I wrote down everything I bought for a week

(Aude White)

Towards the very bottom of the list of non-human coronavirus casualties as organized by “dang, that’s a shame,” well below even the yearlong postponement of Fast and the Furious 9 but maybe just above a forced hiatus for beach-based flat tummy tea sponcon, is the necessary axing of a chatty and overlong story written by a staffed editor at a website. (That is to say, no money changed hands, except for the fantastic art, which was paid for in full.) 

The piece below, which was going to run on The Goods by Vox this week (lol), now stands mostly as a mini-chronicle of the Way Things Used to Be Not Very Long Ago, and is being published here in the name of “shit, I worked really hard on this, even though it seemed silly then, and wow, it seems so silly now.” Please enjoy it in the spirit it was always intended: a mix of whimsy and defeat.

What I’m really telling you is: I have 93 cans of Diet Coke in my apartment as of this writing, and no, you can’t come over. — Meredith Haggerty

The Before Times feel so long ago, don't they? This diary chronicles a week in early February, as the epidemic was growing increasingly grim in China but hadn't quite made its way to American shores (and American minds). Peep the full dispatch after the jump, with truly excellent illustrations from Aude White. — Indoor Voices

***

Getting you to buy the things you buy is, and I’m approximating here based on instinct, 77% of the American economy today. 

There’s the advertising industry, for one, where we get our nation’s main export — slow-moving pictures of hamburgers. There is marketing, which I think is like advertising but with fewer hamburger pictures and more charts. For the last decade or so, there have been influencers, hot people whose whole job is to get brands to give them free things on the promise that someone else will then pay for those same things, and before that there were celebrities, who had much the same effect but who also had to learn singing or acting or be born royal first.

There are recommendation sites and lists and apps and podcasts. There are salespeople on commission and waitstaff reciting mandatory upsell scripts and telemarketers calling your cell in the middle of a work day. Every restaurant, every retail store, every airline and car manufacturer and insurance provider and bank, is jostling, ceaselessly, to impact the way you spend your money. And the question of who is getting through and how is an industry of its own, with focus groups and research papers and psychologists and consultants and studies. 

That’s the question here, which I'm trying to answer with a sample size of one: me, Meredith Haggerty, Brooklyn resident, 34-year-old straight cis single childless reasonably well-compensated short white female, deputy editor for The Goods with a dim view of capitalism and a conflicting love of being extremely materially comfortable.

Why do I buy the stuff that I buy? Who is getting through to me? What kind of influence am I under? To answer that, I wrote down everything I bought for a week and, to the best of my ability, why I bought it.

If your question is “okay, but why should I read that?” it’s a reasonable one, but the answer is simple: voyeurism. The influences of this influence experiment are Money Diaries from Refinery29 and The Grub Street Diet from New York Magazine, in equal measure. I love to spend a lunch break scrolling through a stranger’s life and either judging them or making a list of places I want to eat!

If you read this, it will likely be for same reasons: human curiosity, the lowest stakes kind of gossip, something to do while you eat a meal at a computer, and a little of that feeling when you ask someone where they got their earrings and hear a whole-ass story about their aunt who was a sculptor and then you’re like, “huh!”

***

Sunday, February 9th

I spend the morning on my couch finishing Cheer, which The Goods’ own Julia Rubin has been recommending constantly. As expected, I am sucked in immediately.

Around noon I haul myself to my local bagel shop (Bagels by the Park in Carroll Gardens) for a breakfast sandwich, my second of the weekend. The previous day I'd seen Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), in which the main character is largely motivated by the desire for a bacon, egg, and cheese. I emerged from the theater with a singular need, which I immediately fulfilled. My own order is bacon, egg, avocado on a sesame bagel, doused in hot sauce ($7.35), and it was so satisfying yesterday that I go back today.

I’m going into work tonight to watch and edit posts about the Oscars, so that has derailed my normal Sunday activities, and I head into Manhattan, for which I need to buy a Metrocard. (I put $33 on my card, the equivalent of 12 one-way subway rides, to use over the next few weeks.) I’m lured into a Stone Street bar by the promise of happy hour. (Stone Street is a line of bars along an expressly dangerous cobblestone road near our office that allows the Financial District to cosplay being a fun and ambiently old-timey city; it’s horrid.) 

It turns out the “deal” for this happy hour is $8 for a Brooklyn Lager, or one dollar off. I’ve already removed my coat, so I get a Diet Coke too ($3) and tip another $3 because the dudes sitting at the bar are ordering Long Island iced teas and the bartender is enduring them well. 

