The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [119]
That’s why we tend to spend more extravagantly on Stuff that is visible compared to Stuff we consume in private. Economist Juliet Schor has identified the house, car, and wardrobe as the “visible triangle.” We spend less on Stuff others don’t see. For example, the popularity of health clubs, Schor says, contributed to the creation of designer underwear. And women spend far more on lipstick—which is applied and worn in public—than on facial cleanser, which seldom leaves the bathroom.73
This phenomenon is based in large part on social comparisons. Schor, along with other economists, has documented how our sense of wealth and material well-being is relative; that is, it has to do with how much Stuff we have compared to other people. So, if we’re hanging around a bunch of ostentatious spenders, we feel poor. If we’re hanging around with people who are lower than us on the economic ladder, we feel rich. The saying “keeping up with the Joneses,” inspired by a comic strip from the early twentieth century, refers to our tendency to compare our material well-being with our neighbors’. Back then, we were most likely to compare our living room furniture with that of our neighbors and families, because there weren’t other people around to be our yardsticks. But that all changed with television.
In 1950, only 5 percent of U.S. households had televisions. A decade later, 95 percent of U.S. households had them.74 On average, American homes now have more television sets than people. In 2008, the average American watched an all-time high of about five hours of TV a day, or 151 hours a month, up 3.6 percent from the 145 or so hours Americans reportedly watched the previous year.75 In The Overspent American, Juliet Schor explains the link between TV viewing and consumer spending and debt; each additional five hours of television watched per week led to an additional thousand dollars of spending per year.76
Each of us in the United States is bombarded with up to three thousand commercial messages a day, including TV ads, billboards, product placements, packaging, and more—but it’s not just the actual commercials, it’s the images promoted in shows and movies too, big time. On TV shows, people are disproportionately rich, thin, and fashionable. So all of a sudden, rather than comparing ourselves to the Joneses in the house next door, we are comparing ourselves to millionaires and celebrities. That’s why the more television people watch, the more they overestimate how wealthy everyone else is, making them feel poorer by comparison.77 What peer pressure! Not only do my clothes and house and car have to be on par with my colleagues and the other parents at my kid’s school, but now also with the lavish lifestyles of Jennifer Aniston and Beyoncé. Juliet Schor calls this phenomenon the “vertical expansion of our reference group.”78
As soon as I read about that concept in Schor’s The Overspent American, I remembered countless times when I had fallen into that trap myself. For many years, my work required a lot of international travel. I noticed that wearing the exact same outfit could make me feel stylish and good in Dhaka but shabby and outdated in Paris. I live in Berkeley where, fortunately, there’s not a lot of fashion pressure. I wear my flip-flops or clogs most days and am just fine, reassured by the fact that a good number of the people I pass are wearing the same. But for years, every time I’d go to Manhattan, I’d see women with gorgeous designer shoes everywhere. I’d just have to buy a new pair of shoes even though—believe me—I really do not need any more shoes. It was irresistible. They have such good shoes there and they are for sale on almost every corner. Then I read Schor’s book. In my experience, a powerful way to free oneself from an unhealthy dynamic