The Very Best of Casual Kitchen 2017

With 2017 almost in the bag, here's my annual retrospective of Casual Kitchen's best posts of the year.

Once again, I want to thank you, readers, for your time, your attention, and your support. I'm deeply grateful. See you all in January!
***********************

Top Posts of 2017

8) How To Beat Inflation

7) Why Bad Blogs Get More Readers

6) When Food Advocates Tell You What To Serve Your Customers

5) If I Can't Give Advice (!) How Do I Evangelize Frugality and Anticonsumerism?

4) Nine Terrible Ways to Make Choices (That You Probably Didn't Know You Were Using)

3) Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You

2) Running Towards Humps

1) Checkers... and Chess

Note for new readers: If you're new here and you'd like to look over Casual Kitchen's best work over the years, a great place to start is the "Best Of" posts from each year:

Best of Casual Kitchen 2016

Best of Casual Kitchen 2015

Best of Casual Kitchen 2014

Best of Casual Kitchen 2013

Best of Casual Kitchen 2012

Best of Casual Kitchen 2011


Finally, let me thank all readers, new and old, for generously supporting my work with your kind purchases at Amazon via the links at this site!

When Restaurants Stop Being Worth It

There is an existential crisis in the restaurant industry. Right now.

Forget about Chili's re-re-vamping their menu to try to win back alienated customers. The restaurant industry is now getting squeezed from multiple directions: rising minimum wages, rising rents, rising legal and regulatory costs, and of course rising food costs too.

What's new this time around is the industry finds itself absolutely unable to pass these costs through to consumers in the form of higher prices.

The latest and most shocking admission of this was from the restaurant chain Red Robin [ticker symbol RRGB]. Red Robin's management said this in their most recent quarterly conference call:

"A top area of focus for us has been managing labor costs. The minimum wage and general regulatory environment is growing at an unprecedented rate, especially on the West Coast, where we have our strongest and largest footprint. Hourly wages are up again this year in the mid-single digits, and we know there's no appetite by today's consumer to spend more to cover this. Absorbing these increases with higher pricing is not an alternative for us."

There it is, straight out of the bird's, I mean CEO's, mouth: Not only are food and regulatory costs rising and minimum wage is increasing "at an unprecedented rate," but worst of all, they can't hike prices any more to compensate.

I'll share yet another an example from a local Irish pub we sometimes go to here in suburban New Jersey. This place is a basic, no frills, casual restaurant, a good place, and it now charges $11 for a burger. And an extra buck fifty for a piece of bacon and cheese.

So, imagine the management of this restaurant as they experience the same inevitable cost squeeze that Red Robin and others face. At first, they'll do what they've always done: they respond to their higher costs by passing them along to us. Just hike that burger's price by yet another buck.

That worked in the past, as the consumer didn't mind (or even notice) a burger increasing from $6 to $7 or $7 to $8.

But at some point the consumer notices. And minds. At some point, that burger just stops being worth it. Where that point is, it's hard to know. It depends. But when a basic burger starts to get up into the double digits, at $11-ish, $12-ish, can you hike prices another buck? And, then, a year from now another buck?

Before you know it, a modest dinner of, say, two burgers and two beers, maybe a side order, add in taxes and tip... suddenly, you're looking at a sixty or seventy dollar tab. For burgers and beers.

It ain't worth it. So people stop going out to eat. This is exactly what intelligent consumers do in the face of inflation.

Heck, I can easily feed the two of us for two weeks on $70.

Even Jim Cramer, stock market spaz for the masses, is onto this. Partly it's because he actually owns a restaurant, a Mexican place in Brooklyn. Regarding these trends, he wrote recently:

"It's a nightmare for any restaurateur. And it's just beginning."

A final note, regarding yet more synergies of being an investor and a (frugal) consumer. You'd have seen this theme coming, likely as much as a few years ago, if you were paying attention to the rising cost--and increasingly questionable value--of dining out versus cooking at home.


Resources:
Red Robin's Third Quarter 2017 conference call transcript


Finally a quick housekeeping note: Next week I'll run Casual Kitchen's top posts of 2017. Stay tuned!!

Read Next: How to Become a Sophisticated Investor: Six Steps

Never Try to Change Someone’s Opinion

This astonishingly direct quote caught my eye recently, from the blunt yet always thought-provoking Wall Street Playboys blog:

"Changing an Opinion: No point here. Unless someone is completely new to a topic there is no point in changing their opinion. It won't happen and if you're right they will simply dislike you because their ego took a hit (you were right and they were wrong). This is not a good way to win at life. Instead of trying to change opinions make a decision on if the person has already made a strong opinion. This is the real trick. If someone is 100% new to a topic then feel free to provide an opinion. If they already have an opinion, just agree with it and take their side of the argument. Besides. In order to have your own strong opinion you should be able to argue the other side with ease… This will save you a large amount of time and we can't over state that enough: 1) figure out if they have a strong opinion – takes a few minutes, 2) then decide to either agree *or* give an actual opinion (if they have an opinion just agree). 

In addition, if you read this paragraph and disagree, we think you have a good point and things aren't black and white so there are definitely grey areas (see if you catch the joke)."

One of the reasons I wanted to write a post about this quote was to remind myself to not be like either person in situations like this. Don't be the guy trying to change somebody else's strongly-held opinion... but also, don't be the other guy, the one who's rigidly ego-attached to his own strongly-held opinion such that he dislikes somebody for the horrible crime of having a differing view.

So, here's my four bullet point checklist for any situation where people ask for (or offer!) opinions:

1) When someone asks your opinion, ask back: "What do you think?" or "What's your view?"

2) If the person does not have an already formed opinion, you may consider the idea of sharing your opinion. Maybe.

3) If the person does have an already-formed opinion, smile, nod and agree. Save time and energy!

And, last:
4) Don't have ego attachments to the rightness or wrongness of your opinions. Much of what we think we know is wrong anyway, we just haven't found it out yet.

Readers, what do you think?


READ NEXT: What Underwear Teaches You About Saving Time AND Money

Rebellion Practice

"I just demonstrated to myself and the world around me that I'm not controlled by it."
--Stephen Guise, from How to Be an Imperfectionist
********************************

I just finished a striking little book: How to Be an Imperfectionist by Stephen Guise. First of all, let me recommend it--highly--to Casual Kitchen readers. Today I'd like to share just one of the many, many good ideas in it: The idea of practicing "rebellion."

First, a little background. Guise's book is for people who struggle with perfectionism, and one of the central themes of his book is to stop letting your perfectly reasonable desire to do things "well" freeze you from doing things at all.

That our desire to "do things well" could actually subvert us might be a counterintuitive idea for some readers. But think about it: if you can't do something well, it's, well, kind of embarrassing. Our egos hate the idea that other people will see us suck--perhaps suck badly--at something. As a result, our egos will generally try to protect us from embarrassment by giving us rationalizations for not trying in the first place. And of course these rationalizations always seem like real reasons in the moment. No one who rationalizes realizes it--that's how rationalizing works. In fact if you look at this through the lens of evolutionary psychology, this ego activity could even be seen as a survival mechanism.

However, if you think about what the source of that embarrassment is, it's our internal assumptions about other peoples' expectations. So, the idea of "practicing rebellion" gets at rejecting or even defying those expectations. As well as our own.

