Coupon Culture and the American Decline
Turns out when you live life cheaply, it has terrible consequences
My dad, like many of his generation, was a man stuck in the past. Having grown up in the fifties and sixties, when you could get a burger, fries, and a shake for 47 cents, by the time his age had equaled those decades, he could not fathom how burger costs had skyrocketed. Periodically he would come home, sit down at the kitchen table, and - with a proud little smirk on his face - brag about how earlier that day he was able to use a coupon to get two sandwiches, fries, and a drink from Burger King for only $8.99. Go to a non-fast food joint and spend ten dollars for a burger alone?
“That’s just way too much.”
Needless to say, these stories ceased to be interesting or funny after the first iteration, but they always seemed to bring him great pride and joy, as if he thought he was consistently scoring a great deal. It never really made sense to me, and I would admittedly complain about it often; it bothered me, even if I couldn’t pinpoint why. I’d point out we’ve had inflation, and cost of living increases, there were a million reasons burgers were fairly priced where they currently were! It didn’t make a difference, he just couldn’t see it.
My friend Eric once told me about a buddy of his who is wired very similarly to my dad. A while back, this friend was on a business trip where he was treated to a five-star hotel and a daily menu full of gourmet foods that - in his words - he just couldn’t pronounce. While this sounded like a dream scenario to Eric, it got to the point where this guy couldn’t take it anymore, and he had to get his hands on “a good old-fashioned American burger.” So he and his wife got in their car and drove to their nearest McDonald’s.
Both of these stories share something in common; they are both the direct result of Coupon Culture.
Okay, but what IS Coupon Culture anyway? Coupon Culture is searching out the cheapest price or quantity, (and if both, all the better) instead of investing in quality. It is the unwillingness to pay a fair and proper price for the goods and services you want, and sometimes even need. It is the value assessment that saving money is far more important than quality in almost every aspect of life.
It’s an epidemic, and it is killing us.
I find it hard to blame people in a way, after all, it is almost impossible to escape the humble coupon. You open up your mailbox and are accosted with them daily; you browse online and have “great deal” ads target you on every page. What’s more, it always seems to be the usual corporate suspects.
I honestly struggle because I want to like corporations like McDonald’s, Olive Garden, or Cracker Barrel (to name a few). After all, they are Americana success stories, but I just can’t, because simply put, they're crap. Their products are not good, nor are they good for you, and what’s worse is that in the case of places like Olive Garden or TGI Fridays, they’ve convinced so many people that they are somehow high quality and/or “fancy.”
There’s this great scene in The Big Bang Theory where Wolowitz is leaving a voicemail for a woman, asking her out to a restaurant, only for his mom to interrupt, and we are treated to this amazingly pertinent gem:
Mrs. Wolowitz Tell her we're going to the Olive Garden. I have a coupon from the paper.
Howard: We're not going to the Olive Garden, ma!
Mrs. Wolowitz Oh, Mr. Big Shot with his Red Lobster.
I know the scene is meant to make you laugh, and it does, but man-oh-man if it isn’t the truth for millions of Americans.
But it’s not just food; it’s the Ikea vs. true craftsman problem. To be clear, I am not arguing that discounts are always (or in and of themselves) a problem; if you can use discounts and rewards points to get a thousand-dollar smoker for three hundred bucks, God bless ya! But typically if a product has a coupon, particularly regularly, it’s because it has next to no actual value; and while sometimes a cheap piece-of-crap plastic/faux wood table is exactly what you need in a bind, it should never be a replacement for what is truly valuable. The exception does not disprove the rule.
I’m stating the obvious here, but the reason an oak table or a cabinet from a professional woodworker is more valuable and costs a lot more than a cheaper brand that you can put together yourself is because it’s made with better materials and takes more time, effort, and skill. It is by its very nature more valuable. The same goes for the aforementioned burgers, as the restaurant burger is (typically) made with better ingredients, and takes more time, talent, and effort. These are things that we should be willing to pay for because they are, in many ways, investments in ourselves and others; when we buy the oak table, we are investing in time-honed craftsmanship and beauty, and when we spend our money on high-quality foods, we are investing in our health.
But Coupon Culture is in many ways a perpetually “poor” problem, not a “rich” one. The perpetually poor-minded person seeks free or cheap advice on what to do and refuses or kvetches over spending any “significant” amount of money, and they suffer for it. I’ve seen people I love and care about refuse to spend the money to hire a lawyer because they were afraid of the costs, instead seeking free legal advice from attorneys online, which could only go so far and was never going to be able to be as specific to their case as needed. In the end, it only prolonged the process and made things worse, and more expensive.
I’ve seen my friend lose time and income, both of which he needs for his family, because people will waste his time by seeking his financial advice (he is a financial planner), and then either try and implement his advice themselves or eschew it for what their father-in-law, “who googled your suggestion,” told them to do. It’s as if certain people think they shouldn’t have to pay a fair value for people’s expertise and - should they choose to work with them - capability. If your new advisor has more services available to him and a team of experts that your previous advisor did not, shouldn’t you expect to pay a bit more?
