwise, with the notable exceptions of oatmeal, pizza, and Twix, has made its way onto a mound of pasta, such that there are no longer dishes that don't 'take' pasta, cheeses that don't 'go' with pasta, pasta, pasta, pasta....

So, I'm stuck. To preempt a reasonable suggestion - giving the remaining bags to charity upon moving out, as we'll probably have to do with some other stuff in the cabinets - I should note that the way our kitchen's laid out, with no ventilation (no window or vent), and with storage above the cabinets, all the bags are covered in a thick layer of kitchen grease. The contents of the bags are, I think but don't know, still viable, and I've been treating them as such, but to someone who didn't know the back story, the bags to not look or feel as though they contain edible food. The pasta is ours or it's garbage.

This is where I ask, after all, for suggestions for what to put on pasta. Linguine, to be precise. An Alice Waters pasta cookbook I consulted was of little use - some suggestions were excellent but obvious in their minimalism (although the fact that putting a few basic, fresh ingredients on pasta seems obvious owes a lot to Waters's influence); others were tailored to a climate with a bit more produce variety; and still more violated the Cheapness Studies credo - I'm all for what goes on the pasta being a higher price-per-pound than the heap of starch below, but a pasta recipe that begins with shucking oysters or requires the addition of caviar or truffles, however delicious the results, misses the point.

Anyone ever purchased $1 makeup from teh internets?

2009-06-05T17:05:00.002-04:00

I came across ELF cosmetics, and it looks all pretty and non-sketchy and all their makeup is $1. That could be a major savings over Sephora, but all the reviews I've found have been hugely varied. Some people say it's pretty high quality and reliable, other say it's a scam and they don't ship your stuff. Anyone had any experience? The lipgloss tempts.

The other problem here seems to be that shipping is $7, so in order to make it worthwhile, I'd have to buy about $30 worth of cosmetics which, even if I used tons of it all the time to begin with, would be hard given that everything is $1. The paradoxes of internet cheapness...

The 'beware the latte' brigade

2009-06-05T12:48:00.002-04:00

Responding to Miss Self-Important's inaugural post, PG writes:

I'd say it's also almost always ok to spend on things that will contribute significantly to your emotional well-being on a daily basis. For me, that's getting a cleaning service every few weeks -- it's worth the money not ever to have to deal with arguing over who has let gunk accumulate in the microwave, or whose turn it is to scrub the toilet. For other people, that can be anything from pet-ownership to yoga classes. The main thing is that it relieve the stress of daily life, not just create an occasional high.

Indeed! This was what so frustrated me about that article that came out a while back advising The Youth to give up their regular trips to Starbucks and the like, because over time, you'll save big. (Of course, this, like all 'who knew?' savings tips, presumes a switch from near-daily latte consumption to total elimination - results would be far less dramatic for those who fail to start at one extreme or end up at the other.) But suppose that latte is the difference between you enjoying the period from 4pm to the end of the workday and you napping at your desk? Or at the library, as I'd have done yesterday, had I not sprung for a cappuccino that was, somewhat embarrassingly, more expensive than my lunch. (Yes, I'm lucky to go to school near a Two Boots, where a top-notch slice is $2.50.) Is the joy of saving money in increments of $2 or $3 so great that it's worth cutting back in one especially noticeable area? Or is the point to condemn immediate gratification for the sake of condemning immediate gratification, without consideration for the actual cost/benefit of the latte in question?

The larger point here is... what PG said, but also that, while thrift generally can be encouraged, urging the elimination across-the-board of one particular expenditure - unless it's, say, bathing in caviar - is rarely helpful, and is likely to just be unnecessarily judgmental. Doing so fails to account for the different roles The Latte plays in different people's lives - for some it's just one more thing that could easily be eliminated, and for others (ahem, humanities grad students), it's one indulgence in an otherwise ascetic lifestyle. Sometimes people need an excuse to step outside of their offices or the library for a couple minutes. Starbucks exists to give non-smokers that excuse.

Time is money, but how much?

2009-06-05T10:57:00.001-04:00

Belle mentions the money value of time below, which brings to mind something a commenter on my blog (who may or may not be my real-life neighbor?) wrote when I said I waited on the train platform an extra 10 minutes to save 50 cents:

If you wait ten minutes to save fifty cents, you are saying your time is worth $3.00 an hour. So every hour you spend not-working-at-Hardees, when you could be making $7.15, is a loss of $4.15.

