true american
Earlier this week I went to Costco. It was a Tuesday, a little before noon and unseasonably hot, and the place was bustling, practically bubbling over with people pushing enormous carts filled with enormous multi-packs of every imaginable consumer good.
I had come to join them: to buy a TV before it became tariff-impractical to do so. I got swiped in by my dad, a Costco member who, like many members, is something of an evangelist for the place.
We ended up having to order the TV online because it was too big to fit in my car. Do you think I went to Costco to buy a reasonably sized television? Think again, my friends. Anyway, while we were doing that, we chatted with a sales associate about why it was so busy. We thought it was people stocking up, probably, before everything got too expensive. This was when the tariffs were going to be on every country, even the penguins, etcetera. When all of the lines kept trending downward and it seemed like we might be on the verge of a very precipitous economic collapse.
That was five days ago? Anyway! The guy said actually they’d been having a lot of traffic pretty much every morning because people came to buy eggs. They were out of organic, he advised us, and had been for hours, but if we wanted a $7 flat of regular some would still probably be available.
We did not need eggs. We bought the television; we bought almond butter and olive oil and sardines for my cat to snack on. (She has dry skin and requires a lot of omega 3’s.) We went outside to the food court and used a computer to order lunch: two hot dogs and fountain drinks, $1.50 each.
The price of those hot dogs is artificially low. I mean, the company acknowledges that their price is artificially low. It’s a loyalty play, right, the promise that a Costco hot dog will always cost you $1.50, no matter what. But everything at the Costco— every consumer good in America, pretty much— is to some extent artificially cheap. Because it’s made overseas in factories that aren’t subject to environmental or human-rights regulations. And because we refuse to acknowledge the ongoing, long-term costs of this kind of production and consumption.
I was very pleased by how inexpensive the television had turned out to be.
I felt so many conflicting things at once, sitting in the Costco food court, eating a hot dog, spending time with my dad. I felt gratitude and satiation and rage and despair. I realized how easy it had been to despise American consumer culture when it seemed inescapable, and how afraid I was, in that moment, of losing all of its easy pleasures.
The day was balmy and warm and I was with someone I love very much. I was watching people try to cling to a way of life that is destroying us. I was thinking this has to end anyway, right and also but not like this. I was happy and content. I was clinging, too.
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Related: I never sent a Year in Money post for 2024. I mean, to be fair, you remember the end of 2024; it did not feel like a time to be toting up accomplishments, at least for me personally. It felt like I had accomplished nothing, or actually, it felt like I was being dragged backward through a hall of all of my stupid accomplishments, being reminded that personal progress doesn’t amount to much when you are surrounded by large-scale destruction and cruelty at every turn!!!
The Trump of it all aside, I was also reckoning with a weird thing where I used to do a year in review and link to dozens of interviews and essays I had published, to some of the many newsletters I had written, etc. etc. To be like LOOK at how I spilled my GUTS and wracked my BRAINS, how I laid myself out in public over and over again.
For 2024 I had the major accomplishment of the book and… not much else. Not much else that was public-facing or wholly mine, anyway. I wrote a bunch of podcast episodes and interviewed a bunch of podcasters. I published that book, my first romance novel (plus an epilogue and a Christmas story), and wrote my second one, which is out in just a few months. I guess that’s a lot of work? #Capricorn, it’s hard for me to tell, sometimes, when, if ever, it’s enough.
I certainly made a lot of money. $104,000, which is unfathomable compared to the $41,000 I was pulled down in my first full year of freelancing in 2017. For a while there, money stopped being a source of concern and anxiety and felt like a resource. An abundance, even.
So probably also I was feeling anxious about acknowledging that abundance. At laying out how it felt— at the time anyway— like I’d turned a corner. Gone from being a sad, scrappy girl throwing everything she had at the problem of her life to being, like, just another woman with a job.
Don’t worry. It didn’t last. I lost one of my most lucrative gigs suddenly, just like that. I’m scrambling for money again. Do you need me to write or edit something for you? Because really, I’d be happy to do it.
Previous year in money posts: 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.