The Weeds of Convenience in the Garden of Frugality

(adapted repost)



We have mostly used cloth diapers for our babies. With my first two, I did keep disposable diapers on hand specifically for 'special' situations- when we were going to be out all day, or when we were sick, or some other situation where we were pressed for time or space. Only I noticed that we found far too many 'exceptional' moments, when the disposable diapers were there, and we were in a hurry. This was strange to me, because I could change a cloth diaper almost as quickly as a paper diaper- I timed myself from start to finish, and it really didn't take that long (It did help that I had my supplies and the diaper pail all set up conveniently). But that extra 60 seconds seemed vital at times, even though it wasn't. We were in a hurry far too often. With our third biological child, I even managed to use cloth diapers even while traveling. In fact, we even used cloth diapers while on vacation and I found it worked very, very well (this wouldn't be true of all vacations, it was for this particular one).

Hanging clothes isn't convenient, either.

We are now in a situation where we are gone from the house every Sunday, all day. I have sometimes purchased a case of bottled waters while we are out, along with a package of string cheese, thinking that I have extra for the following Sunday. I never have any the following week, because my family members ALL find some reason why they MUST have a string cheese or a bottle of water instead of a cup throughout the week, so these convenient things are gone in short order- although if I do not buy them at all, they manage to adjust without them just fine. Actually, since I first wrote this out, I pitched a hissy fit about using the bottled water, pointing out there was a tap just three feet from the bottled water, and I was going to start charging a dollar or more a bottle if this didn't stop, and it has. And we're slowly adding to our collection of permanent, stainless steel water bottles. But I still never have any string cheese from one Sunday to the next, and all the Progeny will still gravitate toward the convenient rather than the frugal. For instance, there is a jar of ready made spaghetti sauce going bad in the back of the fridge because one of the girls, charged with fixing lunch, used perhaps 1/3 a cup of sauce from that jar to make English muffin pizzas and then put the rest in the back of the fridge where it was forgotten. She saw the convenience of the ready made sauce, but made no plans for using up the rest.

I like to keep a couple cans of peaches on hand for making peach cobbler in an 'emergency,' that is, when we have an unexpected shortage of food and an unexpected surplus of company in the same meal. But to certain of my progeny, those cans of peaches are as catnip to cats, and they ask me daily if they cannot use those canned peaches for a side dish for lunch, or for an afternoon snack- or they do not ask at all, but simply open them up and eat them right out of the can for the ultimate in convenience food.*

It is as though introducing a small and occasional (or at least intended to be occasional) convenience makes getting along without that convenience ever more difficult and burdensome than if we never had it at all.

Thrift takes a little more time, in most cases, than profligacy, and more importantly, it seems to take something more by way of thinking things through- planning ahead. And these things require good habits. So how do we develop good habits? I don't know, to tell you the truth, but I suspect there are no short cuts.

We like to think otherwise, because even when thinking about thrift and long-term commitments and goal oriented New Year's Resolutions, we want convenience. We want checklists. So we see websites like this one:

How do you form a good habit? The concept is simple: decide what you want to do, and do it each day for 21 days. [To the CEO's knowledge, the 21-day time period first appeared in pop psychology via Dr. Maxwell Maltz, author of The Power of Psychocybernetics. A plastic surgeon, Dr. Maltz noticed that it took 21 days for amputees to cease feeling phantom sensations in the amputated limb. From that somewhat obscure beginning, the 21-day phenomenon has evolved into a staple of self-change literature. Something of a habit, you might say.]

If the idea is simple, the devil is in the details. Making a new habit is hard work! Each new habit--so simple, so sanguine--must turn aside the formidable energy of an entrenched old habit to survive.

You take off the old, and put on the new- that's imperative. And they are right, it's certainly hard work. But I thought it was interesting that while acknowledging the hard work and debunking the 'it takes 21 days to learn a new habit' idea, they then follow up with advice rooted in the idea that it really does take only 21 days to develop a good habit, even though this number is basically arbitrary:

# Take heart, though. With 52 weeks in each year, you can build 17 new habits and still take two weeks vacation before the year's end!
# Hitch your habit to a star! A new habit stands a better chance of survival if it has a friend. Think of a current habit as a locomotive engine, and add the new one to the train. Do you put your toddler down for a nap at 2 p.m. each day? That's a perfect "prompt" to build your new habit--30 minutes of daily inspirational reading--into your schedule at 2:05 p.m. When it comes to habits, remember the lesson of the Little Engine That Could and hitch your habit to a star. "I think I can, I think I can" will soon become "I knew I could!"

This last must be advice the human race needs often, as in our collective wisdom we have the story of the Little Engine That Could, Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare, the moral of which is that slow and and steady winning the race, and cultures as diverse as China and Elizabethan England producing mottoes like:

“Many strokes, though with a little ax, can tear down the hardest oak.”
William Shakespeare

“A trip of a thousand miles starts with one step.” Chinese Proverb

So where are we? I propose that convenience is corrosive to thrift, while habits of organization and thinking ahead are the soil which produces the best in frugal living. We develop those habits not by large and boldly dramatic steps, but by small actions, small changes of attitude, slowly, incrementally, steadily over time.


Convenience isn't just the enemy of frugality. It's also reducing us to consumers and making us sick, something I realized when reading an interview with Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food:

MP: The authority of mothers was essentially destroyed by the food industry. The $32 billion a year in marketing muscle out there has undercut culture's role in determining what we eat, and culture is a fancy word for your mom.