Thus practicing rebellion means seeking out rejection, discomfort and even embarrassment. It means, as I once phrased it here in another post, "running towards humps." And it means not being a good little boy (or girl), obediently doing all the things we're told to do by our egos, by our peer group, by our modern consumer-driven society, and so on. Rebel.

It's up to you to choose what your rebellion might be, and you can feel free to start small. In his book, Stephen Guise shares some modest examples of his own, such as lying down in public places, singing out loud in public, or talking to strangers.

I'll confess, neatniks like me can't lie down in public places, and I definitely don't want to subject the world to my singing. As far as talking to strangers, that's such a perfectly normal behavior for me that I'd have to rebel the other way and not talk to strangers. The point, of course, is to each his own. You have to pick the type of rebellion that suits you.

Here's a list of possible ways you might practice rebellion, some cribbed directly from Guise's book, others I brainstormed on my own. Feel free to add your own ideas!

Rebelling against a typical way of living
Rebelling against any standard or expectation
Rebelling against "play-it-safe" living
Rebelling against the urge to seek acceptance or approval from others.
Rebelling against expected comportment in a given situation
Rebelling against consumerism, against solving problems by making a purchase
Rebelling against talking about politics or the media's latest outrage du jour
Rebelling against standard relationship types (not marrying, etc.)
Rebelling against the dietary conventions of those around you
Rebelling against fashion or clothing conventions (have an unusual hairstyle or clothing)
Rebelling against gadget trends
Rebelling against Facebook or other false/artificial ways to be "connected"
Rebelling against concern over mistakes
Take a sabbatical in the middle of a successful career
Drive a crappy car, even if you can afford a nice one
Have a radically unusual hobby or pastime
Put yourself into odd or uncomfortable social situations deliberately

... and so on.

Note that we can already surmise a few major side benefits from some of these practices. For example, practicing rebellion against consumerism will make you wealthy. Practicing rebellion against things like discussing politics will make you happier. And so on. What's not to like?

Toward your own identity
The point is to run toward that flinch/embarrassment reflex that we all have rather than shying away from it (for more on the flinch see here and here). Consider it a daily kata to train our egos to become less fragile to embarrassment and the perceived judgment of others.

As Stephen Guise phrases it: "It's very desirable to have a desensitized embarrassment reflex, because it brings you freedom."

What he means is here is this is a step towards finding your own identity. Most of us simply participate, without realizing it, in a set of behaviors and identity characteristics established for us by our society, peers and family. So, by choosing to rebel against this "imposed identity" which has been set for you by others, you become more free to seek out an identity that's truly and inherently you.

Obviously rebellion practice can be done at any level, and I encourage you to think about it both metaphorically and literally, and practice your own acts of "rebellion" to the level you consider appropriate.

"Those who need approval don't know who they are." - Stephen Guise



Read Next: Why I Clip Coupons (and Why You Should Too)

What Barefoot Running Taught Us About Expensive Sneakers (And What Nike and Others Really Don’t Want You To Know)

"You're definitely gonna want to pay a lot of money for good quality sneakers. I mean, seriously, if you go running in those $29.99 loser no-name running shoes, you'll hurt your knees! Or your iliotibial band. Or something. You'll definitely hurt something.

Forget those cheap shoes. These $175 running shoes are far better. Mass produced, yet designed to fit your feet. And they're built for comfort, with extra padding to absorb all those shocks to your body."

Readers, this is the basic marketing message behind high-end sneaker brands. For many, it's highly persuasive. After all, how dumb would it be to take a chance on some no-name pair of sneakers... and maybe hurt yourself. Right?

But then, something odd happened.

Some ten or so years ago, "barefoot running" became all the rage. And it raised questions the sneaker industry didn't want you asking. For example, a thoughtful if sarcastic sneaker buyer might ask, "Now hold on a minute: First I had to buy overpriced cushiony sneakers to protect myself from injury. And now you're telling me I don't even need shoes?"

But it gets worse: it turns out that many if not most running injuries result from protecting ourselves too much. All that padding in all those ultra-expensive shoes actually prevents our body from feeling, sensing and properly responding to the various healthy stresses of running. Or, as researchers at the University of Oregon found, "the greater the cushioning in the shoe, the greater the impact shock on the leg."

Ironically, this highly counterintuitive discovery was made in Eugene, Oregon--barely a hundred or so miles from Nike's world headquarters in Beaverton. Huh.

Somehow, our consumer civilization transformed running--a quintessentially basic human act--into an expensive pastime, with luxury-branded shoes, unpronounceable injuries... and $300+ marathon entry fees.

It's also instructive to observe the shoe industry's response. After all, no one makes money not selling shoes, so Nike and other high end sneaker brands had to at least try to figure out a way to "brand" the barefoot running experience too.

And so, for only about a hundred bucks or so, we can buy a pair of Nike "Barefoot-Like" sneakers. They're for sale on Nike's website, right next to all those expensive heavily-padded shoes we were supposed to buy before.

Readers, tell me, how are expensive branded sneakers any different from any other zombie-based advertising/consumption cycle? And if it bugs you to pay 30% more for, say, a name-brand can of tuna when it furtively emerges out of the same third-party factory as lower-priced unbranded tuna, shouldn't it bug you enormously to pay 700% more for sneakers? Especially when all those sneaker features they use to justify their high price at best make no difference, and at worst might actually hurt us?

A final note: Speaking as a three-time marathoner and multi-time half-marathoner who's logged thousand and thousands of running miles, most running injuries are form- or technique-based. This goes double for casual runners. In other words, fix your running form, improve your technique, and you'll run injury-free in whatever pair of reasonably priced sneakers you're happy with. For readers interested in an excellent resource on how to improve running technique, I strongly recommend Danny Dreyer's book Chi Running.



Resources:
1) A short video of a fateful day when the NY Times did a piece on barefoot running. Hipsters raged, then bravely began the search for the next new thing. Note also the mention of the University of Oregon's biomechanical research study at 2:21 in the video.

2) More on how to run barefoot.

3) Why is too much protection a bad thing? For more on this topic, see Nicholas Taleb's discussion of the concepts of hormesis and mithridization in his book Antifragile.


READ NEXT: The Unintended Irony of Pabst Beer
AND: When U Know The Cost, U Know the Margins

Carrot and Tarragon Soup (Yet Another "Laughably Cheap" Recipe!)

You could easily pay $9.00 for an appetizer-size serving of this delicious soup in some trendy Manhattan restaurant. It would probably arrive in one of those annoying one-inch deep bowls.

But we're going to make this soup at home, serve it in a normal bowl, and we're going to do it for around three bucks for the entire pot. Which means this soup runs about 45-50c a serving, making it a front-runner for one of our most laughably cheap recipes here at Casual Kitchen.

People who say healthy food has to cost a lot simply have no clue.

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we did!
******************************

Carrot and Tarragon Soup
Heavily adapted and simplified from Laurel's Kitchen

Ingredients:
6-7 carrots, peeled, cut into large 2-3” chunks
2-3 potatoes, peeled, cut into large 2-3” chunks
Water to cover

2-3 Tablespoons butter (or olive oil or canola oil)
2 onions, coarsely chopped
1 generous teaspoon dried tarragon
2 cups milk
2-3 cups water
1/2 cup white table wine
1/4 teaspoon black pepper and optional salt to taste

Directions:
1) Peel carrots and potatoes, chop into 2-3” chunks, and cover with water in a 4 quart pot. Bring to a boil and simmer until carrots are tender/al dente, about 20 minutes.

