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>> Thanks, everyone, for coming. I'm really excited to introduce our speaker
this afternoon, Lauren Weber, author of, "In Cheap We Trust: The story of a misunderstood
American virtue.” It seems like this book couldn't have come
at a better time, as the recession has caused Americans to reconsider their tendency to
consume rather than save -- to enlarge their debts instead of tightening the belt.
Lauren begins her book talking about a different kind of American -- her father -- who kept
their Connecticut home at 50 degrees during winters, used hand signals instead of turn
signals on their car, and taught his children how to ration toilet paper, although this
last idea didn't really work out. Lauren writes that she resented this at first,
but came to understand the virtues her father had passed down to her.
Last month, she told the New York Times, "I like the word 'cheap'. I embrace it.
To me, it really means self-determination and freedom."
Lauren was a staff reporter at Reuters and Newsday, and has written for the New York
Times and the Los Angeles Times. She currently lives in New York City.
And I got to say, she really practices what she preaches.
Despite not being a local, Lauren used BART and Caltrain to get here from the East Bay.
So, no fancy car for her. After Lauren talks and reads from the book
a little bit, please feel free to come up to the mic -- there's one mic I believe --
and ask her questions. So please give a warm welcome to Lauren Weber.
>> [Clapping]
Lauren Weber: Thank you. And thanks Katie for introducing me and for inviting me.
I was telling her when my publicist sent along the e-mail inviting me to come to Google,
I was like, "Oh, my God, I feel like I've made it.”
So, some of you probably do too for being able to work here and eat that food every
day. When I told friends I was coming, they all
said, "Can you eat in the cafeteria?” And I will report back that I did.
So, thanks again for having me. I sense from the composition of the audience
that cheapness is a topic that resonates more for men than for women maybe.
[laughter] And I was also telling Katie that, after some of the media stuff that I've done,
including the New York Times -- the interview with the Frugal Traveler Blog of the New York
Times -- I have gotten a few, very random e-mails from men proposing to me.
[laughter] And usually they say -- there have been three marriage proposals I think --
and usually they say, "Women keep breaking up with me, because they call me too cheap.”
So, they seem to hope that I could, you know, embrace that part of them.
So I'm always happy to report, to tell them that I actually do have a boyfriend, and he's
even cheaper than me. He can't pass a dumpster without climbing
into it. So, yeah. I met him when I interviewed him
for the book. You know, we're pretty well-matched.
Katie mentioned my dad -- and this is actually the first audience that I've spoken to that
didn't include at least one person who knew my father -- and my dad did in fact, keep
the heat at 50 degrees when I was growing up in Connecticut.
He is an economist. He taught economics for 40 years at the Coast
Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. And so, he's an economist in every sense of
the word -- professionally, and then, in the fact that he economizes on everything.
He did keep the heat at 50 degrees, and I would do my homework at the kitchen table
wearing hats and scarves and with my hands on the stove after dinner to try to keep warm.
He tried to ration our family's toilet paper, which fortunately, he couldn't figure out
a way to monitor it. So this was long before webcams.
[laughter] And so, he fortunately gave up on that one.
He does, in fact, use hand signals out the window of the car rather than using his turning
signal, because I think he thinks this way, he preserves the bulb in the light on the
car. He also insisted on washing all of our dishes
by hand and he didn't use soap. He used cold water and no soap.
And eventually we figured this out and realized this was why the knives and forks were usually
encrusted with food. You know, my dad is -- you could call him
'compulsively cheap'. So I grew up my whole life trying to figure
him out. And, like Katie said, I also complained bitterly
about it. My mother did too.
In fact, while I was working on the book, I interviewed both my parents, and I asked
my mom, "How did you manage to coexist for so long with Dad?”
They're still married 44 years later. And she said, "I should have divorced him
a long time ago.” And it turned out they had had an argument
about something else that morning. So that's partly why there was a lot of acrimony
there. But she said, "Don't tell that story.
Tell the story of how I once packed all three of you up," -- I have a brother and a sister
-- "and threatened to take you all to a motel, because the house was so cold.”
And apparently, she did get us all to get our homework into our bags and packed some
clothes for school the next day. And I think my dad at that point realized
that the hotel would be more expensive; and so, the heat went up.
I did complain about this much of my childhood. And then, when I got older -- and especially
as I started to support myself -- I realized that A, I had kind of involuntarily turned
into my father. When I moved to Seattle, I moved in with my
boyfriend there, and I wouldn't let him turn the heat above sixty degrees.
So I was not quite as extreme, but I was still a bit of a fascist about the heat.
And I also found myself, you know, walking 30 blocks to save two dollars on the subway
when I moved to New York. And doing all kinds of weird things to save
money. I realized I had kind of turned into my father.
And I also strangely realized that I appreciated what he had taught me.
He had given me some important lessons on how to live within my means and on the value
of doing that. And when I was able to sort of take a step
back from it, I also was able to appreciate the fact that he is one of the most generous
people I have ever known. He gives a lot of money to charity as well
as time. He's always volunteering for a lot of different
organizations he believes in. So, he gives money to anybody who needs it.
I think he has a real sense of his own good fortune in life.
And he also sent three kids to very expensive, private universities and never uttered a word
of complaint. And, you know, what I came to realize over
time was that my dad wasn't just cheap in a crazy way.
He actually really had his priorities in order and knew what was important to him.
