Showy spending

Its really driven by ad sales. If you want to reach the uberwealthy, you need to go where they read. So even if they make up a tiny part of the audience for the NYT, the Financial Times and the WSJ (lots of ads for personal jets there as well)its worth paying for that space because they are likely to read those papers. So it then behooves these papers to further increase the amount of uberwealthy that turn to them for news, so you get articles dealing with the terrible lament of getting your $2500 dishwasher that you use for 6 weeks serviced.

I wonder if daydreaming can be separated from aspiration here. I sometimes like to read about foods that I know I’ll never be eating, just because they sound yummy — that’s a lot of the appeal of Trillin’s Tummy Trilogy.

They’re secret marxists stiil hoping to foment a revolution?

It reassures the rest of us that, given that we also buy and have serviced those $2,500 dishwashers, we live in the right place, because in flyover/second-home territory, there are not the skilled technicians there are in the Irvingtons of the area.

/sarcasm with more than a grain of truth

We have to put up with that kind of content because it allows the FT to skew rich in its readership, pumping up ad revenues (and thereby subsidizing our consumption of the content).

Okay, I just made that up, but it sounds kinda plausible, no?

I agree with Matt. It gives the reporters who do this stuff the giddy ride of “status-income disequilibrium” (as Bobo would say) for the couple of days that they’re writing it. Back to the plebs Monday-Thursday until the next How to Spend It/Escapes/Weekend Journal piece is due.

Arrivistes. Next they’ll whine about how Godiva chocolates (or the notorious Noka) don’t deliver.

The really posh live on remote islands in log cabins where they do their dishes by hand. They don’t have dishwashers or central heating. Or telephones.

Dearieme (comment #5) may be correct. A surprisingly large number of FT journalists used also to write for “Marxism Today”. I was never sure which direction was the entryism (or was it both?)

Some other kinds of luxury products: How the fashion world gets along without much IP rights enforcement, along with a question for Steve Jobs. If you’re going to market your products like fashion accessories, why shouldn’t the fashion industry’s less stringent approach to IP?

This is one more illustration of how the American print newspaper is dying. With the average reader’s age pushing close to sixty, the NYT’s demographic dictates foo-foo stories aimed at older, richer readers. Editors used to kill stuff like this, but the paper now has nightmares about losing its core readers: old people.

For daily newspapers, the ground is going to slip. That just happened at Time, Inc., triggering layoffs at People, which Time owns, and putting the future of the newsmagazine in question. If you read the New York Times these days it’s very apparent the paper is trying hard not to alienate the one solid demographic group it has left.

If you look at “Road and Track”, which is probably “the” general-interest car magazine in the US, sold in supermarkets and drug stores around the country, it’s hard to find an issue that doesn’t review at least one car made by Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Porsche. Part of this might be catering to the rich part of their readership, but I think the vast majority is what is descirbed above as “aspirational”, even if the people doing the reading don’t think of it that way.

Expensive cars are cool (if unreliable), and if you don’t have the money to actually buy one, you can at least read about it and imagine yourself driving one. Same with fancy vacations and expensive houses and restaraunts, I assume.

I presume “classy” to describe the title “How to Spend It” is sarcastic, because for the life of me, I don’t see any classiness lurking in it.

…but: someone should point out that there are millions of Americans who can afford such things. And what? About two million or so subscribe to the NYT/WSJ… and far fewer to FT?

So, while it’s true that many readers can’t afford such things… many (a large chunk, maybe) can–especially if you’re only looking for them to afford a slice of the advertised goods (one person’s Viking stove is another person’s fishing trip in Patagonia is another person’s Breitling).

Tyler Brûlé left FT to go start an upscale magazine called Monocle, due out in February.

For reasons known only to myself, I can’t stand the “How To Spend It” section, but I always enjoyed Brûlé’s Fast Lane column.

Sara (at #13) has part of the answer. One of the social functions of the NYT is to integrate the _nouveau riche_.