The office, I have noted, is out of Diet Cokes, which is a crime against me personally. I go to the closest Duane Reade, since our lobby store isn’t open for business on Sunday nights. I get three DCs and a box of hot Cheezits because I am still craving hot things, for a total of $11.62. Dinner, blessedly, is comped by work and from the only great place on Stone Street: Adrienne’s Pizza Bar, which I first read about in the Times in 2006 when I lived in a college dorm on nearby Water Street. 

Influences: A coworker, a movie, the inevitability of public transit, a slightly-misleading bar sign advertisement, laziness/salt cravings/soda addiction, The New York Times a cool 14 years ago. 

Total spent: $67.97

Monday, February 10th

The office is still out of Diet Cokes. Maybe I should quit my job in protest? In the quantity I consume, I consider them an unnegotiated but vital part of my compensation. They’re cheaper in the lobby store ($2 each) than they are the Duane Reade, at least. I buy two bottles. 

I go to a new, healthy-seeming lunch place that just opened nearby, The Little Beet, about which Julia (again, hi) has said nice things, because my body feels a little bad from the hot Cheezit and free pizza dinner. I order a “make your own” bowl and moderately screw it up because making your own bowl is too much responsibility. The Financial District has nearly every fast-casual bowl place that you could imagine, catering to the many many many people who work here, all of whom apparently detest plates. 

I recently came across an author named Clay Christensen who says that we do not buy things out of want or need, exactly; rather, we hire them to do jobs. I don’t know if I believe that entirely, but I do find it very delightful (“I hire this donut!”) and it certainly explains workday lunches. I employ sweet potatoes, green beans, roasted chicken, basmati rice, greens, and vegan chipotle mayo, and they charge me $13.28 for their services. 

At home after work, I eat leftover soup I made, the last cup of a Weight Watchers — I’m sorry, WW — friendly recipe that my friend and former colleague Cheryl passed to me a couple of years back. (Feel free to tap out for weight discussion, but this is a diary.) Since the new year I’ve been almost doing WW again but then not at all; it worked really well for me when I followed the plan closely back in 2012 but since 2014ish it has mostly haunted the edges of my eating habits. I continue to pay for it — $21.72 every month — like that action alone will result in a different body (amortized: $5.06 for the week). This particular soup is just good, and easy. 

In March, I’m taking a trip to Santa Fe with my mom and cousin, but I tacked on two days for myself at the end and need to book a second accommodation. The location was my suggestion; a few years ago it felt like everyone I knew who was cool was going there — by which I realize, upon closer examination, I just mean my old coworker and friend Tiffany, the former shopping director of Racked, RIP. I text her to ask where she stayed and she recommends a hotel ($200 that I will be charged in the future + taxes and fees).

I spend the rest of the evening building an elaborate Santa Fe Google map made up of suggestions from Eater and (you can’t judge me harder than I judge myself!) Goop. 

Influences: Addiction/laziness, a coworker, two former coworkers, an ever-changing diet plan, the opinions of both my colleagues at Eater and people who work for and are channeling Gwyneth Paltrow. 

Total spent: $222.34 

Tuesday, February 11th

Diet Cokes are back in the office; I delete my draft of a self-righteous email to Vox’s CEO and enjoy a balanced soda breakfast. 

I get a reminder notification I’ve set up for myself to cancel Rent the Runway. I signed up for the unlimited plan in January because I could “purchase” a free month of temporary designer clothing using thousands of WW “wins,” which I earned by writing down what I ate for breakfast for weeks at a time. My life is a string of interlocking, voluntary, feminine-coded body humiliations; it’s fine. 

My plan was to order things I found hilarious or extravagant or unattainable, like this $1,690 cape I hated but now I want out of the process. I still have one good dress at home that I won’t be able to return before the cutoff date, so I weigh the cost of the billing cycle folding into the next month ($159; pros: lots of clothes to try out, cons: the danger that I will screw up cancelling again come March) versus buying this one dress ($108, down from $180 retail, plus the added joy of being done). 

I buy the dress, a burnt sienna maxi wrap situation with fat white polka dots that I rented because it looks like it should be worn by someone who actually makes the things in hip, minimalist-in-design, maximalist-in-ingredient cookbooks. 