2) While carrots and potatoes are simmering, chop onions and add to a large soup pot with butter and dried tarragon. Saute onions for 10 minutes or so on medium heat until soft. Let stand.

3) When carrots and potatoes are cooked, drain and transfer to a food processor or blender in (roughly) three batches. With each batch, add about a third of both the 2-3 cups each of the milk and water. Puree until smooth, then transfer puree to soup pot and combine with the onions/tarragon. Add any of the remaining water and milk to the soup pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for 5-7 minutes or so. Add black pepper and optional salt if desired.

Serves 6-7 as a main dish.

Two recipe notes:
1) Let's itemize the cost of this laughably cheap recipe:

Butter/oil 15c
Onions 40c
Carrots 60c
Potatoes 40c
Milk 65c
Cheap box white wine 75c
Spices 10c
Total Cost: about $3.05 or about 45-50c per serving

2) Second, thinking about a snotty Manhattan restaurant serving $9 soups in one-inch deep bowls reminds me of Aesop's fable of the fox and the stork.

3) Finally, a few related links for new readers:

a) The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
b) MORE! Top 25 Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
c) Ten Healthy Recipes for Under $1 a Serving
d) Glossary of Casual Kitchen Memes

How You Can Beat Inflation, Part 2

...continued from last week:

In our last post we talked about expanding how we think about competition and substitution in order to defeat inflation and shift the balance of power back into consumers' hands. Let's pivot now from the spending side of the ledger over to the savings and income side of the ledger, and try to think creatively about attacking inflation on a second front.

Labor markets: tightening
One of the fortunate aspects of inflation is it tends to coincide with lower unemployment rates and an improving economy. Remember last post when we talked about making companies compete to sell to us? Well, labor market conditions are tightening, which means, finally, employers are beginning to compete for workers.

This means a couple of things. For one, enterprising workers who are valued by their employers and willing to ask for what they want can potentially get more money for the jobs they already have. Second, other opportunities are likely be opening up for you, right now, for a superior work situation. Start looking.

Both employment and wage increases tend to lag a recovery, which means now is the time to start taking advantage of the most direct way to beat inflation: get more money.

Side hustles/additional income sources
Last week we talked about monopolies in the consumer marketplace. Here's another way to think about a monopoly: if you have one job, your employer is a monopoly provider of your income. Your employer has maximum power over you, and it can "substitute" you right out of a job under the flimsiest of pretexts, whenever it wants!

To borrow a phrase from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's must-read book Antifragile, this makes you fragile to the loss of all of your income. Not good.

You cannot consider yourself to be truly robust financially if a) you have a monopoly income provider and b) your monopoly income provider can, by terminating your job, spontaneously shut off all of your income. This is why all households ought to be thinking, Wall Street Playboys-like, about what kind of side hustles they can run to supplement income from their primary job.

My domain of expertise is stock market investing, thus that's where I try to drive incremental income for my household. But there is no shortage of ways to earn extra money on the side, and plenty of resources that cover this topic better than I could. Once again, remember our primary heuristic: the more broadly we think about competition and substitution (and monopoly providers of things like our income!), the more we can eliminate various fragilities in our financial lives.

Turning an expense into an income source
One major insight from Jacob Lund Fisker's book Early Retirement Extreme is to look for ways to "monetize" your hobbies: Fisker loved bicycles, taught himself how to fix them, and gradually fell into a modest income source repairing them. Recently, I taught myself how to string tennis racquets. Now, not only have I dramatically reduced one of my largest tennis-related expenses, I'm now in a position to string other peoples' racquets for additional income!

In both these cases we've taken an inflation-prone expense and not only neutralized it, but turned it into a source of funds. I'll leave it to you to figure out where in your life you can apply this important insight.

Low overhead, low fixed costs
The late publisher Felix Dennis, in his useful book How to Get Rich, used to say "overhead walks on two legs."

I gotta be honest: that phrase makes absolutely no sense. But, well, he's from England.

What he's getting at, however, is this: never, ever, ever get yourself in a situation where you have high fixed overhead costs. Felix Dennis kept his organizations lean, mean and flexible so they could withstand anything--any kind of financial stresses. And whenever a windfall came in, rather than getting spent covering expenses and overhead, that income dropped right down to the bottom line.

Why can't we keep our households lean, mean and flexible too?

Debt = Fragility
The first and most obvious step most families can take towards making their households lean is to pay down all debts. Debt makes you fragile. It saddles you with non-negotiable monthly fixed costs that swell up your expenses, limit your flexibility, and crowd out your ability to manage inflation.

But believe it or not, debt can be an inflation fighting tool. Let me explain how.

Here at Casual Kitchen, we carry a modest mortgage on our townhome. When we first started seeing a few too many "non-beat-backable" examples of price inflation, like our auto insurance bill, our property taxes and some of the other examples I discussed in Part 1 of this post, we put a plan into place to accelerate paying off our mortgage entirely.

Our plan is to get this cost item paid off and eliminated from our household ledger for good by the end of 2018. This will create significant room in our budget to compensate for quite a bit of other sources of inflation in areas where we have less control.

A quick sidebar. Traditional economic "logic" says that borrowers benefit from periods of inflation. If you borrow money today (assuming you can do so at attractively low interest rates, a not-always-true presumption) you can then pay it back with lower-value dollars in the future. That's what the economic textbooks say at least.

The truth is debt is a fixed overhead cost burden that you are better off not having at all. The money you vaporize to service your debts could can be far better used to fund a huge savings buffer, or to fund investments in long-term, inflation-protected cash flows. Unlike a large debt load, these protect your family, making you more financially robust.

Nearly every household in our country carries a significant level of debt, which means nearly every household lights a meaningful portion of their money on fire, every month, just so they can use someone else's money to buy things they likely never even needed in the first place.

Eliminate all debt. Overhead walks on two legs. Eliminate that overhead and you'll free up room in your budget to handle all sources of inflation and then some.

Now, let's move on to our final and most powerful tool for defeating inflation.

Income generating investments
A detailed discussion on investing is beyond the scope of this post and likely beyond the scope of this blog.[1] But we'll make room here for a few general heuristics you can use to diversify your sources of income using the amazing vehicle of conservative dividend paying stocks.

Remember in last week's post when we were talking about companies with pricing power? Those are the types of companies you'll want to consider for investments. Or, as I phrased it in another post here at Casual Kitchen: "Wherever you find a highly profitable company charging prices well above intrinsic value, forget buying the product. Buy the stock instead."

I'll share a couple of examples from my personal investing activities: my dividend on my Coca-Cola stock has more than quadrupled since I bought my first shares in 1999. Since the financial crisis in 2008-2009, JP Morgan hiked its dividend from a post-crisis low of 5c a share to 56c a share, an eleven fold increase.

I have yet to see a product in the consumer marketplace inflate prices at that kind of rate, not even status-signalling iPhones.

Which reminds me! Apple stock paid its first quarterly dividend in 2012, a modest 38c a share. In the five years since, the company has nearly doubled the dividend, a growth rate of some 15% a year.

I don't know if we can expect these types of dividend growth rates going forward, but you can put a relatively high level of confidence on all of these companies, and many others like them, increasing their dividends over time at rates equal to or exceeding inflation. This genre of stocks should be one of the pillars of your overall investment strategy.