And that he may have like gotten crazy if you were in the shower for more than three
minutes. There would always be a knock on the door.
But, you know, he really knew what his values were.
And I started to really respect that about him.
And also feel grateful that he taught me how to live within my means.
So that's kind of the personal angle to the story.
And then the other angle is that I'm a business reporter by training -- and I worked for Reuters
for a few years and then for Newsday, the paper for Long Island -- and I was really
interested in the macroeconomics of these issues of spending and saving.
I wanted to understand what it meant that Americans had such a low savings rate, which
in the last decade or so has been around two percent.
In 2005, it actually dipped into negative territory for the first time since the Great
Depression, which means Americans were spending more than we were earning.
So I wanted to understand what that meant, what it meant that Americans had so much debt.
We lived in what another historian has called, "The age of leverage."
And, you know, what the implications of all that were.
So I kind of brought both the personal side and my professional interest to writing the
book. So that's kind of like the background for
why it resonated so much for me. And then, the moment when the idea for the
book actually came to me, I was sitting on the subway underneath Brooklyn.
I live in Queens. So I was on the G Train. Anybody here who's a New Yorker knows --
it goes between Brooklyn and Queens. And I was reading another book.
It's called "The Progress Paradox," by Gregg Easterbrook.
It's not a well-known book, but I had seen it and was interested, because it basically
asks a question, "Why if America is the most affluent nation that's ever existed, Why are
there such high levels of depression and anxiety and unhappiness here?”
And there wasn't anything in particular in the book that sparked this question, but I
suddenly looked up and thought to myself, "What happened to thrift in America?”
It seemed to me that maybe was some connection between this hypermaterialistic culture that
we live in and these very high rates of unhappiness and depression.
So that became kind of the animating question of the book was, "What happened to thrift
in America?” You know, it used to be an important American
value. And it's a part of our national mythology
of who we are and who we were. Ben Franklin and all that.
-- Did this just go off? Is it still on? Can everybody still hear me? Okay.
Yeah something just happened to the sound. Is it back on? Okay. I think it's back on.
-- So yeah. This was once an important American value and it seemed that it was no longer
a part of our sense of who we are today. So the book has a lot of history in it and
about two-thirds of it is history. And it sort of follows this question of, "What
happened to thrift in America?” And I kind of came up with two different and
almost contradictory answers. One part of that is, On some level we actually
were never a thrifty nation to begin with. It's a myth that we've sustained about ourselves
for a long time. For most of our history, Americans were frugal
because they had to be. It was a question of necessity much more than
choice. You know, the economy was terribly unregulated.
It's all based on booms and busts for much of the 1700s and 1800s.
And so, people had no choice but to live extremely cheaply.
And this was a time also when any dress you wore was something that you had stayed up
until 11 o'clock stitching by candlelight, or any quart of firewood that you burned was
wood that you yourself had gone out and cut down.
So people also had a really great appreciation for the value of the things in their lives.
Now, we live in a world where we sit on chairs. We have no idea where they came from, or who
made them. Most of us eat food that we have no idea where
it came from. Maybe not here at Google but.
And you know, so back in those days, people were deeply connected to the resources that
they used, and they had no money. So as a result, they were probably what we
would consider 'frugal' today, very resourceful, very
-- oh, it just went off again I think. There it is. --
-- very resourceful, very prudent and cautious about spending.
But, if you look at it in history, any time Americans had more, that their incomes went
up, or had more access to credit -- and that was often really the key to it -- they spent.
So, you know, I often say, "Thrift was a virtue Americans couldn't wait to relinquish.”
Whether it was installment plans in the 1850's to buy a sewing machine, or the first credit
cards in the 1950's. As soon as Americans had greater access to
cheap money, they took advantage of it. And you know, as much as we like to think
of ourselves as having been frugal back then, often again, it was economic necessity and
sometimes political necessity. So like, during the American Revolution, there
were a lot of boycots of British products. And you know, this is where we get the tea
party from -- the Boston tea party. And there was, what I would call, "conspicuous
frugality" going on back then. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams,
all those guys were trying to get Americans to stop buying imported goods.
And, you know, townspeople would get up together and sign petitions saying that they would
never drink British tea. They called it "poison.”
They would say that they would only wear homespun -- which was coarse textiles made in America
-- rather than silks and linens from Britain and all that.
As soon as the Revolution ended, all of that well-meaning frugality sort of went out the
window, and suddenly everybody wanted Rococo furniture from France and these British ideals
of gentility where flirting was practiced as an art and everybody wanted to have a parlor
with a piano and a tea set -- were very popular. So thrift has been a virtue Americans have
sort of taken on when it's convenient and jettisoned when it was no longer necessary.
So that was one of my answers was, We were never a particularly thrifty nation.
You know, that it was not necessarily -- it was often more of a virtue that Americans
admired than aspired to. And then, the other answer -- which may seem
a little bit contradictory -- is that, we were kind of frugal in the sense that thrift
was something that we admired, but then around the middle of the 20th century, we really
developed into a consumer society and this was not just something that happened accidentally.
It was practically an orchestrated effort after World War II.
World War II -- along with being a military effort -- was also a gigantic stimulus plan.
And after the Depression, it was the war that put people back to work and created a lot
of need for factories and for production and manufacturing and stuff like that.
And even before the war ended, there were a lot of economists and politicians who were
very concerned that, once the war was over, there would be no engine for the economy.
