On Twitter, a couple of months ago, I offered a question/rant:

Those are pretty good engagement numbers. I guess I struck a bit of a chord here. And whenever that happens, I take it as a signal to write further.

I’ve seen a lot of examples of inflation, as well as things that feel like cracks in the system of commerce and retail. It’s subtle and anecdotal, but I think it’s real. A lot of stores have poorly trained employees these days, which means you feel a little bit freer to do your thing. (Judging from my local supermarket closing an entrance and making the self-checkouts even less pleasant to use, many people feel freer to shoplift.) Everything ends up feeing looser and less professional. The expected order falls apart a little bit.

At Trader Joe’s, the clerk dropped my avocadoes and then rang them up, for example. “They’ll be fine,” he said. In the “before times,” I would have gone to the customer service desk and asked to have them exchanged.

This time, for my part, I just walked back to the avocado bin after I checked out and swapped two new avocados in (I put the possibly bruised ones in front at the top; if someone ate them in a day or two, they probably would be fine. I was just annoyed). I wouldn’t have felt free to do that without going though customer service before the quality of service in stores declined to the point where your dropped avocados would be rung up at all.

I can see how a feedback loop can begin where you end up a little closer to the “state of nature,” where people just sort of collectively stop believing in the importance of rules and social conventions.

And restaurants. Restaurant prices have gone up at the same time as service, quality, and portions have gone down. I don’t blame them; I understand fully what a hard industry it is. I don’t tip poorly or berate the servers or send food back. But I do simply go out less often. And I do find it more difficult to enjoy myself. I’ve thought a lot about the psychology of inflation and of all this, and I’ve come up with this way of explaining it.

When prices are low enough to feel like a good value or a deal, you argue for the food (or product.) Say you order a steak with fries and steamed vegetables and it’s $18 or $20—a fair restaurant price in the old days. And say the steak is a little overcooked but fine, and the fries are excellent. My brain says, “Well, they did overcook the steak a bit, but the fries were amazing. And it was cheap!”

If the price goes up to $26, $28, $30, like you see post-pandemic, that all flips. It isn’t just, “That was good but I wish it was six dollars less.” My brain argues against the food. So my reaction to the very same dish becomes: “$30 for an overcooked scrap of meat and some potatoes in grease? What a freaking waste of money. Screw this.” At those inflated prices, the allure of being served in a restaurant vanishes. All you see is the cheap ingredients being poorly prepared and obscenely upcharged.

I met another magazine fellow for lunch recently in Arlington. My lunch special—two small sliders with a salad and fries—was $18. $18 for at most a quarter pound of ground meat, and a pile of potatoes and lettuce. There is no way for me to enjoy that or see value in it.

You have to argue with yourself at every turn; you’re trying to enjoy yourself and not think about being ripped off. Going out and spending money becomes this deeply psychologically unpleasant thing. Almost every transaction feels like this, or at least carries this risk.

So inflation isn’t just a certain percent price increase; it isn’t just forgoing purchases or subbing in cheaper substitutes. It is that, of course. But the money part, on its own, doesn’t bother me. It’s the way it socially and psychologically strains buying, selling, shopping, going out. Trying to enjoy that stuff while getting this foretaste of how things could fall apart in a rich country.

Someone in the replies on Twitter said something interesting: something like, “This is a good example of the upper-middle-class phycology vis-à-vis inflation.”

I think what he meant is that it was not about the hard problems of budgeting, which don’t hurt us much, but rather the soft problems of how it all makes me feel. I know we have it pretty well, and as I said, I don’t blame businesses for these issues and never take out my frustration on business owners or especially service workers. The funny thing to me is that I’m spending a lot less money despite the money, per se, not being the main problem. Whether or not that makes me upper-middle-class (I dunno; maybe a few more paid subscriptions would do it…) I don’t mind holding onto my money.

So whether you really have to tighten the belt or not, I’m curious if any of this describes your experiences of the economic disruptions of the last three years, which, frankly “inflation” only partially captures and describes.

Related Reading:

Owning a Car Is a Financial Decision

Kitchen Contentment

Pull To Inflate

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