Coronavirus Creates Need for Novel Frugality

this time around it's a little different. There's a fear of scarcity and also an effort to avoid unnecessary movement. Meredith Haggarty, editor at Vox, joins us for the novel Frugality. Thanks for joining us, Meredith, I wanted to talk a little bit about how our lives have changed because of the current pandemic that we're going through. One of the interesting things there's this new sense of frugality that is

set in for a lot of people. Anecdotally, you just hear some of these stories, and even online you've been seeing things about how people are growing green onion scallions at their home so they don't have to get out to the store so much. Myself. I've taken to rewashing and reusing the little red plastic solo cups, and even saving some of those plastics to go containers from take out and things like that. We're kind of all getting

in this mode again. A lot of it is not necessarily new, but maybe the circumstances of why we're doing it is obviously new. So Meredith tell us a little bit about how frugality has creeped back into America. So I mean, I also I noticed a lot of people tweeting or talking about eating the ends of their bread for the first time, or washing aluminum foil, which they hadn't done previous. I have not done that yet, I have,

I've only just started doing that. I was not, I have to admit, like a super frugal person myself previously. But the thing that I thought was really interesting about this behavior is that when I first started hearing about it was from people who I knew, say, weren't necessarily

in a position of economic preparity. There obviously is a lot of unrest and uncertainty about the future right now, and everyone's a little freaked out, but it seemed like these new behaviors weren't necessarily coming from a place of will I be able to buy this stuff for my

family again? It came a lot from a place of is it safe for me to go buy this for my family again, or is it safe for me to send somebody else to buy it, Or wouldn't it be better to maybe get a little bit more out of my bread, a little bit more out of my aluminum oil, a little bit more out of my ziplock bags. And that's what we're seeing people sort of embracing and realizing

what they had on their hands already. And you contrast this with the kind of thought of frugality from years past, or you know, your grandparents or other even culturally people that had to have saved because they've gone through tough times. They went through the Great Recession, they lived in a country maybe where they didn't have a lot of stuff, things like that. That's kind of where you think the

basis of it comes from. But you're right, everything is different now, you know, with all of these stay at home orders and people are genuinely freaked out sometimes about going out into public and getting sick. You're just kind of wanting to save as much as you can, just to save yourself from being out there. So I talked to an expert in for gality, Ronald Goldsmith, who had studied it pre pandemic, and he had talked about how, for the most part, there had been two types of frugality,

intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is just some people are naturally frugal. They might be super wealthy, but they're still going to save every takeout container no matter what. And there are other people who are extrinsically frugal, and that's because of the circumstances they find themselves in economically. For the most what Mr. Oldsmith said to me was, they would like to be able to be less frugal, but they don't

have the funds for it. And in this case, we're seeing just sort of this moment where people who were not intrinsically frugal are suddenly becoming extrinsically frugal, but not because they don't have the money, but because they are dealing with this unprecedent hented situation that we're all dealing with right now. And it's crazy, because we invented this whole industry of disposable products really a bunch of stuff

you mentioned in the article. Diapers, cameras, contact lenses, the plastic bags, the zip blog bags, all of this stuff is just disposable things for us. And now even with the ziplog bags, people are washing them and turning them

inside and in drying them so they can reason. And you know, these are all these things maybe so going back to this getting out in the world just so you don't have to re buy them again, and some people like kind of that regret sets into It just happened to me because I literally just ran out of these gallon sized ziplock bags and I'm like, man, I should have watched some of these this past week and

save those. Yeah, it's like when I don't have this anymore, I don't have it in a way that I think some people just hadn't really experienced in the same way before.

It's a strange time, but I think that cultural disposability thing that's sort of the thing I really wanted to get out in this piece too, is like America has a materials culture and has four seventies some add years at least, maybe more, and we've been encouraged through marketing and through the way that things are made through planned obsolescens,

through disposability. Just to think of things as being able to be thrown away, and that we constantly did the new thing, that we're always being sold something else, and that was good for marketers, that was good for companies. It's not necessarily good for the environment. It's not necessarily good for us. And more importantly, it's not necessarily necessary, which I think is the thing that people often forgot.

I have always thrown aways ziplock bags, and I've only just started rewashing them and just like, oh now I still have zip block bags. Blot out small miracle. Talk to me a little bit about the fear of scarcity and panic buying, because we know we all remember the stories right when this happened. Obviously, the toilet paper, paper, towels, cleaning supplies, that was the first stuff to go. Right now we're hearing about things with the food supply and

certain things might not be available. Tell me a little bit about that. So we're definitely seeing fears around the supply chain. As someone who's reported on the supply chain in the past, I've never heard people talk about it in conversation quite as much as we are these days, there's the fear that all these meat plants are being

shut down, which they probably should be for safety. There are fears about toilet paper and Clorox wipes and all these things that the supply chain, because of the way it's structured, is not able to just get up and out to us at the speed that we're currently demanding it. So I think that instills some people just a real fear of like even if I go to the supermarket, if I get myself out and I go out, there will there be the thing that I need there, which

is an unusual thought in America before the pandemic. This is actually one of the aspects of these where I the most was like, well, when I have started doing these things, I am doing it because I'm afraid it's not going to be there when I get to the supermarket, Like I am afraid of scarcity personally. And I think that we saw that same fear with people buying up

all the toilet paper immediately. As we know coronavirus is not a gastro intestinal disease, it doesn't really make sense that we all went out and bought toilet paper, but that is what people did, and that leads to shortage, and that leads to this fear of future shortages. Just the realization that we might live in a really interconnected and impressive global system previously, but that's not necessarily always the case when things are changing so rapidly and so terrifyingly.

Definitely interesting times with what's going on, And one of these things that's interested me so much is how we're adapting and changing to all of this. So I want to use the term you coin for the article. It's us so interesting how this novel coronavirus has instilled this novel rugality in a lot of people. Meredith Haggarty, editor at Vox, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget effort

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