They were really worried that we would plunge back into a Depression -- which was a very
reasonable concern. It was a traumatic event for many Americans.
So, in the early 40's, you start to sort of get this groundswell of public propaganda
about how, "Once the war's over, we got to start buying.
Now, we're using all of our metal for shrapnel -- for bullets and stuff -- after the war
is over, it's going to be for a dishwashers.” And advertisers used that kind of language
too. In fact, I think it's not a coincidence that
Scrooge McDuck -- who is Donald Duck's miserly uncle -- appears in 1947.
And I sort of date that as around the time that frugality went from being a virtue and
something that we looked up to and championed to being sort of a punch line.
It now became funny when people saved money. They were miserly rather than frugal.
It was no longer a virtue, it was an insult -- a punch line, an eccentricity, or a quirk.
And, you know, it was all over the culture. Brides Magazine did a story in -- I think
it was the late 40's -- saying that newlyweds should outfit their homes with brand name
goods, not only because it would make their houses look better, but because it would keep
Americans at work. This idea that it was patriotic to spend and
that it was your civic duty to be a consumer became very widespread.
And it's something that I think Americans have really, deeply internalized.
And when I was a reporter at Newsday, I covered retail for a few years, so I was always like
ambushing shoppers in the middle of their Christmas shopping and like jumping out from
behind racks of clothes to ask them like, what they were buying and why.
And I can't even count the number of times that people would sort of sheepishly laugh
and tell me they were doing their part to help the American economy.
It's just an idea that we've now taken in deeply.
So it was interesting to me to sort of track the history of that.
I'm going to read a couple of -- and one thing I also want to add is that -- when I started
working on the book, a friend of mine said that I should call it, "Thrift: A short history
of a dying virtue.” And the more that I talked to people, the
more convinced I was that it wasn't dying at all.
In fact, it was alive and well. And there are still thousands -- and probably
millions -- of people living frugally by choice. And you know, because everybody I talked to
would say, "Oh, you've got to interview my mother.”
Or "my brother", or "my boss". Or "my daughter". Or "my husband", often.
And, you know, it was clear that there are lots and lots of people living this way.
So my feeling is that thrift is alive and well, it just kind of went underground at
a certain point. Like I said, I sort of date that to that postwar
period when we started getting the message that we needed to keep shopping, otherwise
we weren't good Americans. And of course, September 11th was sort of
the apogee of that idea when both Rudy Guiliani and George Bush and countless others got up
and told Americans to go out and spend. It was the exact opposite message that Americans
received in World War II, where the whole idea was to sacrifice.
So, I'm going to read a little bit from one of my historical chapters, and then read a
little bit from one of the later chapters. This chapter was one of my favorites to write.
It's called "Cheap Jews and Thrifty Chinese.” It's all about the ethnic stereotypes of cheapness.
And my family's Jewish, and I always felt that part of the way that people looked at
my father -- as kind of an eccentric and a nut and totally cheap -- had something to
do with him being Jewish. That there was a particular way of combining
those two qualities in him -- the cheapness and the Jewishness.
So this was a really fun chapter to research and then put together.
And so I'll just read the first couple of pages of it.
[reading] In 1885, a theater group in New York debuted a new comic play by Frank Eugene
Chase called, 'A Ready-Made Suit.' The play revolved around a woman who's charged with
polygamy after marrying nine men in quick succession.
During her trial, two Jews described as 'eminent jobbers in secondhand clothes', appear in
court to testify. As one of them explains to the jury, they
both married the defendant on the same day, because quote, [in a thick accent] "He thinks
if we can get one wife between us, that will be less expensive.”
The crowd no doubt roared in appreciation of the joke.
They certainly would have understood the subtext. By this time, the image of the stingy, grasping
Jewish merchant or pawnbroker was a familiar one in American popular culture -- a staple
of dime novels, variety shows, humor magazines, and newspaper editorials.
It's one that remains with us today, hardly dulled by age or political correctness.
For instance, there's the popular joke about how Moses received the Ten Commandments from
God. One day God appears to a Babylonian and says,
"I have a commandment. I'd like to give it to you.”
The Babylonian says, "What is it?” And God says, "Thou shalt not steal.”
The Babylonian says, "No, thanks.” So God goes over to an Egyptian and offers
him the same deal. When the Egyptian hears what the commandment
is, he also turns it down. Then God meets Moses and says, "I have a commandment
for you.” Moses says, "How much is it going to cost
me?” "Nothing," says God.
"Fine" says Moses, "I'll take ten.” [laughter] It's funny.
There are countless variations on the theme. Why did the Jews wander in the desert for
40 years? Because one of them dropped a nickel.
What's a Jewish dilemma? Free pork. I think they're funny.
Jews aren't the only ethnic group to have been branded with the Scarlet Letter, C.
Go back in history and you'll find a glut of accusations -- often muffled in humor,
sometimes loosed with open contempt -- by one group that its neighbors or adversaries
are cheap or miserly or obsessed with money and accumulation.
The English viewed the Scots as hopeless cheapskates, while the Irish were written off as drunks
and spendthrifts. The Dutch have a long reputation for being
tight with cash. Ben Franklin himself popularized the rhyme,
"The thrifty maxim of the wary Dutch is to save all the money they can touch.”
In America, Yankees -- members of old families of New England -- were both admired and reviled
for their legendary thrift. Scandinavians, Germans, and Japanese were
tagged as parsimonious by American writers. And Westerners used up a great deal of ink
describing the frugal ways of Chinese living in China and abroad.