My friend (and Succession recap buddy) Emily VanDerWerff is in from out of town, and I want to show her that I am very cool, clearly, so I steal a rec from our colleague Alex Abad-Santos: Chubby Princess, a new noodle shop that turns out to be in the back of my college dorm ($37 for noodle soups and dumplings and wine). Afterwards, we meet some of Emily’s friends at her hotel’s roof bar, where I say I am going to have one wine but then at the slightest encouragement order a second drink and make it a pina colada ($30.49). 

The next day, I learn that Julia recommended the hotel; chalk one more up for her. 

Influences: WW combined with a fear of future fuckups and a desire to look like a better kind of Brooklyn lady, yet more coworkers especially Julia and the barest affirmation that I should order a Tiki drink on a Tuesday.

Total spent: $175.49. (But if you think about it, I *saved* $51 by buying the dress.)

Wednesday, February 12th

Last night’s pina colada is demanding another breakfast sandwich, which I retrieve from Leo’s ($8.17), a bagel shop a block from the office. It’s very close but also generally accepted as good, and definitely on some kind of “Best of” lists because its eternally overrun by tourists who are confounded by ordering. I ask around, and as it turns out the original Leo’s rec came from…. Julia.

After work, I pick up some beer from a bodega near my apartment — Brooklyn Lager, again, because I know I don’t hate it ($13.99) — and my laundry ($12.20). I use this laundry service because it’s the closest to my apartment but also because I am separately enamored of two women who work there: one is very friendly, the other is barely friendly at all. 

I’m supposed to meet someone for a third date at a bar near my house, but when he says he’s running late, I drop all pretense and propose ordering pizza to my apartment. He agrees. I order from House of Pizza and Calzones, the same place I’ve been ordering from since I first found it on Delivery.com in 2009. It remains perfect ($22.55). He shows up with some kind of IPA I forget and don’t love but drink anyway. 

Influences: A slight but insistent hangover plus conventional office wisdom about bagels that once again traces back to Julia, inertia and lack of options when it comes to beer, the necessity of having clean clothes combined with how enjoyable it is to be lightly but impersonally known by people in the neighborhood, convenience/my own impeccable taste in pizza.

Total spent: $56.91

Thursday, February 13th

After a free breakfast of a single office banana, I purchase “chicken pasta” soup from the Essen directly across the street from the office ($5.72). It is the definition of “fine.” No one else I work with likes the buffet-style eatery, but I have a soft spot for it from when I worked a different, stressful job directly above another outpost.

Tonight, I’ve booked a hotel room for myself in Manhattan using credit card points (11,631, or approximately $116.31). It’s wasteful and nonsensical — I don’t need space, I literally live alone — but I’ve taken Valentine’s Day off as a reward for working the Super Bowl and the Oscars. It is fun to be comfortable in a place someone else cleans, and I will be dead someday. 

I found Hotel 50 Bowery on a Business Insider list. It’s hip in a way that mostly means wood must be pale, bulbs will be exposed, and walls, ceilings, and floors are covered in striations, like being a cool place to sleep is a strain. I finish out the workday from the king-sized bed. At six, I walk immediately into the rain shower, one of the more desirable parts of the room, and then lay around wearing the hotel robe, another huge selling point. 

I go meet my friend Jolie at her regular bar on the Lower East Side, which I would name but I only pay for two out of three white wine spritzers thanks to the largesse of our friend/bartender ($24.51).

By the time we’re closing up, the place I wanted to go to dinner has closed. Jolie suggests I stop at a place called Congee Village on the way home, and even though I tell her nah, I end up stopping because the idea was planted and I am simple. I take lo mein and scallion pancakes and a Diet Coke back to my room, and eat it in bed ($22.21) while watching Law & Order reruns. 

It’s still fairly early, not even 11, and I don’t quite want to throw in the towel on baby’s big Manhattan night out, so I head up to the hotel’s rooftop bar. Before I go I pick out a dessert from the online menu, an ice cream sundae in a bubble waffle, because pre-reading menus and showing up ready is a thrill of mine. There are neon signs on the wall that say something like, “every day is a gift” — not that but not not that, basically that — and sweeping views of the city and cute people talking to each other but when I pull up to the bar and see that the only dessert option is $10 macarons, I tell the bartender I actually don’t need anything. I do love to realize I don’t have to do or buy anything just because I told myself I was going to. Too often I forget. I go back to my room, put the big robe back on, and take $4 peanut M&Ms from the mini bar. 

Influences: nostalgia and inertia, a desire to treat oneself plus by Business Insider’s 20 best hotels in New York City list, Jolie (twice), inertia once again. 

Total spent: $56.44 + 11,631 credit card points, which do not count.