TMN: Just to emphasize that number, that's not the food industry, that's the food marketing industry.

MP: That's advertising, studying us, packaging, figuring out how to get us to eat more.
[...]

One of the things that 32 billion dollars a year in marketing has bought is our idea about food and how fast we need for it to be.

Convenience for us is big money for others:

MP: I think it's built into the nature of the food industry and the economics of selling food. It's very hard to make money selling normal unprocessed foods. Ask any farmer who's growing broccoli or oats; it's a very hard way to make money.

The more you process the food, the more profitable it is. If I go to the supermarket, I can buy a pound of organic oats for 79 cents. Now that's a lot of oats, and nobody's making much money. But if you turn it into Cheerios, suddenly you have a brand. You've got your little doughnut shape, you've got an ad campaign, and suddenly you're charging four bucks for a few ounces of oats.

Then you come up with a Honey Nut Cheerio Cereal Bar with a layer of artificial milk in the middle. Now you've got a convenience food that's very much your own, because you've got this special formula to make your fake milk. And kids can eat them in the car or on the way to school. Now you're charging $10 or $20 for a few penny's worth of oats. That's the gist of the food industry. That's the economic imperative.

TMN: So, as usual, follow the money.

I was in Battlecreek, Michigan, a couple of years ago -- the home of Kellogg's. Some local women told me cereal sales were way down. I asked why, and they said, "Because you can't eat them in the car." Thus your cereal bars.

MP: Exactly right. And now we have cereal straws.

The first time I saw yogurt in a tube I nearly gagged, seriously. The very thought of sucking food out of a tube for the sake of mere convenience remains an idea that makes me feel like retching. I don't buy them. A few months ago somebody gave us a box of the cereal straws, which I let my kids eat just for 'fun.' I tried one myself, and wondered what was so fun about eating a bit of crunchy cardboard just because it came in a unaccustomed shape. The flavor was horrible, as is the flavor of many 'convenience foods' we buy- our great-grandparents would have known these comestibles for the counterfeits and impostors they are. We do not recognize them as cheap imitations of real food because we have been conditioned by successful marketing campaigns which have influenced us from our salad days- a poor term to use considering salad is actually real, nutritious food.

Personal example: I do not like pasta much at all, but I do like spaghettioes. You know, those insipid, paper thing pasta rings with no texture or flavor whatsoever in a can with some sort of overly sweet tomato sauce? My progeny, who did not grow up eating many convenience foods, are appalled. They, whose taste buds were not seduced as mine were, cannot understand how anybody could like that stuff. I know the stuff isn't really food and has no nutritional value to speak of, and is actually an insipid concoction of chemicals and cheap white flour, and I don't even buy them as often as once a year- but I like them anyway.

TMN: If the stuff that our great grandmother was putting on the table gives us what we need and tastes good, why have we fallen for this?

MP: A lot of reasons: marketing and convenience. We want to be liberated from the drudgery of cooking, or at least we've been convinced that we do.

TMN: And even the drudgery of eating.

MP: That's right. I mean as Wendell Berry said back in the '70s, if the food industry could profitably digest your food for you, they would. They would reach down your throat and mush it up for you. They want the meal in a pill. That's the ultimate dream of the food industry. They have to show value added, and the value they've added most successfully is convenience. Liberating women from the kitchen, cooking for us, chewing for us.

TMN: I often say that this civilization is going to die by convenience.

Indeed. And we want this convenience not only in our food and our day to day living and basic personal care, but in areas of self-improvement. We are daily surrounded by advertisements promising a 'better you' if only we buy this or that product. Organizational sites and email lists devoted to helping us be more organized and tidy nearly always begin by suggesting a trip to the store to buy organizational tools, books, and equipment. Christian bookstores will have advertisements explaining that we can begin the process of living more godly by buying this t-shirt or that study guide through them.
How convenient.

You cannot buy the new you. It won't come in packages, a boxes or bags. It won't come accompanied with a sales tag. You cannot accessorize yourself into greater spirituality, character improvement or a better personality.

I'm pretty sure that God needs none of those things to make all things new. I am reasonably certain that many of those things even interfere with the sort of renewal God has in mind for us.

I've fallen prey to this line of marketing before, not because of evil and slick appeals, but because I have a slothful inner woman in the first place. If I didn't, all the slick appeals in the world would bounce off me leaving no impression at all. There are many things I want to be able to do, but few of them are things I want to take the time to learn to do. I don't want it to hurt, to require self-discipline, or take much time. I just want to be that new woman much as Cinderella was able to go to the ball. Playing the role of Cinderella in my personal fairy tale dream is yours truly. Playing the role of the Fairy Godmother is usually merely a huge helping of wishful thinking, occasionally it would be my checkbook, or worse, a credit card. This way lies only disappointment and debt.

Convenience is a weed that crowds out frugality and undermines self discipline as well as contentment..Convenience can be almost an acid bath for frugal habits. It is like fire- a useful tool, but dangerous if not carefully tended.

You can't buy a better spiritual life. You have to live it, pray it, study it, and you probably have everything you need at home already.

You may also enjoy the thoughts in this post

*I explained to the Progeny that convenience foods in the pantry are like an emergency savings account. Use it up in non-emergencies, and you've lost your emergency cushion. Eating the pantry convenience foods just because you want to is profligacy, and grasshopper like behavior.