Manhattan is awash with money. There are enough people able to stick out their hands and grab some that there’s a fresh supply of _nouveaux riches_ each year. They are unsure of themselves. One of the most respected, old-money couples in their building summers in Maine in a camp that hasn’t changed much since the woman’s great-grandfather built it with his own two hands. They’ve read Veblen. At Yale. True, the most important activity was making the contacts that got them this investment banking gig, but they had to keep their grades up and they dutifully cracked all the books. Are people going to laugh at them if they conspicuously consume?

The NYT reassures them. It shows them people just like themselves spending gloriously, copiously, uselessly, conspicuously. “Go thou and do likewise.”

Well, perhaps this isn’t the intention, but it’s a very good record of who’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. [/davespart]

“How to Spend It” has been appearing with increasing frequency in recent months, and since it has been a record bonus season on Wall Street and the City, it is no doubt reaching a very receptive audience among core FT readers.

Joel T:

Surely, when you visit others in your circle
you notice a distinct lack of books on their
shelves.

But what seems to bother people the most are multiple titles on a single subject.

One time a party guest, who had been spending
time in my library, asked me why I needed to
have 6 books with the title “The Battle of
Britain”?

I countered with “What? Didn’t you notice the
63 books I have on the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’?”

5,000 seems like a lot of titles. We have
557 in our dining room alone. When she asked,
I counted them with my neice over the holidays.

Don’t even get me started on my wife’s cook book
collection. How many editions of the “Joy of
Cooking” can one person possible need?

“He who dies with the most books wins”.
– anon

To a newspaper, advertisers are its customers and the readers are the product, like fish to a fisherman. You guys are like fish discussing quality of the bait.

35: “How to Spend It” has been appearing with increasing frequency in recent months,

Yes, the magazine in the Saturday edition has reached a frequency of almost once a week!

Viking? I assume they can’t find decent servicing because they bought such mediocre equipment.

Aspirational brand identity is the cornerstone of middle class existence (along with its corollary — anxiety about brand identity). There are versions of it in academic circles, but y’all would pshaw me if I tried to point some on them out.

The trend of median income earners buying appliances well outside of their purchasing power has increased sharply over the past 20 years.

Westinghouse introduced a line of $2,000 washer/dryer sets with the expectation that they would be targeting the $70-80K household demo. After a year, they ran the numbers and adjusted advertising down to target $40-50K households, since they were selling more there. The $80K households, presumably, were all about Miele and Bosch.

Consumer credit is a part. Another is the lack of clarity in communicating to people who haven’t been educated in the rudiments of class definition and personal economics that you can’t afford a $1,500 washer on a $45K income.

Popular television and media don’t address living within a median income, home ec isn’t really taught any more, so every grows up thinking they are, or can be like, the Huxtables. How often did the Cosby show take pains to note that they were likely in the top 1-5% of all households? Even Homer Simpson presumably draws an above median income.

And, here in NY, a disproportionate number of low (and high) level media employees are from the very families the cover. The notorious Jennifer 8. Lee gets most of her article leads (which are inevitably lifestyle oriented) by posting to her alumni board (Harvard).

College is becoming the training ground for conspicuous consumption and detachment from economic reality of America (talk to me all you want about unfair wage structures for adjuncts, but encouraging a bunch of 18 year olds that is is economically rational to spend $40,000 for a year of college is teaching them it’s okay to want a $1,500 washer the minute they graduate). Add to that the fact that the top tier colleges (which draw disproportionately from the upper classes) produce most of the media talent (a far cry from the working class, unionized newsrooms of mid century), it’s entirely understandable that this is as complex as their thinking gets. They don’t know anyone who has never replaced a broken appliance for years because it wasn’t economically feasible.

You see these people all day. Are you surprised this is how they turn out?

Dead on 99. B/c I run around with rich people (although I am not one myself), I’ve noticed that the fancier the kitchen the less likely it is to be used. My 4 burner stove top comes from Sears and is pretty dirty because it is used constantly. The GE oven and micro-halogen speed cooker are somewhat cleaner (the M-H btw, is the greatest thing ever for working parents). We looked at a sub-zero fridge and laughed. It holds les than a day’s supply of food. The Viking range is practically unusuable with conventional cookware b/c of all those btus. Copper pots only and who has time to clean those? Which leads to do Western Dave’s first law of cooking: The fancier the gear, the less likely the kitchen is ever used by the owners.