Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. Though it may be cold comfort to the upper-middle managers getting rocked by layoffs across tech and banking, the effective deductible for uninsured Americans is actually $5,000. The law requires hospitals treat before billing and debt collectors mark down bills so patients don’t declare bankruptcy.
Sure, $5000 is a lot, but health insurance is less valuable than many of us laptop monkeys assume.
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Vox Fortuna: No poll today. Giving that space to our sponsor, Nom Nom, a product that’s probably stuck in my beard thanks to dog kisses.
🫗 Errata: Thanks to Sharon, Elizabeth, Hunter (so polite!), and the dozen or so others that pointed out that Ben Affleck didn’t go to Harvard. This error is especially mortifying because I’m from Boston and thus culturally obliged to know these things lest my Masshole card gets pulled.
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Nom Nom allows me to serve my dog the gourmet dinners she deserves without cooking a meal myself. She is all about the Beef Mash made with real proteins and tender veggies, and I’m so happy to see that grateful expression (even if it means I’ve got to wipe up some drool).
Her excitement levels have been high since I made the switch and, honestly, mine too.
→ Buzzfeed is launching a social network founder and CEO Jonah Peretti says will weed out SNARF content. SNARF stands for Stakes, Novelty, Anger, Retention, and Fear – in other words, addictive crap. Peretti’s big idea is to have curators doomscroll on users’ behalf, pulling clickbait out by the roots. The “walled garden” internet is an old idea (and this looks like an effort to turn a stock around), but ihuman curation as a high-end service is coming. (READ MORE)
→ The American press remains ill-equipped to cover an unaccountable upper class. Zero stories published post-Super Bowl featured prostitutes dishing on the private conversations and kinks of the rich. By contrast, the post-Davos hooker call girl story is a staple in England. This year, the big news was around the orgies, anal, and, more concerningly, the mainstreaming of climate change-related “fuck-it-all” nihilism. Prurient as it may be, fly-on-the wall reporting has value. It’s way into the room. (READ MORE)
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The decline and fall of the just-because flower.
This Valentine’s Day, Americans will spend something on the order of $2.7 billion on bouquets. That’s a a lot (props to the fornicators), but also a misleading number. In fact, Americans – and well-to-do Americans in particular – are stunningly bloom-averse. We buy fewer flowers than our poorer Dutch (obvi), Scandi, Swiss, German[1], Austrian, English, French, and Japanese counterparts.
Fresh-cut stems are not a staple of Dwell-subscribing homes. Blame Whole Foods, cocaine, and “respectable” suburban florists.
The first thing to know is that flowers are for closers. In America, the top 3% of consumers population are responsible for 33% of the floral spend. This skew ain’t new. During the Victorian Era, floriography, a flower-based form of encoded communication, allowed rakes and tarts with access to exotic blooms from the far corners of the expanding empire to send each other brief messages – the sweet-smelling antecedent to “You up?” When floral wingdings fell out of favor, flowers did not. Feral former teacher’s pets will remember the first line of Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
In America, Mary Tyler Moore followed suit, buying a cut rose for her desk every damn day. But things change.
In 1982, Safeway, the world’s largest supermarket chain at the time, opened a 61,000-square-foot megathing in Arlington, Texas with a flower stand stood behind the cash registers. That became the defacto supermarket arrangement for arrangements as chains focused on “basket value” undercut florists on prices, taking over the bulk of the cut flower business. Today, supermarkets routinely sell (crappy) flowers for 60% of what florists charge. This is how supermarkets captured roughly 40% of the flower market to florists’ 30%, but it’s also why flowers started to experience inflation shocks.
Flowers are the last thing grocery shoppers buy. As such, when the price of let’s say… eggs… goes up, flower sales go down. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, flower sales dipped. The result? White-collar Millennials who grew up in flowerless homes buy fewer roses than the sildenafil crowd.
Exacerbating this trend is the sharp decline in “vase life” that remains Pablo Escobar’s oddest legacy.
Around the time his son was doing rails at Camp David, President H.W. Bush signed the Andean Trade Preference Agreement. The 1991 treaty offered trade benefits to Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru[2] in exchange for those countries investing in non-coca agricultural industries – mostly flower production. The act may have made it slightly harder for the Medellin and Cali Cartels to recruit, but it definitely drove American farmers unable to compete with lower prices out of business.
Today, more that 70% percent of flowers sold in the U.S. – most of those Valentine’s Day Roses – are imported from Colombia via Miami. These “cold chain” flowers are kept in warehouses and trucks refrigerated to 35ish degrees. This halves their vase life. In short, flowers sell less in part because they are worth less.
Suburban florists aren’t responsible for the macro trends that backfooted them, but they have also made some questionable decisions in service of maintaining Main Street respectability.
In America, most florist keep the bulk of their imported flowers in coolers, putting plants and vases out on display. This is not how it works in Toulouse. So-called “European Style” florists put cut flowers in buckets and let buyers do their thing. This practice, which, it’s worth noting, not uncommon in large American cities, makes things easier for habitual, Mary Tyler Moore-style desk decorators. But main street florists don’t prioritize those customers. Their shops are set up to do big numbers on Valentine’s Day. They do, but at the cost of day-to-day sales.
