Here’s to Luxury Creep

The comfort you have demanded is now mandatory.
--The Dead Kennedys

Sorry—it’s been a real slow news week, so I resorted to hitting the books piled up on my nightstand. I ran across this concept in a book titled, “Nation of Rebels,” a book about counterculture becoming consumer culture. I’m just as desperate to find something to write about as you are to read here.

Moving on—the comfort we have demanded has surely become mandatory in several ways and many places: car accessory options like a heads-up display and heated seats, home construction and outfitting like the now-cookie-cutter McMansions equipped with granite counters, institutional-grade appliances, and resort spa-like bathrooms, all-you-can-eat buffets featuring larger and higher quality cuts of meat, ordinary grocery store chains adding organic meats and veggies to their everyday selections, and even the former big-mouthed bass of discount retailers has even begun catering to those in search of something more. It’s everywhere if you bother to go looking for it.

We’re all in search of quality in one acceptable form or another, but are we really getting it? In most cases, no—just a higher price tag and slicker marketing plan.

Take the McMansion homes for example: once upon as time, they were homes of the wealthy executive, or status symbols of the highly-successful daytrader. Now, they’re a dime a dozen (or about $100k or so in my area) and easily within reach of most fully employed workers thanks to treacherously ingenious mortgage lenders. These homes are now ubiquitous in the “for sale” real estate catalogs that infest grocery store lobbies.

The contents of these homes were also once reserved for the discriminating wealthy—stainless steel appliances, industrial-grade appliances ready to cook for an unseen army, extremely high-tech and complicated wiring for computer access into and out of the home to run amazing security systems and super-fast internet access, a third- and sometimes fourth-car garage, shower stalls lined with marble from another country (not to mention the absurd multitudes of shower heads up and down each wall), and separate faucets for regular water and super-fast on-demand ultra-hot water (in case you might want a cup of coffee and you can’t wait for Mr. Coffee to crank it out). Now, this level of home luxury is standard fare, along with the requisite property tax and energy bills.

Cars are another example of this creep: no longer is four doors, four tires, and a zero power the monicker of a 440 engine-sporting car (what we used to say back in the old days). Now, we see heads-up displays, turbo assist, seat heaters and coolers, fully adjustable pedals and steering column, his and hers climate control, assorted entertainment options for different section of the car (read DVD players and separate stereo systems for backseat and third row passengers), and airbags you can turn off. All that’s missing is a diamond-studded dashboard, and that’s probably doable by at least one of the fast-fading Big 3 automakers. The newest level of luxury in cars is the fuel options: hybrid, flex-fuel, and diesel/biodiesel. While not a glamorous array of options, it still ranks as a luxury to me, because the wealthy are the only ones who will be able to comfortably afford it for some time to come.

My personal favorite symbol of luxury creep is the lowly polo shirt—once reigned supreme in hallowed high school halls by wealthy brats, it’s now a ubiquitous staple of nearly every closet in America. These brats wore their collars up, their Ralph Lauren logos out, and the tails untucked—and THIS represented exclusivity among the monied children of monied families. Now we know better—regardless of maker or brand name, all polo shirts come from China via cheap labor and materials. Even the logo didn’t do much to set Ralph’s shirts apart from WallyWorld’s, except for his name. Now the pony’s dead, and his name doesn’t matter to anyone any more.

WallyWorld and several grocery store chains have begun adding organic food to their usual commercial line-up in search of the customer willing to spend more (profit is hard to come by these days). This particular move is causing harm to the mom-and-pop health food stores in my area, because it’s causing a shortage of meats and produce to us organic foodies. The more quantity purchasing power a company has, the more attention it receives in order fulfillment, or so my organic store tells me—I’ve been trying to order a case of chicken thighs for months now, and it never comes in (now I know why). After spying the same fresh organic chicken thighs at my local Kroger store (a new item for them), I see I either need to change my expectations of the health food store, give in to Kroger’s highway robbery price for this meat, or learn to live without organic chicken thighs. So far, this is the only instance I’ve noticed where I’m directly affected—I’m sure there’s more, but the meat and produce issues are the ones currently upsetting my liver (so to speak). As it is, health food manufacturers are being bought by Big Food conglomerates at breakneck speed, so it won’t be long before supermarket chains will be buying up the health food stores themselves, or at least running them out of business by choking off the supply of organic stock in the downstream flow. I imagine a day will come when I will be forced to grow and hunt my own just to avoid being run over by the wheels of the Luxury Creep truck.

One other thing I’ve noticed about luxury creep: once it makes its arrival into our lives, there’s no going back. The “last generation” technology has carefully been eliminated through obsolescence or disappearance, and the “next generation” has made its firm niche through convenience and implied necessity. The comfort we have all demanded is now mandatory, like it or not.

If given the choice, would you go back to a black-and-white TV with 13 channels and no remote? How about a 1980 five-speed Toyota Corolla? Or maybe a post-war bungalow with two bedrooms, one bath, no garage, and no central heat and air?

These things are quite a comparison to what we’re living with now, aren’t they? Compare them to the luxury we demand nowadays.