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Consumer Behavior
Do We Still Want to Buy Things?
Materialism and the pandemic.
Posted August 23, 2020 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
The plywood is coming down off the windows of Madison Avenue shops. It went up after a night of looting marred the Black Lives Matter protests. Before the looting, you could walk down the Avenue and see no more indication of anything amiss than the signs wishing us good health. But that all changed with the plywood. The Avenue seemed defeated, somehow, or perhaps in retreat from its haughty self-satisfaction. The boarded-up windows sent an updated message: we’re not sure how to present ourselves once we reopen (if we do).
Now that the shops are on the verge of reopening, they’ll have to decide how to renovate their personae. Act as if nothing happened? Act as if the world has changed? The answer could be a moving target, based on the response of returning foot traffic.
That traffic is not representative of most American retailers’, or even of most stores’ in New York City. Madison, running parallel between 5th and Park Avenues, is the shopping corridor of the City’s 1%. Shoes can cost $1200 (each!). A watch is the price of a decent new car. So how these shops act is really a commentary on how high-end capitalism envisions its future. (Ironically, since most of Manhattan’s Gold Coast has vacated to homes in the Hamptons, the Adirondacks, or Spain, nobody’s around to notice).
Except my patient Grace. She stayed and, at first, was delighted to see the new activity. It was a hopeful sign after so much shuttered silence. “The only place that stayed open throughout was the caviar store,” she laughed.
But now, after thinking about the imminent reopening, Grace is puzzled by her reaction. Apparently, she doesn’t want to buy anything. “I thought I’d be one of those people who drove all that pent-up demand,” she said, “but I think the economists misjudged — or at least they misjudged me.” So, the issue was whether Grace’s loss of interest was anything to worry about (depression, maybe?), and whether anyone should regret their losing an interest in buying fancy stuff.
This pandemic has pushed people to re-evaluate their priorities. For some, thinking about their priorities was never a priority in the first place. They’re surprised, therefore, when now suddenly they’ve turned on themselves, questioning attitudes that had seemed ordinary, normal, certainly okay. If you’re not conscious of your priorities, you have trouble balancing the demands of society on your time and resources.
Grace now discovered that she had that problem. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be doing now,” she said “I feel kind of weird.”
Thinking about her role in society never seemed terribly important to Grace. She didn’t think she had much or a role. She and her family lived in a building on Park Avenue, not far from my office. She made sure that the van picked up her two kids in the morning, when they went off to day-school, and made sure to be home in the late afternoon when it delivered them. In between, she arranged dinner with the maid, volunteered a couple of days a week to speak English with immigrant women, and otherwise shopped and had lunch with her friends. What’s wrong with that?
Well, for starters, it no longer worked. As we spoke, I realized that Grace was not depressed so much as bewildered. It was like she had landed in a new moral environment which had invaded (and disrupted) the placid certainties of her mental space. Like everyone else, she had been pummeled by news of how some socio-economic strata had been more affected by the virus than others (namely, hers). She had seen how many Essential Workers had to use public transportation, exposing themselves to getting sick; she took Lyft if she had to travel. Moreover, she had had to turn to her friends, not just for company but for support as she tried to keep her kids occupied and safe. “I’m beginning to realize,” she said, that I’m privileged to be comfortable,” she said. “I’m beginning to realize how hard it is for so many people.”
It emerged that Grace’s loss of interest in the stuff newly on display was a result of her consciously adopting new priorities. There has been a vast amount of writing with regard to how, during the pandemic, we are turning inward — becoming more introspective — and turning more towards friends and family. As a consequence of isolation and deprivation, we are figuring out what we actually need to make us feel happy. Concomitantly, I think, we are coming to see that some aspects of our previous existence represent a type of moral incoherence. Acquisitiveness, as in the case of Grace, represents a failure to see world in its entirety, and the state of all the people in it. “It didn’t feel like I was just focused on me,” she said. “But I was.”
All that stuff in the windows reminded Grace that while she could buy it, other people couldn’t come close.
The paradox of this pandemic is that even while, in one sense, our world was narrowed to a sliver of its vibrant, roaring former self, in another sense it has vastly expanded. We have seen — or, rather, been made to see and consider — the lives of people whom we never thought we would ever encounter. Their realities have been riveting.
Grace did not say, as I had expected her to, that she now felt guilty buying a designer dress or a new, gorgeous handbag. She just felt that she didn’t need them. “I have enough,” she said. “I’ll wait until I need something.”
The pandemic has taught us that resources are finite. It’s hard to consume as if everything were infinitely available to everyone.
Grace had never put her head in the sand, deliberately evading the realities of privilege. It’s just that she had never really had to think about such realities. She spoke to the immigrant women, of course, but mostly they spoke about their children, their families, their eagerness to find jobs and become citizens. It wasn’t until Grace encountered images of body bags in cold storage — right here in New York — and hospitals closing their doors for lack of space in Pakistan, India, and Venezuela, that she began putting things together. “There’s just not enough to go around,” she said.
It may be that as we venture out after COVID-19’s initial onslaught, Grace’s example will stand in for many other people’s reaction to this experience. We may never, at least not for a long time, return to spending the way we used. More importantly, we may demand of ourselves a heightened consciousness regarding the materiality that has been ingrained in us since . . . well, forever. We may read different books, for example, about how to conserve what we have. All of this is totally fine.
In fact, such a paradigm shift could be expected during the challenging times that we are experiencing. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn suggested that “normal” models for approaching a question can sometimes change radically, all at once, when the need for a new direction suddenly becomes obvious. It is likely that as we step out into a world still reeling from the pandemic, we will see the need for a new direction.