Friday, February 14th

I have big plans for this day, my day off. I try to get my credit card points’ worth by taking the free hotel coffee and lounging around the room until check out, watching a documentary about “Angry Betty Broderick” (a woman, played by Meredith Baxter-Birney in an iconic TV film, who famously murdered her ex-husband and his new wife). I derive great happiness from the things I do because they are free, or rather, free because I have already paid for them. 

I leave my bags with the front desk, delighted to be unencumbered, and walk to a nearby movie theater with good reclining seats. I see Downhill ($19.69, insane); I haven’t seen Force Majeure, the Swedish-French-Norwegian movie it’s based on, and certainly no one has recommended this film to me, but I see a lot of movies just because I like being alone in the theater and having my phone off. I purchase a large Diet Coke — a trough’s worth, my preferred increment — and a small popcorn (also quite large, $15.98 total). 

The day hasn’t felt quite as “bam!” as I’d hoped, so I hop on the F up to the Museum of Modern Art, which is at the top of my “I guess I actually haven’t been to this museum in a minute” rotation. The entrance fee is $25.00. I wish there was something particular I wanted to see; it’s a slightly uninspired choice, but I didn’t do my research and at least it’s culture. 

Upon entering an exhibit about fiber arts, I realize I don’t care and that no one is watching me and so I walk immediately back out. I nearly run past the Francis Bacons. My very favorite thing is the “For Kids” sign next to Frida Kahlo’s “Fulang-Chang and I” which asks “Do you think it would be cool to have a pet monkey?” I do, and I like the question! 

My friend Lindsey has texted to ask if I am — as she assumes — planning to spend Valentine’s evening sitting around my own apartment with my friends Kelly and Fritz, eating junky food, and she’s nailed it. I invite her to join us, and quietly decide that we will once again be ordering from House of Pizza and Calzones. I get my stuff from the hotel and settle up my bill (the points, plus $22 for some nonsense additional hotel fee, like an existence tax) and head home. 

When my friends show up, we order our standard: grandma pie plus mozzarella sticks and garlic knots, $36 split four ways. Kelly brings Italian cookies and cava; Lindsey brings candy on sale from a nearby Duane Reade, including peanut butter M&Ms and sour gummies (she spent, she tells us, less than $10, and presents a true bounty). They are horrified that I took marked up mini-bar candy. I turn the cava into spritzers no one really wants using the variety of seltzers in my fridge, all of which Kelly has brought over for herself over the last few weeks. We talk a lot of shit until everyone is sleepy. 

Influences: a love of the movie theater and a devotion to Julia Louis Dreyfus, the opportunity to drink soda and popcorn in a size that would make Bloomberg furious, a desire for culture, the scammy fee a hotel charges on top of the room, and once again my impeccable taste in pizza shops near my apartment. 

Total spent: $91.67 

Saturday, February 15th

I spend the morning puttering around my apartment and watching the week’s TV, which I have missed nearly all of. Then, I go to the grocery store and buy broccoli and brussels sprouts and baby carrots ($8), because my body is dying, and proceed to cook the broccoli in an obscene amount of oil.

At three, I gear up to walk to my 4pm first date. I picked the bar — Covenhoven — because The Goods’ Rebecca Jennings had talked it up in Slack one day and I assume it is cute and fun and will make me look cute and fun, by the transitive property.

I pay for my beers — two sours, because after the year I spent living in brewery-happy Asheville, NC the one thing I can definitively say is I do like sours, and one saison that has sichuan peppercorns at my date’s suggestion ($24 plus tip). 

We decide to take a walk that turns out to be incredibly short to another bar (Crown Inn, if you’re local), where my date buys my next sour in a show of “hey this is maybe going okay,” and then we need food. We end up at a divey restaurant, based entirely on his statement that he’s been there before and the fact that at this point in our walk, we are quite cold and outside of it. I order a BLT and fries and mind your business more beers ($26). 

Influences: A coworker (but not Julia, sorry to Julia), hard won knowledge of what beers I don’t hate, two suggestions from a cute man and the need for a sandwich.

Total spent: $58 even.

***

When I do think about it, I feel like a dupe for buying anything at all. Someone somewhere wants me to buy something, and here I am, buying it. Like a jerk! 

