{"id":29117,"date":"2016-01-24T01:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-24T06:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29117"},"modified":"2021-05-27T09:14:52","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T13:14:52","slug":"qotd-there-are-no-veblen-goods-at-wal-mart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/24\/qotd-there-are-no-veblen-goods-at-wal-mart\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: There are no Veblen goods at Wal-Mart"},"content":{"rendered":"

People buy Rolex watches for reasons other than their timekeeping excellence, just as people buy Ferraris and horses for reasons other than going to the store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. Economists talk about \u201cVeblen goods,\u201d which are more valued because of their high prices rather than in spite of them, coveted not for their conventional utility but for their exclusivity. Owning a Rolls-Royce isn\u2019t about the car \u2014 it\u2019s about you. Which is why you see magazines such as The Robb Report<\/em> \u2014 one of those glossies full of \u201cbland advertisements for being wealthy,\u201d as the novelist William Gibson put it \u2014 for sale in places such as Wal-Mart, where the typical customer is not actually in the market for a yacht or Kiton overcoat. If you\u2019ve ever seen the heartbreaking sight of a young woman stopping a Wal-Mart checker three-fourths of the way through ringing up her purchases \u2014 because she does not have enough money to pay for what\u2019s left in her cart \u2014 then you can be pretty sure that what\u2019s going in her sack is more or less the opposite of Veblen goods.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the anti-Wal-Mart crusaders want to make life worse for people who are literally counting pennies as they shop for necessities. Study after study has shown that Wal-Mart has meaningfully reduced prices: 3.1 percent overall, by one estimate \u2014 with a whopping 9.1 percent cut to the price of groceries. That comes to about $2,300 a year per household, savings that accrue overwhelmingly to people of modest incomes, not to celebrity activists and Ivy League social-justice crusaders.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, these campaigns are exercises in tribal affiliation. The Rolex tribe, and those who aspire to be aligned with it, signal their status by sneering at the Timex tribe \u2014 or by condescending to it as they purport to act on its behalf, as though poor people were too stupid to know where to find the best deal on a can of beans. Or call it the Trader Joe\u2019s tribe vs. the Wal-Mart tribe, the Prius tribe vs. the F-150 tribe.<\/p>\n

Kevin D. Williamson, “Who Boycotts Wal-Mart? Social-justice warriors who are too enlightened to let their poor neighbors pay lower prices”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2014-11-30.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People buy Rolex watches for reasons other than their timekeeping excellence, just as people buy Ferraris and horses for reasons other than going to the store to pick up a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. Economists talk about \u201cVeblen goods,\u201d which are more valued because of their high prices rather than in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,41],"tags":[1420,377,91,907,1321,315],"class_list":["post-29117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-quotations","tag-classism","tag-conspicuousconsumption","tag-poverty","tag-snobbery","tag-veblengoods","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7zD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52923,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29117\/revisions\/52923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}