Friday, March 13, 2015

The "Active Bottom" and the Bottom Line

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey. 
John Ruskin 
(As a child, sitting in the dentist's chair, I would read this quotation framed on the office wall.)
***
Knocking things about in the closet looking for something which, of course, I never found, I recently came upon a restaurant matchbook (remember them?) from the eatery that introduced me to fajitas (actually, I've never eaten them since, but that's neither here nor there). That dining occasion was around three decades ago, I'm sure. The dish itself had apparently sneaked its way up from the Southwest only a few years earlier; the New York Times first mentioned it in 1983.

It was barely a half-dozen years later that I myself first came across a mention of fajitas in the Times. What caught my eye was the title of the article: “How a Humble Cut Got a Fancy Price.”* In the piece, Florence Fabricant reported the staggering price rise of skirt steak, the cut of beef for fajitas, making it, because of the new food craze, “the second most expensive cut of beef, wholesale, with only the tenderloin costing more.” That was the “Fancy Price” part.

Fajitas were not a new food craze, however, among Mexicans living in Texas. A cheap cut of beef, it “used to cost about the same as ground beef and was the only cut of beef that Mexican immigrants in Texas could afford.” That was the “Humble Cut” part.

And so, they were priced out of their own cuisine:
''We were fine until the fajita craze went beyond Texas,'' said Dr. Jeff Savell, a professor of animal science at Texas A & M. ''The price is through the roof because demand for skirt steak is now exceeding the supply.''
As I write this on my MacBook, I am sitting here in a pair of sweatpants that cost me about 8 dollars. So I was amazed to read the other day that some folks are trying to flog their own sweats for 100 times as much. Indeed, as Marc Bain at Quartz.com points out:
A decade ago it would’ve been unimaginable for a pair of sweatpants to be as expensive as an iPod, let alone rival a MacBook.**
Previously, of course, the fashionistas had run up the price of the hard-working blue jean. Bain quotes a “fashion industry analyst” on the recent emergence of sweatpants as a fashion darling:
Because of the ability now to wear them as everyday attire, they’ve replaced the high-end jean market. . . .That same customer has migrated over to the active bottom.”***
*
Fajitas, jeans, sweatpants—with the turning of these three humble items of perfect practicality into examples of Veblenian show-offing by the dedicated followers of fashion, I think we see a kind of reverse Ruskinism at work. Instead of cheapening a product to attract those who only look at the bottom line (think of some of the infamous sardine-can airlines and what they've done to the overall experience of flying), the new con is to add a smidgeon here and little dab there and jack up the prices to appeal to the vacuous vain.

And if perchance some of those v-v's catch on to the hollowness of fashionistadom and decide to retreat, like Candide, to cultivate their own garden, they will discover, unfortunately, that they don't have the clothes for the job.

***
*http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/26/garden/how-a-humble-cut-got-a-fancy-price.html



***You have to love that “active bottom” part. I leave that to your imagination.