Extract from Rachel Sherman's Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence
“Regardless
of their struggles, almost all my respondents described becoming
acclimated over time to making more expensive consumer choices.
Maya
said that she would not spend $1,000 on a dress, but added that:
“I
didn't want to be one of those rich people that just spends money
without thinking about it. But I will say that there was a period
where my thinking about what was reasonable became very different
than it was, like, you know, in 1992. So,
over the span of ten years, what I [had] considered a luxury or
extravagant or whatever didn't seem as extravagant.”
Eliana,
who's inherited wealth totaled about $9 million and who believed
deeply in economic and racial justice, said she felt like a
hypocrite, because:
“I
don't think I fully live out all my values, I guess I would say. I
used to say I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first
massage.”
Beatrice identified this phenomenon as “luxury creep”:
“Well, there's definitely been luxury creep in my life. I just feel comfortable spending more money on more things. There's luxury creep within categories that look like necessities. So, like, I spend more and more money on clothes...We spend a lot of money on wine...We've recently had a big leap in the amount of money that we spend on bottles of wine, like fifteen or twenty-five dollars. So we would have bought wine before, and considered it, like, a life necessity, but it's the luxury creep aspect of it that's changed.”
Beatrice went on to associate luxury creep with her peer group, saying, “It's a very insidious thing, you know, because it's much less conscious than like, 'keeping up with the Joneses' kind of conspicuous consumption, that competitive consumption thing. It's really about this like – I mean for me, it's just like this vague sense of what's normal.”
Beatrice identified this phenomenon as “luxury creep”:
“Well, there's definitely been luxury creep in my life. I just feel comfortable spending more money on more things. There's luxury creep within categories that look like necessities. So, like, I spend more and more money on clothes...We spend a lot of money on wine...We've recently had a big leap in the amount of money that we spend on bottles of wine, like fifteen or twenty-five dollars. So we would have bought wine before, and considered it, like, a life necessity, but it's the luxury creep aspect of it that's changed.”
Beatrice went on to associate luxury creep with her peer group, saying, “It's a very insidious thing, you know, because it's much less conscious than like, 'keeping up with the Joneses' kind of conspicuous consumption, that competitive consumption thing. It's really about this like – I mean for me, it's just like this vague sense of what's normal.”
Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Sherman_(sociologist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Sherman_(sociologist)
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