Conclusion and review
Once again, let's return to Galbraith's "at-risk" households: those with no control over their income, no control over prices they pay, and "no capacity to protect themselves by increasing their own returns." While we can't control everything--here and there we will have to eat a price hike--we now have several tools we can use to increase our "capacity" to protect ourselves and our families from inflation:

* Think about competition and substitution as broadly and as empoweringly as possible
* Improve your brinksmanship: increase your ability to say "no" to more and more products and services in the consumer marketplace
* Avoid monopoly and oligopoly providers in as many forms as you can
* Ruthlessly strip out overhead ("overhead walks on two legs")
* Relentlessly pay off all debts (debt = fragility)
* Save more, both into a large emergency fund and into income generating investments
* Don't let your job be a "monopoly income source"--diversify away from it now, even if you do so in small steps at first.

Good luck and get started!


[1] Footnote: Resources for further reading:
For those readers interested in more articles and resources about investing, see:
1) Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases
2) Synergies of Being an Investor AND a Consumer
3) Money Sundays: The "Stoplight Rule" For Creating An Emergency Fund
4) Ask CK: More on Emergency Funds

And, be sure to see my chapter-by-chapter analysis of Your Money Or Your Life, [full archive here], and in particular,
5) Becoming a Sophisticated Investor: Six Steps
6) The Official "Your Money Or Your Life" Reading List
7) Ask Casual Kitchen: Best Investing Books

How To Beat Inflation

How do you deal with inflation and price increases? I've noticed quite a few price hikes over the past several months across the consumer marketplace: in the grocery store, on the menus at local restaurants, in the costs of various services... the list goes on. Some examples from our household:

* Our cable company hiked our internet bill 9%.
* Many product categories in our primary local grocery store have seen price hikes: a few that come to mind: store brand peanuts $2.49 to $2.99 (20%) and then to $3.29 (32% cumulatively), soy milk: 33% ($1.50 to $1.99). pineapples 20% ($2.50 to $2.99).
* Our automobile insurance bill went up a surprise 10% in the last billing cycle.
* Our townhouse community fees increased about 5% last year.
* And our property taxes jumped 8% two years ago as our town put through new assessments.

Of course, let's not forget one of the worst examples of inflation today: increases in health insurance policy premiums, which seem to inflate at a shocking rate each year.

All of this made me want to attempt to collect and organize my thoughts for readers on how best to deal with inflation and price increases. Unfortunately, I can't solve the inflation problem directly, that's the job of all those stone-handed economic geniuses at the Federal Reserve. But I what I can do is share some heuristics and general principles to help us blunt inflation's impact on our household budgets.

Let's start by stealing a quote and a conceptual framework on inflation from economist John Kenneth Galbraith, from his book The Affluent Society:

"Those individuals and groups will suffer most which have the least control over their prices or wages and hence the least capacity to protect themselves by increasing their own returns."

Galbraith ain't the greatest writer in the world, but what he's trying to say here is you want to increase your flexibility on both sides of the ledger--with both income and expenses. Those households without much room between income and expenses, those carrying high fixed costs, those that can't (or won't) save aggressively, and those unable to control their incomes at least to some extent--it's those households inflation hurts the worst.

Don't be that kind of household. To ensure your family isn't like the "at-risk" example Galbraith describes, you'll want to add to your income, cut expenses, and beat price hikes where you can. All three--at the same time.

Okay. Let's move from the theoretical and get into some practical ideas.

The ability to say no
The things we buy in life can be broken down into two categories: things we need and things we don't. Many posts here at Casual Kitchen address how easy it is to confuse needs with wants, and inflation in the price of a given product or service gives us a way to clarify the confusion. The more you can consider something as a want rather than a need, and the more you can simply say "no" to that product or service, the more power you have over the entity selling to you.

Some of our peers tell us they could never part with television. Now, I never judge peoples' horrible media consumption habits, but if that's your position, guess what? To the extent you believe TV is a "need" you lose all your leverage. You lose the ability to use true brinkmanship with the supplier. Yes, you can use all the Ramit cost-savings scripts you like. But if you won't cancel service when it really gets down to it, the company holds all the cards, not you.

Eventually, you're going to eat a price hike.

In contrast, imagine a household that places cable television in the "want" rather than "need" category. In our case, that simple act of mental categorization at first enabled us to keep cable, as the cable company, smelling our utter indifference when we called to challenge a price hike, offered us a hilariously cheap deal. Ironic.

But eventually, as with all monopoly- or oligopoly-provided services (more on this in a moment) the price hikes inevitably resumed, and we simply eliminated the entire cost category from our life. We won the brinkmanship battle because we could always say no. And eventually we did. The more you can improve and expand your ability say no, whatever the product or service, the more power you have over inflation.

Sounds easy, right? The problem, of course, is sometimes there's no competition at all.

Monopoly providers
In our community, internet service is a monopoly, and--no surprise--they've put through multiple price increases in recent years. They do it because they can. It's a reality. We've managed to negotiate the last few away, but this summer they put through a 9% hike that we were unable to beat back.

Unfortunately, some price hikes you just have to eat, and we'll be eating this one. You won't be able to beat back every single manifestation of inflation. Instead, you'll have to make room for the ones you can't beat back by driving down costs elsewhere in your budget.

Oligopoly providers
Oligopolies are markets where there are very few players competing. Here's where we often see creeping inflation and the dreaded "pricing umbrella," where the most dominant company in an oligopoly hikes prices and the other competitors follow along. It's not collusion exactly. It's not like these companies get together in a smoky back room and agree to hike prices in advance (which is illegal). They are, however, still free to watch each others' pricing decisions in the open market, and either follow along or not.

Branded consumer products companies tend to be worst offenders here, which is why you want to try and both avoid their products and invest in their stocks. More on that next week in part two of this post.

Substitution/Competition: broadening our primary weapon
It's an elementary economic concept to know that the more competition there is in a market, the lower prices will be, and the less likely there will be inflation. I wouldn't be teaching you anything by telling you this--you already know it.

What I want readers to do instead is to view "competition" as broadly as possible in all consumer marketplaces.

Branding is one way companies try to artificially limit competition. If you only buy Bumblebee Tuna for example, you're enabling a type of mini-monopoly market, and setting up a possible pain point for inflation in the future. On the other hand, if you know the real truth about canned tuna, and thus are indifferent to branding, you can switch.

And the ability to switch or substitute is a consumer's primary weapon of empowerment. The question is, can we think about substitution in ridiculously broad terms, and impose more competition across more markets--and thus increase our overall power as consumers?

Let's go over an example of what I mean. One of the most basic substitution examples, one you'd find in an introductory economics textbook, is the idea of substituting chicken for beef based on whichever meat is least expensive. But Casual Kitchen readers steeped in the practice of almost meatless cooking should be able to broaden the substitution possibilities far, far further, by rotating in laughably cheap vegetarian meals for some meat-centered meals.

If you think about it, this makes meat providers "compete" far more expansively. They're not just competing against other meat providers, we're making them compete against vegetables too! In other words, you've created circumstances where all of these food providers have to compete against each other for your food dollars. And this gives you more options and flexibility than ever.

Interestingly, one of the primary flaws in measuring inflation decades ago resulted from the government failing to take into account the substitutability of many products in the consumer marketplace. Heh. We won't be making that mistake.

Substitution and competition can be thought of still more broadly, at all levels of the consumer marketplace. For example, think beyond the mere product level. Competition and substitution can be found at the store level too: If any store hikes prices beyond what you think is reasonable, go to another store.