Why have so many ethnic and national groups been cast in the role of the world's tightwads?
The late Harvard psychologist, Gordon Allport once said that "Stereotypes are projection
screens for modern man's anxieties," and this one is no different.
The stereotypes of cheap Jews and thrifty Chinese -- two of the most enduring examples,
and the ones I explore in this chapter -- reveal more about the people broadcasting
them than they do about the real lives and practices of Jews and Chinese people.
They tell us about the social, political and economic worries that vexed Americans as they
commiserated over a lost job with friends or headed off to the mines for work, or spent
their week's earnings at the grocery store. And they tell us about the complicated emotions
that hovered under the surface in a free market economy of winners and losers.
Emotions like envy, resentment, admiration, fear, and -- perhaps most of all -- ambivalence.
Ambivalence about the promises of equality and opportunity and meritocracy that were
advertised as the American dream. These emotions bobbed up and fixed themselves
to the waves of immigrants who came to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Native-born Americans watched Jews and Chinese gain a fragile, economic foothold in their
adopted country and interpreted that success as a threat to their own property and job
opportunities. And then, I kind of go on to detail where
both of those two stereotypes kind of originated from -- which for Jews, it had a lot to do
with being closed out of other fields, like glass-blowing and metalwork in the Middle
Ages, and being forced into jobs like being bankers and lenders, because Christians were
forbidden to do that. And so, that was sort of the origins of the
Shylock stereotype. And then, I kind of traced Shylock as he comes
to America and gets expressed in a variety of ways here.
And then, with the Chinese -- the thrifty Chinese -- a lot of it had to do with the
Gold Rush, and the waves of immigrants that came from China to America and had no families
here to support and often could live on lower incomes than a lot of the white and native-born
workers. So there are a lot of -- there is an amazing
amount of propaganda out there in the 1800s about how Chinese people eat rats and mice
and live on rice. Americans couldn't get the whole like --
that there was no giant slab of meat and potatoes and stuff like that.
So there was a lot of talk about Chinese people eating rats and dogs and stuff like that,
and basically like, living on lower incomes or living on less -- sort of 'cheap Chinese
labor' idea. But these stereotypes are incredibly potent,
and like I said, I think they stay with us today.
Now, I have never quite been able to square the historical development of the stereotypes
with the relatives of mine who embody them so perfectly.
Like my 90-year-old aunt who can't leave a restaurant without her bag being full of bread
or bread sticks or something like that. I'm going to try not to do that.
I'm, of course, tempted to put a lot of your food into my bag, but I'm not going to.
So the first two-thirds of the book or so is historical and some of it is really chronological
and some of it is more thematic, like that chapter I just read from.
And then, the last third of the book looks more at the contemporary issues of cheapness,
you could say. One of them really goes into the economics.
Like I said, I was really interested in what it means that we have such a low savings rate
in this country, and you know, what the effects from that are.
And I think we're now seeing the effects of that -- so many people over-leveraged themselves
in the last few years, partly because the money was free or it was cheap and easy.
And partly because we just happen -- there are many reasons to explain our low savings
rate. And in fact, in one interview, a TV interviewer
said to me, "Aren't Americans just fat and lazy?”
I actually don't buy that idea. Yes, I think probably many people could benefit
from a little more restraint and self-discipline. But there is a whole context for why Americans
got into so much trouble, and part of that had to do with the fact that politicians deregulated
the financial services industry in the 80's and 90's.
That allowed banks to go through these massive mergers and take on more risk and develop
these, you know, exotic new products like securetizing mortgages and stuff like that.
Anyway, it all led to just a complete bubble of cheap credit being out there.
Meanwhile, we had a political administration that refused to provide any meaningful oversight
of this system. And two Fed chairmen who ignored any signs
that we were in the midst of a historical bubble.
And so, that's partly how we end up in the situation that we find ourselves in today.
It's not just about Americans buying too many flat screen TVs and lattes.
You know, I think there's a greater context for it.
And in many ways, ordinary people were just taking their cues from bankers and politicians
who didn't want the party to end. So I do not think Americans are lazy, profligate
pigs. Even though some people -- this particular
interviewer -- seemed to think that. I have another chapter on the synthesis between
cheapness and the environment. And sort of, using fewer resources and why
people like my dad were green before it became popular to be green.
Although, he now sheepishly says that he had no idea that there was any other benefit besides
saving money to all of his compulsive turning off of lights and stuff.
Another chapter goes into the psychology of cheapness.
People seem to really like that one, because I think we all are trying to understand ourselves
and the people around us. And the origin of that chapter came when I
asked my great aunt -- my father's aunt -- who's a psychologist.
I said to her one day, "Why is Dad so cheap?” And she said, "Well, Freud would say it has
something to do with unresolved potty training issues." [laughter]
And I said, "That's ridiculous.” And she said, "Well, it's all about what you
hold onto and what you let go of." [laughter] And I was like, "That makes sense.” You
know? So that kind of became the basis for that
chapter. And then, I looked at, not only what Freud
and other psychologists said, but also behavioral economists, who had some really interesting
-- one of my favorites was somebody told me that, "For cheap people, the future just
feels closer. Whereas for people who are more 'spendy' they
feel that the future is further away.” And that made a lot of sense to me.
And I think it explains part of the way I think, you know, when you're cheap, a lot
of it is an anxiety about what might happen next.
