Blame marketing: Why people equate frugality with poverty
Posted
May 30 2008, 10:31 AM
by
Karen Datko
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
Recently, my wife and I kicked around the idea of installing a clothesline in our backyard. We both grew up in the country and we both had clotheslines for drying clothes in the spring, summer and fall.
A quick cost analysis. An average dryer load costs about 30 to 40 cents to dry, so we'll give it an average of 35 cents a load. Given the installation cost of the clothesline we investigated (about $30, all told), we could recoup the cost of drying the clothes with about 89 loads, and after that it's gravy.
Not only that, drying in the fresh Iowa country air makes your clothes smell fantastic. So, it's definitely a frugal move -- and not only that, it's an environmentally friendly move over the long haul. Using a clothesline for 20 years is far more environmentally friendly than daily use of a clothes dryer. Just because you don't see the burning coal used to power your dryer doesn't mean it's not burning.
But there's a drawback. We live almost in the country. If you walk out our back door and look straight ahead, you see cornfields. However, if you look to your left and right, you see other houses. We live on the very edge of a small town. As a result, there are social pressures and limitations on what you can put in your yard. There's a standard look and feel to things -- a reasonably well-kept lawn, trees in the backyard, and things like that. A clothesline does not violate any sort of use policy, but it definitely would stick out like a very sore thumb in all of this.
The whole "don't care about what other people think" philosophy tells us that we should just go ahead and install the clothesline and happily hang our clothes on it. Frankly, if we lived out in the country a bit more, we'd already have the clothesline, even if we had some neighbors who were fairly close.
But there's also a need to respect our neighbors, both in terms of social politeness and neighborhood property values. Richard Monson, president of the California Association of Homeowners Associations, told Legal Affairs magazine that a clothesline in a neighborhood can lower property values by 15%. "Modern homeowners don't like people's underwear in public. It's just unsightly," Monson says. His logic is similar to the reasons you don't see cars on blocks in the backyard while people are working on them. In some situations, it's simply not considered appropriate yard decoration in an area where you have close neighbors.
Thus, for the time being, we won't be installing a clothesline in our backyard. We'll keep hanging our clothes on lines and racks in our laundry room and guest bedroom instead. The potential negatives here from the social and property-value perspectives are much higher than the positives from a money-saving perspective.
Still, there's a bigger issue at work here. I find it very interesting that the financially sensible choice, the frugal choice, is the one that's seen as socially unacceptable today. Why did that change? During World War II, it was considered highly patriotic and a very socially good thing to use clotheslines, grow your own vegetables, and wear clothes until they fell apart. While some of these activities are coming back in vogue, it's not for their frugal aspects. It's because they're trendy in a "green" sense.
My only conclusion is that the perspective changed because of marketing. In each case, things that went from being viewed as patriotic and a social "good" to being signs of poverty and a social "bad" are all tied to buying more stuff.
I reject that sentiment and try to practice frugality in the old-fashioned sense. We have a garden and we wear our clothes until they're falling apart (and then use them as rags). The only thing keeping us from the clothesline is the idea of a net-value loss.
Go back and read about the things people did for the social good on the home front during World War II. You'll be shocked how many of them were great frugal tactics and were also considered to be great things to do from a social perspective. Since then, the only thing that's changed is the social perspective -- the association of such tactics with low socioeconomic status because of marketing. Whenever you think a frugal tactic is beneath you, remember this: Your prejudice is often largely tied to marketing.
Being frugal does not equate to being poor. It just equates with enough intelligence to realize you don't have to buy your way out of every problem.
Other articles of interest at The Simple Dollar:
"Fun"
"5 lessons my friend's passing taught me about life, money and everything else"
"The monthly grind: 16 hardcore tactics for minimizing your monthly bills"