So, we now have our first set of weapons for combating inflation, and here's the general heuristic for readers: source as many of your "needs" from markets that are competitive, and for each need, have as many substitution possibilities as you can, in as broad a sense as you can. To the extent you can expand the envelope of competition and substitution across all things you buy, you will massively increase your leverage and flexibility over price inflation.

Next week we'll look at still more ways to beat inflation in Part 2: we'll look at the issue from the income and employment side of the ledger, and we'll consider some unusual ways to think about overhead and investing. Stay tuned!

Ten Book Recommendations (Actually, Eleven)

Readers, I thought I'd share a list of the best books I've read so far this year. And also, I have a favor to ask: What have you been reading lately that you'd recommend? Please share in the comments--I'm always looking for new reading material.

A quick housekeeping note: if you'd like to support Casual Kitchen, one of the best ways to do so is to visit Amazon using any link here at this site. I then get paid a modest commission, at no incremental cost to you, on anything you buy on that visit. As always, I'm grateful for my reader's support!

Now, on to the books:

Spent -- Geoffrey Miller
This book looks at consumer behavior through the lens of evolutionary psychology, and it helps explain much of the conspicuous trait-signalling and virtue-signalling we see all around us. This book was at times funny and at other times tone-deaf, but it gives readers--particularly frugal, Casual Kitchen-type readers--a helpful set of tools for understanding modern consumerism.

The Hidden Life of Trees -- Peter Wohlleben
An unusual, even kooky book, but absolutely hypnotic. You might think you already appreciate trees… read this book and you'll appreciate them far more.

Never Split the Difference -- Chris Voss
An excellent book on negotiating. Readable, insightful, and often counterintuitive.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up -- Marie Kondo
A book that really changed the way I think, and one that has forever changed how I think about my stuff. If you could only pick one book from this list, make it this one.

Spark Joy -- Marie Kondo
This is a companion guide to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Where "Tidying Up" had a lot of philosophy and theory, Spark Joy gets into the pragmatics and practical applications of how to execute the specific steps of tidying. Use both.

Happier -- Tal Ben-Shahar
Useful. Offers readers helpful techniques and mini-habits to spur self-awareness and gratitude in your daily life. (Note: this author is an intellectual disciple of Martin Seligman, whose book Learned Optimism was also a subject for an unusual post here at Casual Kitchen)

Hannibal -- Harold Lamb
No, not Hannibal Lecter. I'm talking about the Hannibal, the general from the lost city of Carthage. This is a short, well-written biography, telling the nearly unbelievable story of how Hannibal attacked Rome after moving his entire army (including, incredibly, his elephants) across the Alps. Excellent.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid -- Douglas Hofstadter
I strongly recommend this book for geeks, and strongly do not recommend it for normal people. But if you're a geek and you take pride in being so, you'll never forget the experience of reading this foundational book, which has helped shape the past few decades' discussions on consciousness, software programming, recursion, and artificial intelligence.

The Education of a Value Investor -- Guy Spier
Best investment book I've read this year by far. Excellent advice on how to control your intellectual and emotional inputs, useful thinking on what kinds of media you should (or shouldn't) consume, and helpful insights about what kinds of people you should surround yourself with (consensus thinkers or rigorous non-consensus thinkers), and even thoughts on how often you should check stock prices (in my case, less often--probably a lot less often). This is a very honest book that looks at the "water" we're in, and how to to improve the intellectual environment driving our investing decisions.

Capital -- Karl Marx
No one actually reads Capital, they just opine about it. And in our modern era of infantalized, "I'll talk louder than you" public discourse, you can barely bring up this massively influential book without people losing their shit and spouting all their pre-fabbed opinions. It turns out, at least in my opinion, that there are two totally different ways to read Karl Marx's divisive book: you can see it as a bible for people who want to believe "capitalism" is a horrible, awful, no-good, really bad economic system, or you can read it as a how-to guide for joining the investor class. If you'd like to protect yourself financially and help construct a good future for you and your family, try reading it through the latter lens.

Second Class Needs

Keynes observed that the needs of human beings "fall into two classes--those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative only in that their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows."
--John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

Readers of Casual Kitchen already know all about status competition and costly trait signaling. Longer term readers will also recall the concept of desire triggering: by buying something, you can even extinguish a desire you never even knew you had until some company gave you that desire to quench in the first place.

There's an obvious insight that follows: If you want to avoid getting rudely separated from your money, simply avoid all purchases in this genre of "needs" Keynes discusses above. They aren't needs at all, they just feeeeeeeeeel like needs.

Which takes us to Galbraith and Keynes once again:

Keynes noted that needs of "the second class," i.e., those needs that are the result of efforts to keep abreast or ahead of one's fellow being, "may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they.”

Empowered consumers must know to separate needs of this "second class" from true needs. Further, they must also know the game: that these "needs" exist at every socioeconomic level--and no matter what your level of wealth, your attempts to satisfy them will take all the money you have, and then more.

Understanding this dynamic is a gigantic step towards playing the money game on the easy setting, and an even bigger step towards living a much more fulfilling life. Not to mention a far less expensive one.


READ NEXT: Epistemic Arrogance
And: Epistemic Humility

Costly Signalling

I just finished an intriguing book called Spent by Geoffrey Miller. I recommend it. In some ways the book is all over the place, covering more topics that it probably should, but to a patient and accommodating reader it offers plenty of useful insights.

One of the central themes of Spent is the idea of observing consumer behavior through the lens of evolutionary psychology. We all know that consumers buy things to "signal" desirable qualities and traits. This in itself is not a new idea--after all, Thorstein Veblen covered it in sarcastic detail in The Theory of the Leisure Class back in 1899. Heck, for that matter, Diogenes saw it back in 400 BC. We signal to the people around us that we are "fit" in the evolutionary sense: fit to be friends or peers, fit to be colleagues, fit to be a member of whatever tribe we're in, fit to be a mate, and so on.

The consumer marketplace gives us all kinds of methods to engage in signalling. We can signal wealth by buying expensive cars, clothes and houses. We can signal intelligence by buying shelfloads of books, or by name-dropping the Ivy League university where we got our MBA. We can signal environmental conscientiousness by waxing rhapsodic about the organic, fair trade bulgur we bought at that family-owned health food store in town.

Unfortunately, it can get awfully expensive to do all this signalling. What if, instead, we were to look at signalling activity from the perspective of consumer empowerment?

One thing to consider: If you think about it, all signals given via purchases made in the consumer marketplace are essentially... facades. Returning to our luxury car example, let's say you buy an expensive car to signal economic fitness, and by doing so you successfully attract many mating partners and friends.

Here's one problem that comes to mind right away: you will have attracted the kind of people who judge you by the car you drive.

That's bad enough... but there's an even bigger problem. Your actual economic fitness will become quickly obvious to all of those mating partners and friends once they actually get to know you. The whole point of attracting friends and mates is for them to know the real you, right? So when they find out (and they will find out) that you can barely swing your monthly lease payment, and that your "wealth signal" was totally phony, your facade instantly crumbles away, and these alleged friends and mates (who you attracted under essentially false pretenses) will neither care about your nor the luxuriousness of your car.

All facades crumble. Better to have built true financial fitness instead--by not buying that car in the first place.