This is the problem of the opportunity cost of time (OCT), which as I understood it from Econ 101, means the monetary value of time as determined by the price of doing the next most valuable thing. The OCT made a lot of sense when I first heard about it because it was all about the hypothetical future in which I would surely be commanding the salary of a bazillionaire, and so the opportunity cost of my time would indeed be quite high and I would be justified in contracting out nearly all of my daily functioning to services.

But now, having fallen short of the bazillion mark in my actual salary, I wonder if the OCT argument is not actually a goad to irresponsible spending, workaholism, and the overvaluation of the worth of one's labor? It's almost always introduced as an explanation for why you should not scrimp in some way--don't wait 10 minutes to save 50 cents on train fare, don't go to the grocery store two miles away because it has a better deal on eggs, don't clip coupons. These are wastes of time that you could be spending earning tons of money. Because just think! You are a person with lots of education and social capital, and so every hour of your time is worth so much! Or, at the very least, your current hourly wage!

Well, what does that mean, actually? The OCT implies that, at any given moment, instead of doing slothful activity X, I could be earning money. How can I determine how much? If degrees and social capital were enough to justify conserving time over money since those degrees could hypothetically be parlayed into high-wage employment, then Belle should be paying people to peel grapes for her. Even if the calculation should be based on one's actual hourly earnings, how do we extrapolate to the time not spent at work? I make a decent wage while I'm working, but barring a few hours of overtime a week that I'm not actually allowed to take, I can't make more if I work more hours. So even if I can determine the exact monetary value of my time at work, what is it outside of work? Zero? The amount of money I could potentially make at the second job I don't have but should get so that I am optimizing the money value of my time every minute of the day? What about when I'm on an annual stipend that doesn't dictate how many hours I spend working? Is it the stipend divided by all the hours in a year during which I could potentially be studying, which makes the OCT probably a fraction of a cent, or the stipend divided by all the hours I actually spend studying, which I can't predict in advance and so has no use as a standard for deciding how much to scrimp?

But even if the actual OCT is just an approximation, the rational thing to do in most such dilemmas--since they involve such miniscule amounts of money--is spend more money and save more time. Only the extremely unproductive should value their time so little as to spend 30 extra minutes walking to a store to save 30 cents on a carton of eggs. And who wants to be someone so unproductive that their time is worth 60 cents an hour? What kind of useless slug of a human being is only worth 1/14 of minimum wage? Obviously you should buy the more expensive eggs. But isn't that a vast overvaluation of most people's time, given that they can't possibly work all the time instead of buying eggs? And if they did always opt to pay money instead of spend time on the assumption that their time was worth at least the wage of a hypothetical second job, wouldn't that, over the long run, be an unwise strategy?

This view of the value of time seems to privilege allocating all of one's time to financially remunerative labor over doing pretty much anything else. But in Econ 101, I also learned that subjective utility has value too, so one might say in defense of OCT that Belle is still making a wise decision about her OCT when she bakes (successful) lemon bars, since she derives more utility from occasionally employing her time in the service of lemon bar preparation than from working for money non-stop. Ok, but since we can't quantify utility, what does that really mean, except that the theory of OCT has nothing to say about how any given person should employ either his time or his money? If I derive great personal satisfaction from saving 30 cents on eggs, I should walk 30, even 60 minutes to do it. Is that rational?

Moreover, I wonder if thinking in terms of OCT doesn't in some ways erode the kind of inherently thrifty mindset that works to save small amounts as much as possible because many small amounts saved over a long time add up? Maybe some individual instances of such savings are absurd or irrational, but the general attitude, consistently employed, tends to increase rather than diminish one's savings.

Anyway, Belle, you are the expert on this. What is your view?

Free donuts tomorrow!

2009-06-04T22:45:00.002-04:00

Krispy Kreme and Dunkin Donuts are giving away free donuts tomorrow in honor of National Donut Day. Well, you have to buy a drink to get in on the DD deal. I assume this does not just apply to DC, so I am not being parochial.

Keep in mind though, donuts make you fat, and being fat is expensive.

Via FLG.

Cheap and thrifty, but not necessarily more virtuous.

2009-06-04T15:48:00.003-04:00

Dear Rita and Phoebe,

I am so excited to be blogging with the both of you on a subject that excites all of us to paroxysms of tight fist waving glee! I do, however, wonder about my qualifications to blog on this subject. While I have posted a couple of times on how to save money cooking and traveling, I am not the best model for financial responsibility. I am not wholly irresponsible, but I have very little savings, and much, much educational debt. While some of my best friends have been working since college and now have enviable 401Ks (well, less enviable since the crash), and my law school classmates are now making bank as third year associates, I am pretty much still living like I have been since 2002: from financial aid disbursement to disbursement, with odd jobs as a reader, research assistant, or TA (very rarely, since my program is not connected to an undergraduate major) to relieve some of the cost of living burdens. I suppose though, that my example can be of a person who lacks a consistent income and who therefore by necessity should be cheap and thrifty. You don't have to wait till you have a steady income to save money, or at least refrain from spending it profligately.