And there's sort of planning for catastrophes. And so, I think saving money has a lot to
do with creating some form of security in the form of a nest egg or something like that.
But the chapter I'm going to read from is called, "Living cheap in the age of mass consumption.”
Like I said, when I talked about the topic with strangers, I'd have so many people saying,
"Oh, you know, you've got to talk to so and so.”
Or "Interview me.” And it became clear that lots of people were
living cheaply. And so, I wanted, in this chapter, to investigate
some of the ways that people are living frugally in today's America in the age of mass consumption.
And so, I followed two groups, and then, one individual person.
The two groups were -- one was "The Compacters". I don't know how many people here are familiar
with The Compact. It was kind of a movement that started in
San Francisco in 2005 with eight friends who just decided for a year they weren't going
to buy anything new. They would buy food, they would buy medicine,
but they wouldn't buy clothes or cars or anything that was new.
They could shop at thrift stores. And it led to like, a lot of sharing of stuff,
you know, borrowing tools from each other. And it became kind of a big, community-building
exercise. And some of them have continued on -- you
know, four years later -- living this way. But, when they started out, a reporter from
the San Francisco Chronical wrote a story about them.
And they got hundreds of e-mails and calls from people who wanted to join their movement,
you know? And there was no movement; it was just eight
friends who decided to do this. And it showed them that, like I said, there
are so many people who either were already living this way or were craving an opportunity
to find an alternative to a consumer society that seemed to be sort of going off the rails.
So, I did sort of an in-depth interview with one of their founders and wrote about that.
And then, I also spent a lot of time in New York with freegans.
Are people here familiar with freegans? I don't know if you kind of use the same word
out here, but they're basically a band of anticapitalist, anarchist, dumpster divers.
And they're people who try to live outside of the money economy, they say.
They dumpster dive for their food; they squat rather than pay rent or, you know, own homes.
They walk or bike everywhere rather than pay for transportation.
They generally don't have jobs, although some of them do.
There are varying degrees of it. But I went out on a lot of trash tours, which
is how they introduce new people to freegan ideology -- basically dumpster diving through
New York City. There are no dumpsters in New York -- very
few. So it basically means like sidewalk, trashpiles
of supermarkets. You know, I thought I had been thinking about
waste and excess and cheapness for a long time.
So I thought I was prepared for what I saw. But I was shocked by how much perfectly good
stuff we cavalierly throw away in this culture. We would open supermarket garbage bags and
find sealed bags of potato chips that hadn't reached their sell-by date or anything like
that -- along with a lot of spoiled produce and stuff like that.
You have to be pretty selective. This is why many of them are also vegan, so
that you don't end up eating dairy or meat or something that could actually be dangerous
for you. So, you know, that was really shocking and
appalling to me. And it changed the way I thought about what
we throw out in this culture and how much of a disposable society this is.
And then, so there were the freegans. Those were kind of the two movements I looked
at. But then, I was really interested in people
who are just living this way on their own. And so, the last person that I wrote about
-- and this is the section I'm going to read -- is one of those people.
[reading] For every person who identifies with a political or communal form of anticonsumerrism,
there are dozens more who are solo operators. A common thread runs through the stories of
these underspenders. There are people who -- in the time vs. money
equation into which so much modern life can be distilled -- choose time.
Helena Show dropped out of a well-remunerated career in San Francisco in the mid 1990's.
Her work as a software analyst was making her sick.
She was skinny and depressed, beset by headaches. She arranged to take a sabbatical and travel
around Europe. When her three months were up, she stopped
by her parent's house, sat them down and said, "I don't want to alarm you, but I'm never
going to have a career again.” Helena landed in New Orleans, a good place
for marginal living. "I liked being here, where people talk about
everything except shopping and what they do for a living," she said.
And I got the general knowledge that there was a large population of people living on
the cheap. From them and from trial and error, she learned
how to get by on less and less. She found a job taking tickets at a movie
theater, and late at night, wove through the city streets with a garbage bag full of leftover
popcorn balanced on her handle bars. That became dinner on some nights.
Later on, she moved into an old school bus that sat in a friend's backyard in the Lower
Ninth Ward. She slept there for a year, paying about $60
a month and sharing the bathroom, kitchen, and living room in the main house.
She made her own food, listened to music at bars with no cover charge, and splurged on
a beer when she wanted to. Now, she lives in a row of five houses whose
occupants have an informal, cooperative living arrangement.
It's called "the chuck farm.” They share an enormous backyard where many
of them raise food, and there's a communal washing machine and dryer to which they all
contribute money. "There is an art to this set of skills," Helena
said of cheap living. We don't often think of it that way.
We're more apt to view choices like the ones Helena has made as quirks or eccentricities.
But she's right. It takes planning, thoughtfulness, and working
knowledge to live cheaply. We learn a lot of those skills from the people
around us. Helena picked up some of her values when she
decamped for France after high school and lived with a single woman and her three children.
The woman worked in a grocery store and brought home all of the shop's bruised vegetables
from which she cocted amazing meals. From her, Helena saw the possibilities for
converting refuse into gold and gleaned the value of a freezer.
Now, she freezes the excess butter and milk she buys when they're on sale, and makes stocks
and pasta sauces in bulk when the ingredients are cheap.
All of these activities take time. It's what economists call 'household production'
-- the idea that we can spend time rather than money to meet our needs.
Thrifty people are inclined to prefer the former when they can.