In fact, taking this one step further, you could argue that a sophisticated observer of consumer behavior could judge an expensive car as a signal of anti-fitness. The signal of always driving late-model luxury automobiles, viewed across a person's entire lifetime, might represent not wealth, but the waste of hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal financial capital! This is a second-order insight you might distill from, say, books like The Millionaire Next Door or Your Money Or Your Life.

Now, in the archives of Casual Kitchen, we've written about the idea of driving old cars as an act of mini-rebellion against consumerism, against financial waste, and against the idea of raising the bar of status competition for the people around us. But as much as we anticonsumerists like to think we're above base displays of fitness signalling, these things are acts of signalling too.

What driving an old and highly practical car signals, I'm not quite certain. I'd like it to signal something along the lines of "I have the confidence to drive an old car and not worry about what people think." But then again, perhaps it signals "I'm slightly dull." Or "I'm slightly dull, thus I am unlikely to get pec implants and a mistress, therefore I am signalling I would be a very steady and economically desirable mate." It's hard to say.

Of course, I'm not judging any of these signals in the least (really, I'm not!). What I want to illustrate is that this last signal--uh, whatever it happens to mean--costs a lot less to put out there than a lifetime of buying late-model luxury cars. A whole heck of a lot less.

The point here is to be aware not only of trait signalling, but also to be aware that we all do it--even if we'd like to think we don't. As "hypersocial status-seeking primates" as Spent's author Geoffrey Miller would phrase it, we are genetically built to signal. In fact, the entire reason we're even here talking about this topic in the first place was because our genes successfully signaled fitness over time, and thus survived to the present day.

The empowered consumer, then, finds a way to signal the right kinds of fitness without resorting to buying things in the consumer marketplace. Those signals are the costliest--and the most transparently artificial.

So what signals are you giving off by the purchases you make? Or, more importantly, the purchases you don't make?


READ NEXT: The Scientific Study That Cried Wolf

"Women's Vitamins"

Readers, see the following embarrassingly amateurish photo, and tell me: what do you think might be the difference between these two types of vitamins?

Well, one is branded--by Bayer, one of the most trusted brands in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. The other isn't.

One is a "women's formula" and offers consumers "bone and breast health support." The other, with its more modest and plausible claims of being "gluten free" and offering "daily well being," doesn't make me laugh quite as hysterically.

Granted, the branded vitamin contains calcium and a few bonus obscure minerals, all of which you already get in sufficient amounts from a normal diet:

Branded

Unbranded

Let's face it: these two bottles of vitamin tablets are virtually identical. And given recent research on vitamins, neither will likely make any difference to your health.

The only distinction: one costs about three times as much per tablet.

Now, you might rationalize this price differential by arguing that the "untrustworthy" generic vitamin was probably manufactured in some horrible Chinese sweatshop by exploited, underpaid workers who secretly added extra lead and mercury to each pill. And of course the "trustworthy" brand was surely manufactured by people who care, who really care about you, and would never outsource manufacturing to anybody.

Feel free to think this if it makes you feel better. But the rest of the readers here at Casual Kitchen know that a brand signifies nothing about who makes, packages, or formulates the product inside. Nothing.

The only difference is the cost premium of the branded product, paid by you and received by them in the form of excess profit. And... the pill's bigger.

READ NEXT: How to Own the Consumer Products Industry--And I Mean Literally Own It

And: Consumer Empowerment: How To Self-Fund Your Consumer Products Purchases

When Food Advocates Tell You What To Serve Your Customers

It was interesting to see Chili's re-rejigger their menu recently, eliminating a number of recently added healthier menu items to focus on the chain's traditional fare of burgers, ribs and fajitas.

Yet again, another well-meaning company, while attempting to "healthify" their menu, discovers their customers never went there for healthy food in the first place. Nobody goes to Chili's for quinoa and kale.

But Chili's recent about-face highlights a risk all companies face: not knowing the difference between what people say they want and what people actually want.

Or to put a finer distinction on it: what people who know what's good for us say they want, and what actual customers want.

Consider food policy experts like Marion Nestle or Michele Simon: both would love it, simply love it, if chains like Chili's and McDonald's were to offer far more "healthier" food options.[1] They've both put extensive public pressure on many of these companies, criticizing their current food offerings and demanding healthy items like salads, fruit, and so on. And even when, say, McDonald's does offer a healthier option, it never satisfies: Nestle and Simon will reliably say the company "hasn't gone far enough."

But here's the problem: Michele Simon and Marion Nestle aren't customers of these chain restaurants. Neither would be caught dead eating at a Chili's, much less McDonald's. Hilariously, Michele Simon even wrote in her book that she only enters fast food joints to use their rest rooms![2]

Which takes us to an interesting question: When a food policy expert campaigns for major menu changes at restaurants they'll never go to, can you come up with any reason--any reason whatsoever--why a company would bother to listen? If a food advocate wants to influence what companies offer their customers, is this really the way to go about it?


READ NEXT: The Consumer Must Be Protected At All Times
And: When It Comes To Banning Soda, Marion Nestle Fights Dirty


Amazon Links: 
Michele Simon's book Appetite for Profit
Marion Nestle's book Food Politics


Footnotes:
[1] Let's set aside for the moment the highly uncomfortable topic of how recent dietary science has turned upside down much of our views about which foods are healthy.

[2] See Appetite For Profit, page 197: "Another survey showed that nearly all U.S. adults, at one time or another (97 percent) eat at fast food restaurants. For those of us (like me) who only see the inside of a fast food joint on long road trips (and even then just to use the restroom), this statistic is a sobering reminder of how the rest of the nation eats."

How to Use Ersatz Knowledge For YOUR Benefit, Not Theirs

This week's post offers some follow-up thoughts on an article from two weeks ago about ersatz knowledge. Today, I want to explore how we consumers can use it for our benefit.

Recall that when we talk about ersatz knowledge, we're talking about information that appears to be useful, but in reality is used to achieve ends contrary to the consumer's best interest. For example, after a consumer has painstakingly learned all about cigars, a genre of wine, or tennis racquets, the process of acquiring this knowledge produces a weird sort of loyalty in the consumer.

It's not really loyalty though. What it is is a desire to make this ersatz information worthwhile--to use it, to put it to work. And this becomes a ready-made justification for spending more money on that product: by going up-market, buying more expensive versions of the product, buying future versions of the product, buying various accessories for that product, and so on. Psychologists would call this justification of effort. After you put so much effort into learning about cigars, there's gotta be a payoff in there somewhere, right?

Thus we can see how ersatz knowledge can be used to extract a sort of long term buy-in from the consumer, causing us to spend more. Usually much more.

Some readers might misinterpret what I'm saying so far: "Wait, are you saying we shouldn't try to become more informed consumers? That we shouldn't learn anything about the products we're buying?" Holy cow, no. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, saying so would be in total contravention to everything I've ever written here at CK.

What I am saying is there is sometimes a game being played around you, a game that takes advantage of your laudable desire to learn. Therefore, I want you to be able to meta-interpret the information around you, to distinguish between ersatz and actual information, and to use this information to level the playing field. And to help you do this, I want to offer a few insights and clues to help you use ersatz information for your benefit, not theirs.

1) Use all product information to find price inefficiencies and opportunities. I'll share two examples here, one with wine and one with coffee. Typically, the domain of wine is fertile soil for the worst kind of ersatz information, but here's one major exception: wines from Chile, Argentina and New Zealand typically offer the same quality at a far better value than much higher-priced wines from France and California. Knowing this helps you save money. Another example: a commenter in my prior post talked about using knowledge about coffee to find better value in what he buys. In both of these cases you use their knowledge to save your money. Many domains are loaded down with ersatz information, but if you use that information with an eye to discovering value, you can actually save money while increasing the quality of what you buy.