But if not me, who? Who really is a great candidate to write about thrift? The person who washes out every ziploc bag to reuse (my mom), or the person with the biggest retirement and savings accounts? Everyone should be qualified to write about thrift, if by thrift we mean an awareness that how, where, and why we spend money signifies ethical and economic values. The person with a lot of money in the bank is virtuous in one way (depending on how they obtained that money of course); the person who spends very little on clothing and entertainment is virtuous in another way. So my take on this blog will be of a cheap and thrifty, but not exactly fiscally healthy grad student. I'm very aware of how much it'll cost to payback educational loans, start a family and mortgage, save up for kids' college funds and my own retirement, but I am really not anywhere near being able to do any of that, having been in school since 1998 (at least college was free). I also have that great immigrant experience of growing up poor and actually remembering what it's like to be hungry and paying for things with food stamps, so I have a sort of Scarlett O'Hara defiance of "as God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"

I love all of your suggestions for blogging towards a theory of thrift. Here are some of my own:

Further to Phoebe's suggestion on the gendered aspect of thrift, what are the relational aspects? There has been much written on the hoaxy DABA girls, the actually true Seeking Arrangements sugar daddies/babies ickiness, gold digging, and how the recession has affected dating, all by the NYT. I myself have blogged on my feminist cognitive dissonance on being partnered with someone with A Real Job, such that I go to great lengths to redefine to myself and my relationship the idea of "contribution," such that we can be co-equal partners in this joint enterprise of love, which if you spend every day together, involves a lot of eating and the occasional movie and ball game or concert. Historically, women have been the home economists, managing the money and household as the husbands provided. As some of my research is on work/life balance and gender in the workplace and society, I'm quite interested in how we navigate these personal and social questions. In fact, one of my future posts will be on how incredibly neurotic and calculating I have been, such that I was bargaining to myself whether I should feel guilty about ordering the $1 more expensive carne asada burrito, when I could have ordered chicken. I am still neurotic, but I have stopped keeping a ledger of how much I probably owe, and how many batches of cookies that would translate to.

I am also interested in another potentially gendered aspect of thrift: the time value of money. In theory, it can be cheaper to make than buy, but not always. And as Hanna Rosin cogently argued, breast-feeding is "free" only if you don't value a woman's time, in terms of lost income, lost hours, and lost sleep. Let us not underestimate what we spend in time and energy when we try to save money. What do we do to save money, how are those activities gendered or not, and are our behaviors actually economically rational? Beause I spent two hours yesterday making a pan of lemon bars that ended disastrously, I wanted to weep over the cost of the lost ingredients: two cups of flour, two cups of sugar, 1.5 sticks of butter, eight eggs and six lemons, which probably equalled $7. I did this so that I could indulge my hobby of baking, bring something nice and homemade to a party, and not buy a $30 bottle of wine. Instead, I lost $7 in ingredients, but more than that, 2 hours of time and if I calculate my hourly rate at even the least generous pay rate provided by my university for a nominal academic job, I lost a lot more. Had it worked out, I would not have minded losing that time, because again, it was in pursuit of an avocation. But when avocations go awry, we can't help but to compare the lost time it means to our vocation, and what else we could be doing with our time--and money. And when we consider the other thankless tasks upon which we spend our time--cooking, cleaning, child care--and how such tasks are still to this day disproportionately gendered, what do we really save when we try to do everything ourselves? When is it more econoimcally rational to buy than make? When is it more economically rational to pay someone to do this task than to do it ourselves? Add a further level of neurosis by considering how outsourcing any of these tasks might preserve the gender imbalance in most households by putting the burdens on a wife-for-hire (i.e. a housekeeper).

Finally, I would like to consider other moral and ethical considerations in spending, further to Rita's point that cheap clothes don't necessarily mean that you're saving money in the long run, and probably entail costs in the form of supporting bad labor practices, adding more to landfills since the clothes are basically disposable, etc. Should we follow Peter Singer's applied ethics model and make every economic decision a moral one? Warning: this may quickly result in cheapness fatigue (much like green fatigue) and a feeling of despair that it is easier to do nothing than everything, if those are the only two choices.

Looking forward to our conversations and shared stories!

Cheapness as virtue or neurosis?

2009-06-04T13:08:00.004-04:00

Thanks, Rita, for getting things started!

