Social Others & Luxury Creep

Extract from Rachel Sherman's Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence

“Regardless of their struggles, almost all my respondents described becoming acclimated over time to making more expensive consumer choices.

Maya said that she would not spend $1,000 on a dress, but added that:

“I didn't want to be one of those rich people that just spends money without thinking about it. But I will say that there was a period where my thinking about what was reasonable became very different than it was, like, you know, in 1992. So, over the span of ten years, what I [had] considered a luxury or extravagant or whatever didn't seem as extravagant.”

Eliana, who's inherited wealth totaled about $9 million and who believed deeply in economic and racial justice, said she felt like a hypocrite, because:

“I don't think I fully live out all my values, I guess I would say. I used to say I was gonna be a revolutionary, and then I had that first massage.”

Beatrice identified this phenomenon as “luxury creep”:

“Well, there's definitely been luxury creep in my life. I just feel comfortable spending more money on more things. There's luxury creep within categories that look like necessities. So, like, I spend more and more money on clothes...We spend a lot of money on wine...We've recently had a big leap in the amount of money that we spend on bottles of wine, like fifteen or twenty-five dollars. So we would have bought wine before, and considered it, like, a life necessity, but it's the luxury creep aspect of it that's changed.”

Beatrice went on to associate luxury creep with her peer group, saying, “It's a very insidious thing, you know, because it's much less conscious than like, 'keeping up with the Joneses' kind of conspicuous consumption, that competitive consumption thing. It's really about this like – I mean for me, it's just like this vague sense of what's normal.”

Rachel Sherman is an associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research.

More on Rachel Sherman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Sherman_(sociologist)