Taste Inflation

Rather behind as I return from my vacation and catch up on everything...

There's been a lot of talk and press lately about inflation, with the costs of food and fuel getting higher and higher. It's hard to avoid hearing about it, even for a newsphobe like me. And it's harder not to see it as you drive or shop. The trouble is that there's not a whole lot that we, as individuals, can do about inflation itself. But there's a different kind of inflation that we can do something about -- taste inflation.

Taste inflation is the way that the costs of our tastes inflate over time and it happens to many of us. When my husband and I were first together, we had very little money and (by necessity) very simple tastes. For example, we ate a lot of ramen, drank cheap beer as a treat, and bought generic jelly, tubs of margarine, and bulk high-fat ground beef. As our financial situation improved however, we began to buy better quality and healthier groceries. To a degree this was a good thing. Fresh fruit and veggies are better than preprocessed frozen burritos. Juice is healthier than Kool-aid. We also made changes based purely on taste (like beer).

The trouble is that this was, for many years, a purely unconscious process. I only became aware of it when my husband returned from the health food store with a half-gallon of fresh-squeezed organic orange juice. I took a sip and demanded that he never buy it again. Why? It was delicious, but so expensive. I didn't want to get too attached to the taste.

It was at this moment I realized that my tastes were changing over time and that I could be in control of this process. Another example was a national sit-down Italian restaurant chain. When I first ate there, when I was a teenager, it was a high-end delicious treat. Now it's, well it's not terrible, but the food lacks sophistication and nuance and the wine is barely palatable.

So as time goes by I become harder to please and what I eat becomes more expensive. To a degree I'm OK with this. Food is one of life's great pleasures and eating well is important. Making good food at home and feeding friends are two of the things we really love. In fact, to me food is prosperity -- at a very deep and visceral level. I won't compromise my prosperity by eating crap.

And in so much as food prices increase, we do have some room to retreat from our expensive tastes. Instead of 100% not-from-concentrate juice, we can buy 100% frozen concentrate. It might not be quite as delicious, but we will certainly survive. Instead of expensive shrinking boxes of breakfast cereal, we can buy organic flakes in the bulk bag and add dried fruit, nuts, and honey on our own.

But taste inflation happens with all sorts of stuff (here the taste is more figurative than literal). Cars, clothes, personal care items. Over time we can become more picky and consequently spend more. The key is awareness. Some things really are worth paying more for... but others are definitely not.

One interesting area is in person care items. As we age and the news from the mirror becomes rather more startling, particularly in the morning, there's a temptation to somehow fix this problem with expensive products and treatments. This used to be mainly an issue for women, but lately men have been drawn in as well. I believe it's important to care for ourselves and take care of our skin, but there's a point at which taste inflation can rapidly spin out of control. Fifty dollars for a quarter-ounce tub of goop that's supposed to work miracles. The truth is that we have some control over how we look as we age, but not as much as we'd like. And it's the simple stuff like healthy food, enough sleep, no smoking, and plenty of water that usually contribute the most.

Another taste that inflates is usually one for brand names. I'm actually pretty indifferent to brands, but I know that many people aren't... and they pay for it. And they usually pay more as time goes by and the brands they choose increase in prestige. And don't forget houses. Upgrading a house used to be reserved for increasing family size. But during the boom it became purely a matter of taste -- a bigger kitchen, more bathrooms, fancier neighborhood.

A final area where tastes inflate is in the area of services. The things we are willing to do for ourselves versus those that we'd like to pay someone else to do for us. There's been a recent push in productivity circles around outsourcing (see The Four Hour Work Week for the prime example). I can see the value to a certain degree, particularly for entrepreneurs who really can make more growing their business rather than stuffing envelopes or answering phones. But if I'm paying someone to wash my car in the sunshine so that I can spend my time slaving in the office, well you have to wonder.

Childcare might be the ultimate example of this outsourcing, though it's one that many people absolutely must do instead of choose to do and I will not judge it. Still if, over time, you discover that you absolutely can't live without laundry, yard, cleaning, grooming, and automotive service, your taste inflation may be getting out of hand.

As the real costs of goods increases, it's a smart idea for us all to examine how our own tastes may have inflated during the good times. One way to mitigate the effects of rising costs is to dial back our expectations just a notch. While I won't be eating margarine again any time soon, we can all decide how much our good tastes really cost us.