In terms of cheapness tips, I promise to refrain, whenever possible, from pointing out how much money can be saved through restricting your shopping to Uniqlo, Sahadi's, and a certain fruit stand on Court and Pacific in Cobble Hill. Even though that, plus 99-cent bags of Whole Foods pasta, more or less defines my own cheapness as it manifests itself on a day-to-day-basis.

I second all Rita's suggestions for what this blog should cover. Some other possibilities, in no particular order:

-Where Cheapness Studies meets Gender Studies: does male influence inhibit shopping? Think 'I Love Lucy' and the never-ending stream of new hats that must be hidden from Ricky. Do men spend as much, but on different things (flat-screens, steaks, whatever else stereotype would have it), or is it just easier to be cheap as a man?

-Does the stereotype of Jews being cheap push Jews towards ostentatious indifference to money/generosity in public settings/on dates, etc.? To add a gendered analysis: does the stereotype of Jewish women as spending heaps of (their father's/husband's) money on personal upkeep cause Jewish women who fancy themselves (ourselves) not JAPs to be particularly thrifty when it comes to beauty routines, not only eschewing professional manicures (and in some extreme cases, professional haircuts), but doing so, on some level, to make a point? Insert applicable comparable cases (immigrants, as Rita suggests; the Dutch) as needed.

-And finally, what do we think of Michael Pollan's suggestion that we ('we' as in slop-eating Americans) start spending a greater proportion of our incomes on food? Should we be like the French, who of course spend 1,000 euros a head per day on breakfast alone?

Rita's question, "what am I saving for?" is a tough one. I tend to think saving is basically like dieting - we should all watch what we eat and spend, but taken too far, whether what's counted are calories or pennies, things can get messy. Also, as with dieting, sometimes what matters is less the results (more money, less top-of-the-jeans bulge) and more the sense of virtuousness refusing whatever it is you want can provide. While I seem to have long since grown out of the calorie concern, I do tend to be a fan of not spending any money, ever (although I agree with Rita on the gift/going-out-within-reason exception). Either way, the $6-but-tiny chocolate-domed pastries at (pardon the NYC-specific reference) Bouley Market are, most of the time, at least, out-of-bounds. The $2.75 cannelles at Joyce, however, will be my financial downfall.

The telos of saving

2009-06-04T10:27:00.003-04:00

First, on an introductory and mission statementy note, we have not actually discussed what this blog is going to cover, aside from Phoebe's general suggestion that it should be about "how not to spend any money, ever." That's a pretty good starting point, since that is my only slightly exaggerated view of the purpose of financial management.

However, since a lot of the everyday ways not to spend money are geographically contingent--the rock-bottom cocktail prices during happy hour at this bar, or the strawberries at that ethnic market--and we all live far away from each other, I propose we keep the money-saving discoveries general, or at least generally applicable to our specific bourgie lives in America's most expensive cities. This means no promoting Uniqlo because, from Phoebe's descriptions, I'd be practically living in it if only they had a location in DC. But we might ponder whether discount store clothes are worth it, or actually cost more in angst (bad fit, rapid disintegration and replacement, poorly paid labor) than is indicated by their price.

I would also be in favor of blogging about broader cultural thriftiness (or spendthriftiness) and ideas about value and savings. Why does finding a bargain feel like a brilliant victory over the world that must be shared with anyone willing to listen? Why do people like Ed Andrews get subprime mortgages? Is thrift moral? Are poor people not thrifty, or are we unfairly castigating their spending habits? Are immigrants super-thrifty, or do they just have insider information that people outside the ethnic clan can't get?

My first question, however, is the one I posted at my blog: putting aside ambiguities about how best to save and assuming that thrift is good, what am I saving for? In the abstract, I am saving for 1) emergencies, 2) a hypothetical future family, and 3) a possibly insane feeling of satisfaction I get when I look at my balance in Mint (which, apropos of the blog's purpose to suggest ways to save, is absolutely the best free money management application ever). None of these purposes lend themselves to determining how much money I need to be saving though. The answer to that question by all these standards is just "more"--more in case of emergencies, more for my hypothetical future family, more for my insane ledger-lust. But this can only result in my feeling guilty over every single expenditure, since it could have contributed to the pile of "more."

So what I would like the unified theory of thrift to eventually address is not only the morality of saving, but also how to decide when and how much it's ok to spend. So far, the only suggestion I have come up with is that it's almost always ok to spend on gifts for other people (unless you agree with this view of gift-giving), and on time out with other people (unless it results in a $100 bar tab). So even my tentative hypotheses suffer from a lack of concrete boundaries.