2) Be wary--incredibly wary--if you repeatedly learn information about the same genre of products. The classic example here is Apple products. How often have you heard someone go on and on about some feature or app on their iPhone, but when the next version comes out, this same person goes on and on again about the next new features and apps on that phone too? In other words, if you're learning a body of knowledge over and over again about different versions of the same product, you're being played, badly.

3) Watch out when the people "informing" you are also selling to you. In such cases there's a gigantic likelihood that the vast majority of the information is ersatz, and that information is skillfully structured to get you to pay more... and rationalize it to yourself. One solution here is to balance all vendor-based information with external and independent sources (Consumer Reports, for example) to verify and sanity-check any information you've been given.

4) Recognize instances where you ego blinds you. If you can step back and observe your ego throwing up contra-evidence and contra-examples to defend all the knowledge you've painstakingly acquired (Ultra high-end beer really is worth it! Let me hold forth intelligently on all the reasons why! And none of this is ersatz expertise! Really!), you're more likely to avoid getting sucked in to a deep and inescapable buy-in process. Nobody likes to think they've been tricked by the very knowledge they thought important to learn. And certainly no one wants to learn that the expertise they painstakingly acquired is just an elaborate buy-in device to get them to spend more. Your ego will want to protect you from this embarrassing truth by rationalizing and justifying. Look out for it.

On a related note: one of the reasons I selected cigars to illustrate the concept of ersatz knowledge was because nobody reading a healthy food and frugality blog is going to be "into" cigars, and thus no reader is likely to personalize the product category and ego-defend against criticisms of their knowledge of it. This (I hope) allowed me to better illustrate the concept. More on this at the end of the post.

5) Do you spend more now on this product compared to before? Once you learn all their terminology, once you're in their club with your knowledge, isn't it funny how you always seem to be spending a crapload more? This is the easiest-to-see clue that we've been taken in by ersatz information. With all this amazing information you now have, why do you seem to be carrying water for them, giving them so much more of your hard-earned money?

6) Watch out for status-signalling and virtue-signalling. Once again, let's consider the always-instructive domain of wine: the ersatz knowledge in this domain really seems like real knowledge, largely because consumers can signal sophistication and intelligence by regurgitating it. Do you enjoy signalling your knowledge by holding forth about a product or service that's been sold to you? When your knowledge of a product starts to become a part of your self-image, you're no longer a consumer with agency. You've been played.

**************************
A final thought: To paraphrase Daniel Kahneman in his brilliant book Thinking, Fast and Slow, it's always easier to see cognitive errors anywhere but in ourselves. Think once again about cigars: to the average reader here, it probably seems vaguely funny--if not pathetic--to spend, say, fifty dollars on something only to set it on fire. It seems even worse to light that fifty dollars on fire with a fifty dollar double torch lighter... while holding forth on how to retrohale. "Sheesh. That guy has no idea that he's regurgitating ersatz information. He's getting rudely separated from his money!"

See how much more easily we can see these mechanisms at work in domains we don't personally care about? Cigar smoking is a useful domain to explain ersatz knowledge because it's unlikely to trigger ego defense in any readers here.

Which takes us to the central insight: there are consumer product domains that we do care about, lots of them, where we are rudely separated from our money by these very same ersatz knowledge mechanisms. We just need to look a little more carefully through our egos to see it.


Read Next: Epistemic Humility

And: Nine Terrible Ways to Make Choices (That You Probably Didn’t Know You Were Using)

Techniques and Practices of Voluntary Discomfort

I thought I would articulate in a post some of the techniques and habits I use to embrace the important Stoic concept of "voluntary discomfort."

If you recall from our other discussions of various aspects of Stoicism: voluntary discomfort is a tool of enjoyment, as counterintuitive as that may sound. The idea is simple: if you (temporarily) give up a pleasure, or (temporarily) deny yourself a comfortable experience, you'll appreciate and enjoy that experience far more--and far more profoundly--when you resume it.

Short-circuiting hedonic adaptation
We humans adapt quickly to pleasures and comforts. Honestly, it's rather disturbing to see how things that once gave us immense pleasure rapidly become expected, required, even "needed." Worse, our minds quickly redraw a pleasure baseline from any new pleasure or comfort, which means in order to experience the same level of pleasure or comfort in the future, we constantly need more. We can see easily how this drives various insane societal behaviors such as consumerism, the constant pursuit of the new, status-signaling and Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption.

If you think about it, the Stoic practice of voluntary discomfort is essentially a lifehack for short circuiting hedonic adaptation. A two-thousand year old hack!

So, here are a few examples of how I "do" voluntary discomfort, ranging from the seemingly silly to the significant. I'd be grateful if readers would share their ideas in the comments… I'm always on the lookout for new ways to apply this incredibly useful Stoic tool.

Going without my usual near-daily glass of wine for a few days in a row:
Once again, we very quickly adapt, hedonically speaking, to any situation. I've discovered that when I consume alcohol daily, I deaden the very pleasure I chase.

Intermittent fasting/delaying a meal:
I wrote briefly about this concept in my post Waiting Until We Are Hungry Before We Eat. Few things heighten the satisfaction of a meal like genuine hunger.

Taking a cold shower:
Nothing--and I mean nothing--better enhances your appreciation of a nice hot shower the next day. When I wake up and realize "Hey! I don't have to take a cold shower today!!" it's the start of a very good day.

30-day trials of giving up something pleasurable or comfort-inducing:
I've given up chocolate, alcohol, sugar and junk food on various 30-day trials over the years. These are both tests of will (that I derive pleasure from, interestingly) and they deepen my appreciation of the thing I give up.

Turning off the air conditioning on a hot day/Leaving the heat off on a cold day:
On a really hot day, have you ever left the AC off until you can hardly stand it, and then turned it on late in the day? This is a silly--yet not silly--example, but it just shows how a comfort briefly withheld becomes a comfort we stop taking for granted.

Days/weeks of spending very little money:
Here at Casual Kitchen, we generally make a point of reducing our spending during the summers. We cook simple, low-cost food at home, we avoid meals out, and we try to do less.

Other possible examples:
Eating the same meal several days in a row
Wearing uncomfortable clothing
Walking instead of driving
Waking up early/not sleeping in
Going a period of time without social media


Readers, I'm always looking for new ideas to exercise voluntary discomfort--what ideas can you share?


READ NEXT: Two People, Fifteen Days, Thirty Meals. Thirty-Five Bucks!

Using Your Sophistication and Great Taste Against You

The consumer products industry is very skilled at selling things to you. Sometimes they sell so well, they don't even have to try. They create an environment where, sometimes, you carry water for them. You do the work for them by convincing yourself to spend more.

They can even do this while making you think you're smart, enlightened and above average.

One easy way this can be done is by creating an entire domain of ersatz knowledge and expertise that consumers want to learn, so they can become more "sophisticated" and have a greatly deepened appreciation of a given product.

Let's consider a textbook example of such a product: cigars.

How can we get legions of otherwise intelligent consumers to spend lots of money on cigars? It's quite easy actually.

