“Brrr,” remarked our teenager. “It’s a cold morning.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“Which reminds me,” she said in the careless, airy tones that generally signal the onslaught of a campaign, “I’m probably going to need some winter clothes.”
I put a newspaper with a “Dow Plunges” headline down on top of another that asked, “Recession…or Depression?” and observed that she seemed to have plenty of warm clothes in her closet, and that she might enjoy wearing those.
“Yes, but—“ she tried, then changed her mind and laughed. “Ok, fine, what about a coat? You couldn’t turn down a poor frozen daughter who needs a winter coat, could you?”
“Ha ha,” I said evasively.
Why, of course I could. In ours, as in virtually every household I know, a spirit of virtuous Yankee-style thrift has taken hold almost overnight. Would it be so awful to put one’s children in less-than-pristine winter coats this year?
Need has begun outpacing want as the primary reason for buying anything. There’s more marinating, as everyone moves to cheaper cuts of meat. Piano lessons that children were griping about have mysteriously stopped. Yes, you have to take the bus, and yes you have to wear those sneakers until you outgrow them, and no, you can’t have a new lacrosse stick or whatever unless the old one has actually snapped.
Among adults there’s a kind of relish at the new austerity. Haunted as we are by the ghost of overspendings past, many of us find something almost cleansing in the embrace of frugality.
Everywhere, women are cheerfully grabbing from their closets garments with the tags still on them and rushing to exchange them for cash. Last weekend I stood in line at a Banana Republic behind a woman who was returning literally armloads of clothes. Next to her stood a woman returning a sweater. Then it was my turn and I handed the saleswoman my receipt and a necklace I’d never worn.
What made the scene remarkable was the giddiness of the customers. Everyone seemed more invigorated by getting her money back than she normally would have been spending it.
Yet it’s one thing for adults to embrace new realities. It’s quite another to persuade children that the indulgent open-wallet practices of the past may have come to an end.
For parents, the trick is to impress upon children the idea that it’s not a good time to spend frivolously while somehow shielding them from adult-level economic anxieties.
“So I bought them the tombstones,” sighed a mother of three, as we discussed the topic. She had just shopped for Halloween decorations with her sons. “They wanted me to buy a fog machine.” She grimaced: “A fog machine! I mean, really! And the boys were kind of outraged when I said no.”
Her face clouded. “Truthfully, last year I probably would have said, ooh, how fun, let’s get a fog machine! Now it just seems ridiculous.”
“It was a good run,” concluded a beautifully dressed friend, a few days later. “But I’m kicking myself. I knew this day would come,” she said, shaking her elegant head. “The travel, the cars, the clothes! Why didn’t we pay down the mortgage when we had the chance? “
She shrugged. “Still, it’s kind of liberating just to tell the children, no, you can’t have it, no, we can’t afford it. It saves a lot of discussion.”
I decided to try this approach with my winter-clothes-desiring eldest daughter. We would buy her a new winter coat, but she must understand that it could not be an expensive one, and she would be expected to make it last for several years.
I ran the conversation over in my mind ahead of time, pleased with my own calm, virtuous, Yankee-style rectitude.
“Hurrah,” she said, when I told her. “You’ll like the coat I’ve picked. It’s a classic.”
“Wonderful,” I said approvingly. “Where exactly did you see it?”
“Oh, on-line, at Burberry. It is five hundred—“ she began.
“WHAT?” laughed Mrs. Calm Rectitude. “Sweetheart. Which part of “thrifty” and “frugal” do you not understand?”
She grinned. “Oh, very well,” she said. “But it was worth a try.”
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
