Tag Archives: SUVs

Greenwashing Cadillacs and McMansions

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A review of the 2012 Cadillac Escalade compares the greenwashing of the Escalade and McMansions:

And of course, the Escalade is not a paragon of fuel efficiency, but you knew that. Still, 13 mpg city and 20 mpg highway is pretty grim. Much better mileage is available, however, in the form of the Escalade Hybrid. It’s easy to view that car as a cynical bit of greenwashing (sort of like putting bamboo floors in your McMansion), but the Hybrid’s EPA ratings of 20/23 mpg put it on a par with much smaller vehicles — the city rating particularly.

Two thoughts:

1. I’ve asked repeatedly whether McMansions could be considered green. SUVs have similar issues: how many MPG would they need to no longer be considered with derision by critics?

2. The comparison between McMansions and SUVs is not unusual. Here is a finding from my recently published paper on the meaning of the term McMansion: out of the 637 articles that mentioned McMansions in the New York Times between 1/1/00 and 12/31/09, at least 33 compared McMansions and SUVs. Both are often cited as exemplars of excessive consumption (using resources, debt, sprawl, etc.) and many critics would love to leave the two objects to a foregone past.

Even Gawker says “The McMansion is dead”

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Since Gawker is reporting it, does this really mean that the McMansion is dead?

This heartless recession has stolen from America our most treasured national totems. Huge SUVs? Too gas-guzzling. Sprawling suburbs far removed from the “diverse” cities? Reduced to slums. And now, the recession is coming for our very homes.

By “our,” I mean “people with too much money and too little taste.” The WSJ says that the humble McMansion—the rightful reward of all hardworking Americans willing to take on a $450,000 mortgage and a 75-minute commute in order to have a huge, useless foyer lined with the thinnest sheet of marble veneer—is no longer the popular thing to build, for builders who want to build homes that will actually sell. Shrines to conspicuous consumption are out! By necessity.

Goodbye, grand foyers! Adios, spiral staircases! Hello, newly poor American rationalizing their now meager living spaces like a bunch of formerly wealthy people wiped out by financial calamity—which they are!

Totem could be taken as referring to a religious object of devotion, a la Durkheim. If so, do Americans worship SUVs, McMansions, and suburbs? That would be interesting to discuss.

Granted, Gawker is quoting an interesting Wall Street Journal story that suggests the wealthy/big homes of the future that will include “drop zones,” space for an elevator, a “lifestyle center” (not to be confused with gussied-up outdoor malls masquerading as community centers known by the same name), steam showers (goodbye soaker tubs!), and outdoor living space.

A reminder: this is the same website that has this description leading off its stories about Jersey Shore (this is from earlier this year).

When watching Jersey Shore, the most important sociological experiment of our time, we’re looking for new and exciting behavior.

Me thinks there may be some hyperbole and/or mocking there. At least that is what I hope.

Tying purchases of larger fast food items to McMansions and status seeking

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A forthcoming study from researchers from Paris and Northwestern University shows that powerless people make larger fast food purchases in order to show their status:

Consumers who feel powerless reach for extra-large portions of food in an effort to increase their social standing in the eyes of others, a new study suggests.

“An ongoing trend in food consumption is consumers’ tendency to eat more and more,” the researchers wrote in the study to be published in the April 2012 print edition of the Journal of Consumer Research. “The increase in food consumption is particularly prevalent among vulnerable populations, such as lower socioeconomic status consumers.”…

The study authors noted that cultural norms associate some larger items, such as houses, vehicles or flatscreen TVs, with wealth, success and high social status. If consumers feel unhappy with their status, they may take this belief and apply it to food, the researchers suggested.

These consumers may attempt to compensate for their perceived lower status by showing others that they can afford to buy the larger sizes, but instead of a Mcmansion they buy larger portion sizes, according to the researchers. In one of the experiments, the participants perceived that consumers who bought a large coffee at a cafe had a higher status than those who chose medium or small — even when the price of all sizes was the same.