None of this is to say that the Upper Middle doesn’t buy plants. The succulent plant market is expected to grow at a bonkers compound annual growth rate of 17% from 2024 to 2033. But an aloe is an aloe is an aloe – and very much not a rose. Prickly desert plants should be a once a year purchase. Roses should not.
→ Esquire is now selling subscriptions to “Esquire Premium,” a membership tier that grants readers access to the magazine’s frequently updated style guides. This attempt to monetize the Google-placating, evergreen content that stopped providing traffic after last year’s algorithm update is ridiculous and brazen. It’s also likely to be replicated across not only Hearst properties (Bazaar, Elle), but Condé Nast properties (Vogue, Bon App). There’s nothing wrong with selling the back catalog – that’s the business model for Penguin Random House – but spending money on Esquire access makes no sense. Glenn O’Brien’s obnoxious named but fantastically written How To Be a Man: A Guide To Style and Behavior For The Modern Gentleman can be had for less. (READ IT)
→ The jeans printed on sweatpants thing is a real trend and a real bummer. The antidote to uncomfortable jeans should be comfortable jeans, not trompe l'oeil. Enbaggification needs to stop. (READ MORE)
→ After funding cuts affected school budgets in New Zealand a few years ago, it became a power move for well-to-do families to buy and retrofit old schools. In 2021, six New York art galleries bought a former public school upstate for $1.2M[3], renamed it “The Campus,” and began making it a thing. Expect more of this if DOE funding dries up. (READ MORE)
→ Burberry dropped a banger. (WATCH IT)
→ William H. Macy has settled a $600K lawsuit brought by his neighbor, who claimed Macy had “several healthy, decades-old mature pine trees” cut down on his property, presumably in order to improve the view. Prick move, but also kinda badass. (READ MORE)
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“Ask Mr. Market” is UPPER MIDDLE’s occasional financial advice column authored by Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.
Dear Mr. Market:
My wife is more risk averse than I am and I’m having trouble convincing her that our 50-50 stock/bond portfolio is too conservative. She always thinks things are about to crash. Can you help?
Stymied in Syracuse
*
Dear Stymied,
Okay, so your wife didn’t make a killing on GameStop. You should still consider keeping her.
Risk is like fiber. Most people don’t have enough and it’s not very pleasant to add more. But the outputs, so to speak, are better.
Still, risk hurts. If you’re 100% in stocks and the market crashes 50%, your nest egg will halve and you’ll feel lousy. But before your wife locks in a 4% CD, remind her that the two types of people most likely to screw up as investors are those who don’t take enough risk and those who bail out near market lows because they can’t take more pain.
Try a gradual approach. Get her to agree to put 60% of your assets into stocks this year and, if the world doesn’t end, push that up to 65% or 70% next year. Before doing that, however, you must agree that the two of you won’t sell if the market tanks. (I’m not big on blood oaths, except in this case. ) Remind her that the market always comes back. Show her the chart. Tell her that the S&P 500 crashed 34% in early 2020 after Covid hit and exceeded pre-crash levels by July.
Maybe don’t tell her that the Great Recession, which was far more financially devastating, saw theS&P 500 56.8% down at its low and that it took years to recover – four years to be precise. Not that long, but certainly long enough to get a date in family court.
Big declines will happen. That’s the sure bet. The question is whether or not you sell. You and your wife can’t control the market, but you can control your behavior (granted, this is only true if you can live off your income). You eliminate risk by strapping in for the long haul. Trader, de-risk thyself.
Sufficient risk means having bad days or months or sometimes years, but it almost always pays off so long as feelings of panic don’t turn into panic selling.
Sincerely,
Mr. Market
→ The average price of private school tuition just hit an all-time high, rising 7.4% to $49,284. This sounds like the champagne-fest of champagne problems – and perhaps it is – but it will highlight income inequality so often willfully ignored in high-income zips, sowing real discontent[4]. And, yeah, that’s kind of a problem. (READ MORE)
→ If you’re gonna pay $.50 more for eggs, maybe invest in an egg poacher pan and some off-the-shelf béarnaise. Highly recommend.
→ The economic vibe shift is underway. My (not at all crazy) neighbor invested in a bull in order to sell semen. I live in Brooklyn.
→ WSJ has a kind of amazing profile of Sierra Bille, a New York University graduate paid nothing for higher ed having applied for 300 scholarships. The story drives two points home. There’s money out there and colleges are doing nothing to make it easy. (READ MORE)
[1] As it turns out – and no one would have called it – the Germans buy a ton of flowers and the Japanese invest heavily in fancy flowers (mostly orchids). The Axis lives on.
[2] It’s worth noting that coca production only really ramped up in Colombia after the coup in Chile so wilting flowers could be blamed on Pinochet or, like everything else, Kissinger, who did nothing to stop him.
[3] It’s time for all you Trulia and Zillow scrollers to get with the program and start trolling LoopNet.
[4] There’s this weird dynamic in high-income communities where the public schools are effectively more private than private schools, which offer various scholarships. As a result, the kids with the least exposure to inequality tend to act like townies and kids with the most exposure do not. One might argue that this is actually a demonstration of resentment more than it is an emergent property of the public school system.