And in exchange for her labor and her assiduous attention to resources, someone like Helena
has more autonomy in her life than most people. She now works a couple of days a week at a
store in the French Quarter, sometimes fills in, in an art gallery, and does some gardening
work for her landlord. But aside from those paying gigs, her time
is her own. "I wanted to not be a prisoner of my own existence,"
she said. "I realized pretty early on that, Any day
I was out in the street in the daytime and not in a job, was a reason to be joyous.”
In the end, what do all of these disparate experiments add up to?
They don't represent a unified challenge to our consumer-driven society.
They won't topple capitalism, or perhaps even make a dent in global warming.
What they suggest though, are new possibilities of collective sustenance and autonomy.
In the words of Jeff Ferrell, a sociologist who wrote a book about his own year-long experiment
in trash-picking and low-cost living. Freegans, Compactors, and independent devotees
of cheap survival are all thinking deeply about issues like community, sustainability,
self-determination in the contours of a meaningful life.
They are creating alternatives to a culture that thrives on store-bought pleasures and
disposable dreams. They're building worlds based on imagination
and durability. So.
I'll just stop reading there and take questions if anybody has any.
Thanks.
>> [Clapping]
Q So I have two questions. The first one's easier.
What you think of advertising and its effect on reducing frugality, because it's in the
advertiser's interest to make you buy? And the second one, which is based on when
you said that the psychology of cheapness is that, Stressed people are more likely to
save. And I think it's the opposite.
People who are stressed are more likely to buy to kind of relieve their stress.
But people who are content have nothing to buy, you know?
They're just happy to laze about, read a book whatever, you know?
Lauren Weber: Right. There are many forms of anxiety.
And I think, maybe the cheap people have like one particular form.
I'm not sure exactly how I would describe it or explain it.
I think a lot of it is just a sort of fear of the unknown or fear of the future drives
frugal people -- cheap people -- and it is that sort of fear that there's a catastrophe
around the corner and you have to be prepared for it.
In fact, thrift is sort of indirectly related to hording.
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap
that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers
in Harlem in New York City in the 1940's -- there was two brothers living.
By the time their house was excavated, the police found like, 25 old pianos.
They found the chassis of a car in the basement. It was just, anything that they found on the
street they would bring home. And one of them was finally killed when a
bunch of stuff toppled on him, and he had been taking care of his brother who then died
of neglect. And hording.
Psychologists have studied a lot on hording. Very few people -- very few researchers have
studied cheapness, thrift, you know, frugality. It's not that interesting to consumer researchers,
but it should be. A lot of people have studied why we buy.
Very few people have studied why we don't buy.
There's a lot of studies on hording. And a lot of it is based on this idea that
you save every piece of string because you might need it some day.
It's just in case. There's that kind of 'just in case' anxiety,
which I think is related to frugal people, cheap people.
And then, the other question on advertising. You know, I think there's too much of it.
But I also think like, human beings are -- we're not dopes and we're not dupes.
I think, just because you see an advertisement doesn't mean that we're sort of programmed
to immediately go out and buy that thing. I do think we should be trained to be better
consumers of advertising and consumers of stuff.
And we are susceptible. I mean, I'm susceptible too -- although I
would be hard pressed to think about what. You know, I mean, we like brand names.
My sister and I are always calling each other, bragging about what we found at the Salvation
Army. So, you know, on the one hand, I do think
that stuff works and it's effective in a way that I don't like.
On the other hand, I think human beings -- we're not robots, you know.
We are able to resist those messages. I wish there was more education about resisting
those messages, though. And I hope my book is a part of that -- sort
of being able to question the imperatives of living in a consumer society.
Q Thanks very much for being here. In this audience, I am prepared to admit that
I am really a cheap person. But, I think ordinarily, I kind of keep it
to myself. If I talk to myself about it, I would say,
"I'm proud of being cheap. I'm proud of having the value of wanting to
get value out of things.” But on the other hand, I noticed that I don't
talk to my friends much about it. So I'm sort of curious to know what you discovered
about the people that you interviewed -- how they perceived themselves.
Are they proud of who they are? Or are they proud of who they are, but they
keep it to themselves? Any thoughts along those lines?
Lauren Weber: Right. Yeah. I mean, all different reactions to that.
In fact, I'll just briefly read my -- the first paragraph of the book is about that.
It says, Cheap suit, cheap date, cheap shot -- it's a dirty word rife with negative associations.
We hear the word 'cheap', and we think "miser, ***, Wal-Mart, made in China, something
that's going to fall apart.” It's an insult almost any way you look at
it. An 84-year-old man heard about my interest
in cheapness and got so excited that he offered himself up for an interview about his frugal
ways. At the end of our conversation, he said sheepishly,
"Please don't use my name. I don't want people to think I'm cheap.”
[laughter] You know, and I did get that a lot from people
I interviewed who were uncomfortable with the word "cheap.”
You know, they prefer "frugal" or "thrifty.” Which is fine.
I'm probably -- before I started writing this book would have said a similar thing, but
in the course of writing it, I started to embrace it.
And I felt like the word itself captured some of that ambivalence and conflict we have about
spending and saving. I think people often use the word 'cheap'
to project. Like my dad -- a lot of the things he does,
you could just call frugal, or whatever. So what if he likes to buy gas at the cheapest
gas station. But he's always been called 'cheap', and I
think people use it as an insult partly to project to him their own discomfort with their
spending or saving habits, you know? His brother has like no money to his name
and could learn a thing or two from my father, and yet is always calling my dad a cheap ***.