It seems that the key here is that these are the decisions made by powerless people, people who have limited, more legitimate ways to show off their status. So do the authors suggest that people with more power don’t buy items to simply show status? This is an argument typically made about McMansions and SUVs: certain people with money feel the need to show off their wealth with these more ostentatious, larger purchases. On the other hand, the implication is that people with more education or taste would consume other sorts of items, not seeking status. Really? A designer larger, green home isn’t also somewhat about status? Going smaller is necessarily less about status?

I would love to see results of similar experiments done with different groups regarding some of the other consumer items mentioned in this report. I suspect we might find that status seeking purchases look different across different socioeconomic statuses, echoing Bourdieu’s distinctions between those who little capital (in this fast food study) versus more capital and also between those with more education and more money.

Nostalgia for the early 1990s: McMansions, SUVs, and more

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The early 1990s are not that long ago but this comparison of the 2011 Ford Explorer and the 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee is wistful for this earlier era:

The early 1990s are starting to seem like a long time ago. McMansions were barely a twinkle in the Toll brothers’ eyes. Apple stock was less than fifteen dollars a share. The Iraq war was going great. A tea party was something for little girls. And Justin Bieber hadn’t even been born.

In the U.S. car market, perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is that the SUV, as an automotive force, was in its infancy. Sure, Wranglers, Blazers, Broncos, Scouts, and the like had been bouncing along on the fringe of the American automotive scene for a while, but their numbers were small.

I am interested in this mention of McMansions, which has several connotations in these opening paragraphs:

1. It is not unusual to lump the McMansion in with other consumer objects. Perhaps its most common pairing is with the SUV, often considered an oversized and ostentatious vehicle.

2. The Toll Brothers, a large American home builder, are often tied to McMansions. This builder preferred to call their larger homes “estate homes” but critics ended up dubbing them McMansions. Read a quick summary of Toll Brothers history here. The term McMansions really started being used in earnest in the late 1990s.

3. There seems to be a growing idea that the McMansion might have been a blip in American history. This review pegs the McMansion as beginning in the 1990s and other recent commentators (see here and here) have suggested McMansions are done and will not return. The jury is still out on this one: the size of the average American home grew steadily from the 1950s until just a few years ago.

(4. An unrelated issue: can we already have nostalgia for a time just 20 years ago? Think of this in terms of “oldies” on the radio: it’s hard to even find 60’s music on the radio and now the 80’s and 90’s are considered old. How far can we compress the past in order to develop a prepackaged nostalgia?)

And Americans vote again for the automobile

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Surveys from AAA suggest Americans will be traveling by car in record proportions for Thanksgiving:

Next week, 94 percent of Thanksgiving travelers nationally are expected to drive — up from 86 percent in 2008 and 80 percent in 2000, according surveys conducted by AAA.

The air-travel share is projected at 3.8 percent this Thanksgiving, the lowest figure in a decade. Air travel accounted for 13 percent of Thanksgiving travel in 2000, AAA said.

A quick interpretation might be that people are fed up with airport security. But interestingly, these surveys were conducted before the TSA announced more intrusive search procedures:

AAA officials noted that the data on Thanksgiving travel, which are based on the plans of people surveyed, were collected before the TSA announced it was switching to more intensive pat-downs of airline passengers and increased use of the full-body scanners.

“Those folks who said, ‘I’ve had it with the airport hassle and I’m traveling by auto,’ did so before the TSA’s new rules were put in place,” said Beth Mosher, spokeswoman for AAA Chicago. “We’ve seen a lot of people grousing. It’s hard to say if people will eventually get used to the changes. We’ll know more once we see Christmas travel numbers.”

I haven’t seen these survey figures and whether they ask people specifically why they chose the travel mode they did.

But I’ll quickly offer another take: Americans don’t need much of an excuse to travel by car. Our love affair with the car (or more appropriately for family travels this weekend, the SUV or minivan) is well-established and could be an important factor in this story. Ultimately, travel within a certain radius (roughly 6-14 hours of driving one way) could either be done by airplane or car (or as some hope, by faster trains in the future). Certain factors, such as ticket prices, weather, availability, gas prices, and other odd factors, such as new airport security measures, can push people back to their vehicles which they might have been reluctant to leave behind anyway.