It was just an item on the “honey do” list. Would I go to the appliance store and pick up some new filter cartridges for our icemaker/drink dispenser?
Yes, we’ve got one of those middling-fancy refrigerators. It has French doors at the top and a big freezer drawer at the bottom. It’s also counter-depth, water-dispensing and clad in stainless steel. Stainless, at least, until you touch it. While waiting for the filters, I walked around the showroom. Who knows what advancing technology could bring to refrigeration science?
I wasn’t prepared for what I found.
Long ago, home appliances were limited to three distinct categories. They were established in the Sears, Roebuck catalog: Good, Better, and Best. It doesn’t matter what you are buying: it will either be Good. Or Better. Or Best.
No other classifications need apply.
No more. Today, we live in an ever-expanding world of Competitive Upscale — or CUS. And the store I favored, Wilson AC and Appliance in Dripping Springs, is definitely in the competitive upscale world. In a typical appliance store — like Best Buy or Sears — our Kitchen-Aid fridge would be in the “Best” category. In the upscale store, our $2,000 Kitchen-Aid clings dubiously to the bottom rung of upscale.
That was when I saw the Sub-Zero. It was a 48-inch side-by-side with a glass window door and four independently cooled drawers at the bottom. It was priced at an amazing $16,950.
Yes, you read that right: $16,950.
Mind you, that’s for a refrigerator that can’t even talk! I could go to Home Depot and buy a refrigerator that can talk and have secret meetings with Alexa and Siri, not to mention remember my birthday. At $3,000 each, I could buy a bunch of them. They could keep cool, talk amongst themselves and hang out together while making their contribution to solving the problem of global warming.
But it wasn’t the functional differences that got my attention. It was the $16,950 price. That’s more than the $15,000 I paid for my first house in Boston’s South End. To be sure, it was a long time ago — 1964 — and the South End was a pretty sketchy neighborhood. But I paid a record price at the time because it was a four-story townhouse at the end of a street, next to a church. It was also wider than most houses, so it would be more flexible for remodeling.
Once an elegant private home with beautiful walnut woodwork, it was functioning as a rooming house and, like most of the houses in the South End, the price was about two times the annual rental income, a multiple that should give you an idea of just how sketchy the neighborhood was. The price was only two times annual rent, but you had to be tough enough collect it.
So what explains a $16,950 refrigerator when you can find rows of pretty fancy refrigerators for $2,000, $2,500 or $3,000 near other rows of simple refrigerators that cost $500 or $600? What explains the much higher price?
If you’ve got an explanation, I’d like to hear it. My take is that affluence has gone extreme. It has outgrown the old good, better and best. When people have a lot more money, they don’t want to buy the same things the rest of us buy. They want something different, something close to unique. The result is high-end, upscale inflation, a proliferation of products, all aimed at being the new Top-of-the-Line.
Face it. When there are too many Cadillacs, some people feel a need to visit the Mercedes dealership. And when there are too many Mercedes, others feel a need to wander to the Bentley dealership.
So, whatever happened to my old $15,000 rooming house at 195 West Brookline Street in Boston? I found out on trulia.com. The building had been completely renovated and the fourth floor, which I had lived on, was a one-bedroom apartment — as it was when I lived there. It had sold as a condo on August 28, 2017, for $1,015,000.
And guess what? The new kitchen has a really nice Sub-Zero refrigerator with French doors.
I bet there are Sub-Zeros on the other three floors, too.
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(c) Scott Burns, 2018