Yet, I think it has as much to do with comforting himself to insult my father than about anything
my dad does. So, you know, I kind of wanted to reclaim
the word 'cheap'.
Q I like that.
Lauren Weber: Sure.
>> [pause]
Q Hi. I have a really simple question. Is there a point where when you were doing
the book that you went, "This cheapness is really destructive rather than a virtue?”
Lauren Weber: Yeah. Well, many points. I mean, in my own life.
I had a terrible habit for a long time of like, not eating lunch if I had forgotten
to make myself lunch. And then, at the end of the day, I'd have
headaches. You know, it was because I was agonizing about
the idea of what -- spending five dollars on a sandwich.
That's not really doing me any good. Finally a friend of mine said, "Do you think
you don't deserve to eat?” And I got a little bit better about it there.
So it can become very compulsive, not wanting to spend money.
But there's one moment that I wrote about in the book.
While I was writing -- I've always been very frugal, but living on a writer's income, I
had an advance, but it wasn't particularly large at all and I went through it fairly
quickly. And then, I was living on my savings.
And so, I found all kinds of new ways to save money.
I started making my own laundry detergent and, you know, friends would want to go out
and eat and I'd say, "Why don't I make a picnic?” You know?
Because it was just cheaper to make food and bring it for both of us.
But there was a moment where I was trying to save money by eating some of the old food
I had in my pantry and I had this can of clams that I'd had for like five or six years or
something. And I decided to make like a clam sauce. So
I opened them. I had the garlic simmering on the stove and
I opened the clams and they were kind of greenish blue and they smelled funny, but they smelled
like cockry. They didn't smell like foul.
And I ended up -- I went back and forth -- and I ended up making the clam sauce.
And I was sitting there eating it while I had my laptop open.
And I was looking up the symptoms of botulism. [laughter] And I thought, "This is ridiculous.”
And so, I eventually did throw out the clam sauce, but only after eating it.
-- This just went off again. Oh, now it's on.
-- Okay so, you know, that's not good. You know, if you don't go to the doctor because
you don't want to spend the money, that's not good.
And then, we probably all have the friend who never pays their fair share at dinner.
That's not the kind of cheap I like. I like my dad's version of cheapness which
is really, personal austerity and public generosity. He's very generous to anybody who needs it
or needs his help, but with himself, he's monk like.
Q Hi. My whole family's three quarters of the way through your book.
I read a couple chapters and then, when I'm not looking, my wife steals it and reads it.
It's great so far. I have a question around the connection between
the delay in gratification and the lack of being cheap.
My sort of theory is that people -- if they have 20 bucks in their pocket and they're
kind of hungry, then they're going to spend it, because they can't delay the gratification.
And like, I know Richard Bach, I think, talks about the "latte factor" -- that this little
thing you spend a couple bucks on lattes a couple times a day, that adds up to thousands
of dollars by the end of the year. So I was just wondering if you saw that threatening
your research about just people back in the olden days took a long time to knit a coat
or to walk into town to even buy the coat. So they wouldn't do it.
But now, you can hop on Google and buy things instantaneously.
So this lack of delay of gratification.
Lauren Weber: Yeah, that's true. I mean, there are so many opportunities for
instant gratification everywhere. And I think there's a lot of research now
being done on self-control as like a childhood quality, or just a quality that can help lead
to success. And that stuff is really interesting, because
what do you do when we live in a society where everything is so accessible to us?
You know, whether it's alcohol or spending -- This just went off again -- alcohol or
spending or *** or whatever. It's all right there.
And there's a famous experiment from the 1960s that a psychologist at Stanford did.
It's called the Marshmallow Experiment. You know about it, yeah.
And it's in the book, where he gave a bunch of two-year-olds, I think, a marshmallow and
said that if they could hold off 20 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow.
And some of the kids just ate their marshmallow immediately and couldn't hold off.
And some of them actually did wait and received their second marshmallow.
It's really funny. They waited by like singing themselves songs
or like trying to take a nap. Very cute to me to think about these two-year-olds
trying to distract themselves from the marshmallow. And then, they followed these kids.
And it turned out that the kids who were able to exercise self-control did much better in
life. They had higher SAT scores, they were much
better adjusted and stuff. So, you know, it's interesting that many of
the kinds of addictions -- we as a society can generally agree to look down on them
-- drug abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, whatever.
We can mostly agree that those are bad things. Shopping is one of the ones that we can't
agree is a bad thing. We -- actually many people think that's a
-- there are a lot of interests who have something at stake in believing that having
self-control when it comes to spending money is not necessarily good for us as a society.
So I think that's one of those areas again, where we have a lot of ambivalence and conflicted
feelings and stuff. Yeah. But, you know, I got the message from my father
that he judged a person's character by how well they could deny themselves what they
wanted. Which is partly why my sister and I, who are
very similar, are close to my dad. And my brother, who is much more of a spendthrift
-- he and my father have a difficult relationship. Because my dad just, you know, doesn't have
as much respect for somebody who gratifies themselves instantly. Hi.
Q Hi. Glad to have you here. Do you have any estimates about like, what
percentage of the population by any definition would cheap people consist?
And would it make sense actually for like big marketing firms to sort of target products
for them? Or is this like just a fringe group?