You might notice that, for something billed as an influence diary, professional influencers don’t really pop up here (unless you count Gwyneth, which you absolutely should). I don’t keep up with Instagram, which means that I miss life updates from friends as much as slick posts from well-lit strangers with devoted husbands, beautiful children, and unmarked sponcon. This is partially because because I can be a crank about artifice, partially because I’m not a visual person, partially because I’m busy refreshing Twitter. It might just be because I’m fortunate enough to know a bunch people I want to be like, and I have all the influence I can handle.

My purchases are often a function of who I know and what they like, especially when I’m trying something new. It’s not just me! According to PR Daily, 83% of people say they listen to the recs of their peers. 

There’s something not altogether horrible about that idea, especially in an age when consumer consciousness is on the rise. More regular people are trying to shop their principles, despite the memeified wisdom that “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.” While individual purchases are a drop in the bucket, there’s potentially some power in loudly recommending the sustainable option, the local option, the option that most closely aligns with the world you want to live in. 

Personal suggestions led me largely to local restaurants, independent hotels, beers from small breweries. These suggestions also very simply made me happy, and fulfilled needs. I do need and want to eat and buy things, and I enjoy eating and buying in ways and with products that add to my life. On top of that, there’s connection and an intimacy in taking someone else’s advice; the added pleasure of running back to your friend and telling them how much you also enjoyed what they enjoyed. It may not be the good we need, but it isn’t all bad. 

I can’t ignore, though, the other story told here, about the products I purchase thanks to influence mechanisms so subtle or so all-encompassing that they’re hard to fully recognize; about times I behave with mindless but insistent drive, like an orange shoe- and Zima-obsessed teen from Josie and the Pussycats. 

This is most apparent in my consumption of a veritable river of Diet Coke, which I’ve chalked up to addiction (woof, sorry) and necessity.

The Coca-Cola Company is “one to look out for” as both business leaders and watch dogs might say. It had a reported $5.8 billion dollar global advertising budget in 2018. Coca-Cola is the sixth most valuable brand in the world, its ads are everywhere ads can be found, its soda is shorthand for soda. The company has very effectively bought the world a Coke, and we’re all paying it back to the tune of billions in profit.  

It’s also responsible not only for environmental devastation but obfuscation through green-washing, and has been accused historically of suborning Apartheid in South Africa and using paramilitary groups to threaten and even kill its own workers in Colombia. It’s a company that sells, fundamentally, legally-addictive and health-destroying liquids that I am personally arguably addicted to and will possibly be destroyed by. It’s not a thing I’d want to be recommending. 

Also it tastes perfect and creates joy in my one wild and precious physical being. Drinking this trash is so bound up in my identity that I have become a self-contained influence ecosystem, a perpetual motion machine of buying and guzzling more soda. I can safely assume that the $5.8 billion must be working. 

A satisfying ending to this piece might be me waking up and quitting soda. I won’t lie to you; that will not happen today. I am, at least, considering how much doing that would represent a kind of freedom. 

The problem here, besides moral cowardice on my part, is that quitting Diet Coke wouldn’t leave me with a clean slate. Hotel 51 Bowery is owned by Hyatt, which in 2009, fired nearly 100 members of cleaning staff to replace them with cheaper labor, and in 2018 made an “active choice” to host a reported anti-Muslim hate group; Cheezits are made by Kellogg’s, a brand founded in an anti-masturbation fury, and which has been accused of fabricating health claims and using palm oil made with child labor. 

This is just a smattering of the concerns that we know about. What sustainable clothing brands or eco-friendly wellness products are secretly made in deplorable conditions? Which local restaurants and small time breweries abuse their staff? What about the problem of factory farming, or eating meat at all? Which actions are bad enough, which controversies are recent enough, which lines cannot be crossed? How informed should a consumer be? How righteous?

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a complicated phrase: extremely hard to argue with (at least for me), but reductive, and as a result too often tossed off in opposition to its intention, a lol or a shrug. I don’t want to hand wave and say nothing matters; I just want to acknowledge how hard it is, and how it’s that hard by design. It is important to make choices; it’s often difficult or overwhelming to remember we have them.

I do think there’s a value in slowing down and thinking about why you’re buying what you buy; which motivations are natural and which are imposed on you, which suggestions are helpful and which are pernicious. It was for me, a woman who is currently experiencing the terrible phenomenon of increased self-knowledge. 

The fact is, the influence industry exists. Saddled with our unseemly needs and our frankly disgusting wants and occasionally the considered judgement of our intellect, we take these forces in however we will; we metabolize them, we become them, we reject them, we share them with each other. And then we buy things.  

Total spent: $728.82 + 11,631 credit card points, which again, do not count.