First, create an entire body of knowledge out of the domain and make it so the customer has to work to learn all the nuances and details of cigar making... where the really good cigars come from, how they're made (by hand, painstakingly, of course), which are the best and why, and so on. Have them learn various memorable narratives about certain cigars: "This one, a newly legal Cuban, was made at the factory owned by Fidel Castro's personal cigar-maker," let's say. Or: "This one, from a remote village in Nicaragua, is made from tobacco grown from transplanted seeds of the finest Cuban tobacco breeds."

Be sure to have your customers memorize a long list of jargon, terminology and idiosyncratic phrases. Have them learn what it means to "toast the foot." Have them learn how to "retrohale." They are becoming knowledgeable about a very high-end, very elite topic. Let them signal their intelligence and sophistication by holding forth knowledgeably about it!

Then, sell them accessories, high-end ones of course. After all, it's pathetic to use a match when you can use your double torch lighter ($42.99). Using your teeth seems so undignified, so neanderthal-like, when you can use your personalized silver cigar cutter with its own carrying case ($59.99). Another advantage: accessories serve as mini ersatz knowledge domains too, by which a consumer can easily signal still more of his or her sophistication and good taste.

Now, let me ask readers a few questions: Once this cigar-buying consumer has learned all these things, once he's attained a meaningful level of sophistication, will he spend less money on cigars, or will he spend more? Or will he spend much, much, much more?

Which leads to another obvious question. Is it really in the interests of the consumer to obtain this knowledge?

Is it even "knowledge" at all?



Notes/For Further Reading
1) The Diderot Effect

2) Constructed Preferences

When Things Don’t Make Sense

There are some really strange and kooky things in our modern food system. Like, for example, the fact that there are 20-30 different kinds of jams and jellies in your local grocery store.

An easy career move any aspiring food pundit or food blogger can make is to write an article pointing out something weird or senseless like this (it's ridiculous for there to even *exist* 30 kinds of jam!), and then use that seemingly weird, senseless fact as self-congratulatory proof that "our food system is broken."

There was even a book about the "jam problem," at least in part: The Paradox of Choice, in which author Barry Schwartz[1] discusses many instances where the modern consumer environment offers what he sees as an inappropriately dizzying array of choices.

One way we can react to seemingly senseless or dumb things, like 30 kinds of jam, is to shake our fists and wonder why things are so stupid. Even better: if you wonder out loud to the people around you about how weird and dumb these things are, you can score bonus virtue-signalling points too![2]

Except that situations like the jam/jelly problem, as weird and dumb as they may seem, are cognitively tricky, trickier than they at first appear. And the first thing we need to do in cognitively tricky situations like this (uh, right after shaking our fist and pointing out how weird and dumb things are), is to consider one of our minds' worst habits: They like to form quick explanations for things. And worse still: our minds love quick explanations that neatly fit into our existing world view.

Well, it really is kind of ridiculous to have 30 kinds of jams and jellies. I can't see any other reason for it other than pure corporate greed.

Can you believe all of these jams and jellies? The store should use this space to sell healthy quinoa, or... or lentils! The food industry is trying to make us all fat.

First, let's start with a heuristic: Any relatively simple explanation that fits your worldview should be spontaneously rejected as unlikely. We'll see why shortly.

Second, just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. We are limited beings. We may not see the whole picture, or whatever system or set of phenomena we happen to observe might simply be opaque to us.

Third, any explanation (for anything) that comes to mind comes from our minds. As circular and definitional as that statement may sound, it hides an insight: when things come out of our minds, they're almost always dripping with solipsism, with our own narrow way of looking at the world.

We can see now that our brains, in just a couple of rapid-fire thoughts, have reached three distinct layers of cognitively suspect conclusions:

a) Our initial opinion, that it's ridiculous that there even exist 30 kinds of jam, is likely wrong.

b) Our explanation for why there are 30 kinds of jams and jellies is likely wrong too. Our brain leaped to it too quickly, and it too neatly fits our existing world view.

c) Finally, most of our ideas and explanations will suffer from some (possibly calamitous) degree of solipsism.

Sadly, we now have SCIENCE!!! piling on too, explaining to us why things are the way they are, and how they should be instead. Now, one would hope that credentialed experts will take their time to form explanations, using careful study design and even more careful testing methods. Their conclusions will be rigorous, correct, and not pre-fit to some pre-existing world view.

Hmmmm. Let's see if this is true about jams and jellies.

Well, as a matter of fact, one of the best known studies in the genre of choice paradox was the famous "jam study," where, conclusively, it was found that when customers were given far fewer choices, they buy more jam. A lot more: some ten times as many customers purchased jam when faced with six choices compared to customers faced with 24 choices.

So the idea that it was ridiculous and dumb to have 30 kinds of jam in the grocery store now had the blessing of evidence-based, credentialed SCIENCE!!! Intelligent consumers everywhere were given a clean, simple explanation, and that explanation had the added bonus fitting our world view: It really is stupid to have so many kinds of jams and jellies! Nobody needs all that.

Now let's step back a moment. The so-called "jam study" dates from the mid 1990s. That's more than twenty years ago. If it were actually that much more profitable to sell far fewer types of jam, don't you think grocery stores all over the world would have done so? If greed supposedly explains everything they do, you'd think they'd leap at the chance to put these credentialed scientific conclusions to work ...and make even more money.

Whenever we find ourselves at war with reality, we're given an opportunity to consider that we're wrong.

And it turns out the jam study (and Barry Schwartz for that matter) studied the wrong thing: Neither considered the fact that almost all jam-buying consumers have already long ago settled on a brand and type. They already know what they want, and if they don't find "their" jam, they don't buy at all.[3]

Thus the grocery store isn't actually subjecting consumers to a dizzying array of choice by carrying dozens of types of jams and jellies. The idea that there were "too many choices" was an error of solipsism--an error committed by Schwartz, by the designers of the fatally flawed study, and us!

When a store carries what seems like a "ridiculous" number of types of the same product, all these brands and types are not there for you or me. We buy the specific type we want, and so do all other customers. Collectively, these products, as long as they remain profitable for the store to sell, make up the what the store carries. The grocery store simply offers the brands and types that consumers have already settled on, and as a result, there are exactly the right number of types of jams and jellies.

In reality, what the "jam and jelly aisle" really represents--to Schwartz, to the jam study people, and to many consumers who consider themselves smarter than the marketplace in which they participate--is essentially a problem of aesthetics. We're all intelligent people, and it just doesn't make sense to have so many more jams and jellies than any of us as intelligent individuals would think was necessary.

To us, there are more varieties than there needs to be, it doesn't make sense, and somebody should do something about it. See how that works?





Footnotes:
[1] Note that I do not intend the specific criticisms of this post in any way to take away from the many valuable insights in Schwartz's book. For me, one of the most profound insights I learned from The Paradox of Choice was the concept of "satisficing."

[2] The virtue-signalling here is nuanced and often difficult to see (all virtue-signalling must be non-obvious, by definition, in order to be truly effective). The mechanism here: by pointing out something dumb, one appears smart by (unstated) comparison. Look around carefully, and you will see all kinds of examples of this type of behavior. One common current example occurs when people point out how stupid (or inarticulate, or hotheaded, or treasonous, or gesticulatory, or racist, or orange, etc.) our President is. This particular example also shows how easy it is to virtue-signal without us realizing we're actually doing it.

[3] See this interesting article on a re-analysis of 99 studies of choice paradox, which uncovered explanations why you actually might want dozens of kinds of jam after all.