Lauren Weber: Right well.
Q Just not significant?
Lauren Weber: It's definitely not fringy. There's, as I said, very few studies on people
who don't buy. But one of the few that there is, is called
the Tightwad Spendthrift Scale. And it was developed by three behavioral economists
at Carnegie Mellon. And they surveyed 13,000 people and found
that about 24 percent were tightwads, you know, cheap.
And 15 percent were spendthrifts. Now, it's not a great sample, because almost
everybody responded to a survey that was on the New York Times website.
And there are correllations between levels of education and frugality.
You know, the better educated you are, the more frugal you are likely to be.
When they did the same experiment at a shopping mall, they kind of had the opposite numbers.
So, you know, it's hard to get a read on exactly how many 'cheap' people are out there --
self-described or otherwise. But there have been stories occasionally on
companies that try to target cheap people. And, you know, there's a lot of them out there.
Right now, Sax Fifth Avenue -- I don't know if you have Sax out on the West Coast, but
they have this whole like, ad campaign going on right now about 'value' and how Sax offers
value. You know, a couple years ago, their ads were
for $5,000 handbags. Now, it's saying like, "You need that perfect
little black suit, and it's a good deal if it's good quality." and all that.
And in Germany -- where are you from? Okay. In Germany, I have a friend who's German who
told me about an ad campaign for a retailer there.
And the ad campaign was called Guisaskiel, which means 'cheap is cool.' So some retailers
have tried to sort of co-opt this idea. I'm not a big fan of that approach.
I'd rather cheap people stayed -- I'm not uncorrupted.
The boots that I'm wearing right now cost $350.
But, you know, I would like to not see cheapness be co-opted and exploited as a marketing opportunity.
So. Any other questions?
Q I don't really know where the question is in here, but I might find it.
But, you were talking about delayed gratification and this gentleman was as well.
It seems like there's a real joy in delayed gratification when you get the gratification
which is much bigger than the joy that you might get by getting something instantly.
And it really resonated with me when you talked about you and your sister bragging in the
phone about the brand name stuff that you got at the Goodwill. Do you find that that's
sort of a common thread in people who do delay gratification -- that the joy of finally getting
it, or getting it after having waited an appropriate amount of time is bigger than just going out
and buying it?
Lauren Weber: Yeah. Well, I find that for myself for sure.
I mean, a lot of the interviews I did, didn't get into like the real, sort of, psychological
workings and stuff. And people often have a hard time articulating
that stuff anyway. But, you know, my sister said -- she's like
me, and she's a professor. And when she has something she needs to do
that she's dreading, she'll usually like say, "I'll treat myself to a cookie when I'm done
writing my syllabus.” Or whatever. And it's just -- you know, a lot of people
would just go out and get themselves a cookie if they want it.
But to her, it's like she just thinks about like, What kind of cookie?
And What bakery? And everything. And I feel that way too.
I mean, I love great food, and I like to go out to a nice restaurant, now and then, and
spend a lot of money. But, you know, if I did that three nights
a week, I don't think I'd enjoy it nearly as much as doing it twice a year.
So, I think that is a part of like, savoring and experience -- when you become inured to
it if you treat yourself in those ways too often.
That's my take.
Q I have a two-part question. One is, Do you think the trend is going to
shift now, because, you know, of the recessionary times?
And two, What do you think about government spending?
Like, do you apply these same sort of values to politicians, government, right?
Countries, what have you.
Lauren Weber: Well, government spending. That question comes up, because, you know,
we now are more in debt than we've ever been. I think it's a very different thing.
The government -- I am a Keynesian at heart. You know, I believe that the government should
prime the pump when necessary. The government has many more levers to deal
with debt than individuals do. The government can go into debt, but then
it can use interest rates, or tax policy, or trade policy to mitigate the effects of
that. When individuals go into debt, they have very
few options besides paying it off somehow, by hook and by crook, or you know, declaring
bankruptcy. So, I'd rather see the government spend --
you know, I think the answer to our current problems is not to tell ordinary people to
go out and charge up their credit cards -- I'd rather see the government take on debt
than individuals. And then, the other question -- oh.
Where is it going? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are cutting back now.
It's both anecdotal and aggregate. You hear about people canceling their cable
subscriptions or gym memberships. You know, it's not anything like it was during
the Great Depression. We're not at that point yet.
And it's also an aggregate evidence. The savings rate has gone up a lot in the
last few months or so. I think it's temporary.
You know, if you look -- there are a lot of economists who are out there saying, "This
is a seismic shift in the American consumer.” You know, "This is going to be permanent
-- a long-term thing.” But if you look at the history, any time there's
been a crisis, human beings are very adaptable and resilient.
We know how to cut back when we need to. And then, usually as soon as the crisis passes,
consumer spending goes right back up to where it was.
And actually goes higher. You know, we reset our appetites a notch or
two higher than what it was. You know, I mean, in 2001, after 9/11 and
everything, in a recession, there was a lot of talk about, you know, "the new earnestness.”
And irony was how. And people were going to spend less and be
more family-centered. Well, you know, a few years later, it was
like, Hummers on the road and all that stuff. So, yeah.
I think we'll go back to the way it was before. The one thing that I think is different this
time around is the environment. I think that is making people rethink the
way we consume in a different way. So that could lead to more permanent changes
on an individual basis. [pause] All done?
>> If there are no more questions, let's give Lauren a big round of applause.
>> [clapping]