Our business civilization — Edition Insights

me social grade, or fifteen times the old cost, whereas the ordinary income has less than trebled.

The increased cost of living from these and other causes is having marked effects. It is, for one thing, largely destroying the old idea of thrift and saving in the classes with which we are here concerned. In the first place, there is the natural human desire to possess many of the new things available for their own sakes, and often because Mrs. Jones has them, and they belong to the new standard. But there are more insidious forces at work. Mass-production requires an enormous and steady output to be profitable. There is a saturation point for nearly every article. Fresh vegetables are eaten up in a day or two, but clothes or cars may last several years. There is no reason why many of the mechanical contrivances we buy should not in themselves last many years. From the standpoint of the producer there is always the danger that the consumer may have enough of any particular article unless he is made to want more. This is accomplished in several ways in the technic which has been developed by psychologically trained sales experts. The consumer is cleverly induced to want an article that he had thought he could do without or could not afford. If he has already owned one, as an automobile, the slogan becomes that every self-respecting family should have two. The model is changed every year and social vanity is played upon; or an appeal is made to the powerful motives of fear, shame, and pride. In selling many of the mechanical contrivances a more brutal method is employed. Manufacturers stop making essential parts so as to require the owner to buy an entirely new and perhaps only slightly altered model. Some years ago, for instance, I bought at a cost of $450 a certain instrument. It was good for a lifetime. I added steadily, as I could afford it, to the things that were to be used with it, and without which it was useless, until the whole investment was over $800. One day when I went to get more, I was told they no longer made anything for that “model,” I would have to get another and, of course, with a condescending tone that was almost a sneer, “I must want to have the latest.” The new model, differing only slightly from the old, cost, the salesman told me, as though it were a trifle, $750. To accumulate the same things to go with it that I had for the old would cost about $400 more. My old investment was rendered worthless, and the salesman made it evident that he had no interest in a person so cheap that he would not casually throw away $800 and spend $1,000 more on a toy. His company did not have the least glimmer of an idea of responsibility toward a public out of which it had made its money and which had made, in the aggregate, a colossal investment in its instruments. When other methods fail and you really have no money, the advantages of the partial payment plan are glowingly placed before you.

Again, we are told by leaders of the world of mass-production that thrift is out of date. One of the greatest manufacturers in the country recently wrote that “use” not “saving” should govern our ideas with respect to our national and other resources. In another remarkable pronouncement, this man, who is an idol of a large part of the people, said that no boy had ever succeeded or would succeed who saved money when he was young. Another leader writes that “one reason for America’s prosperity and one reason, in my opinion, why that prosperity will continue, is that we have committed ourselves to a standard of living far beyond our wildest pre-war dreams.... We cannot make good except by producing more wealth, and always a little ahead of us is advertising with its alluring images of still other good things that work will buy. Americans have passed out of the period where they care about petty economies. They want convenience. They want action. They want comfort and style. It is impossible to call Americans back to petty thrift, and I personally am glad of it.... I live now in New York where everybody expects to be overcharged and where nobody counts the dimes, much less the pennies.... We have ceased to count our pennies in America, and I certainly hope we never return to the days of the most graceless of all virtues, a niggardly and penny-pinching thrift.”