Rich-minded, and frankly, rich people, on the other hand, don’t have this problem, which is a significant reason why they remain rich. They are willing to pay a premium for good advice, knowing it may end up hurting a bit in the short term, but it will grow both their money and influence in the long term for themselves and their descendants. Incidentally, if you are mad at “generational wealth” and people who are filthy rich without ever having to work a day in their privileged lives, you aren’t really mad at them, rather, you are generally speaking angry at your ancestors for not planning as well as theirs did. Proper planning and wealth management can support a family for GENERATIONS, but far too many seek the cheap way, and they and their families pay dearly for it. Coupon Culture causes generational problems; and again, I understand there are exceptions, but the rule remains.
Before anyone calls me out for being tone-deaf, especially in this economy, or accuses me of making this case because I had ancestors who planned well, let me quell those claims. I am neither well-to-do myself, nor am I on the receiving end of some generational wealth. My grandpa, for example, worked multiple different jobs during his life; he sold ice cream on the side of the road, homemade bleach door-to-door, and after a career on the line at Arnold’s Bakery, was a gas station attendant at his son-in-law’s station.
Through his hard work, he was able to own three houses (almost always two at a time) in a nice part of Westchester County, New York; unfortunately, due to a lack of proper planning and a streak of over-generosity, when he and his wife died, they didn’t leave to their descendants nearly as much as they could or should have with those assets. So I’m not saying these things because I learned them the easy way, but simply because they are true.
Similarly, and it may sound like I’m being a bit reductive here, but have you ever wondered why the majority of new buildings we construct seem purposely ugly, that is to say, purposeless in their supposed beauty? It’s Coupon Culture, among other things, that has led to the downfall of inspiring architecture. Who wants to spend ages creating magnificent, God-honoring (with their beauty) buildings that inspire people to do great things when you can just cash in the coupon for a quick and easy, “functional” structure? It’s too much time, too much effort, too much money, and yet, it ends up costing us so much more.
Additionally, Coupon Culture has done more damage to us as a people than filling our pre-fab-cookie cutter homes with cheap, replaceable garbage and our bellies with items that hardly qualify as food. You see, pursuing Coupon Culture goes against our very purpose as people and is beneath us as the Imago Dei; we as human beings are created in the image of God and designed by Him to seek quality, especially because we and all His other creations were made with quality! There is no cheapness with God, if you are a believer, your very soul and salvation were bought at a high price! God, in saving His people, is like John Hammond in Jurassic Park, He spared no expense.
Sadly, we’ve even seen Coupon Culture infect the pulpit and the church. Pastors who are supposed to be great men of God, preaching the whole counsel of His word, have turned into what Blaze TV host Steve Deace would call “pleated khaki wearing” weaklings, who sell a watered down, cheapened gospel. “Men” who promote the mild, hippie Jesus; who adore preaching on God’s love, while abstaining from those hard and valuable teachings on His holiness, righteousness, justice, wrath, etc. Coupon Culture in the church is what has caused so much of the deconstruction we have seen in the faith of an entire generation, as people my age have seen the cheapness of what was being sold and refused to buy it any longer; tragically they haven’t abstained from Coupon Culture, they’ve just ended up exchanging one coupon for another; from cheap grace to free sin. I’ve witnessed far too many people I grew up with leave the faith and exchange the truth for lies, and it isn’t because we gave them too much high-value truth.
Finally, we’ve let Coupon Culture invade our politics and, in so doing, help bring us further down the road to destruction. How? For far too long, we on the right have sought out the value brand of Conservatism because it’s cheap and easy to vote with the “Magic R(epublican) Coupon” despite the decades-long betrayal of their promises and our trust. Instead of seeking value and paying the appropriate price for great representation, we have consistently turned in coupon after worthless coupon for candidates who claimed to share our values, who talked a good game, and then broke down like a cheap piece of furniture every time; and if they somehow won, we kept re-electing them.
You want to talk about the national debt, the invasion at the border, the infestation of wokeness in schools, the assaults on the first and second amendment, drag queen story hour, and the transgendering of your kids? Blame Coupon Culture, and the fact that we’ve engaged in it willingly by failing to fight for the high-value representatives for far too long. This is what happens when we refuse to pay the fair price for even the small things in life; it “trickles up” to the great things.
The people are the problem.
I’m not sure what to do about Coupon Culture on the whole; you have to first convince people there is a problem before you can see massive change. This is but one part of my attempt to make a difference; thankfully, in some areas, there seems to be some positive movement. A portion of the people seem to be waking up to the need for quality in their lives in their food, and how they take care of their bodies, but there is still a long way to go, and I am under no delusion that Coupon Culture will go away any time soon.
To be fair, we’ve seen positive advancements on the political side of things as well; the fact that we have a candidate like Ron DeSantis running for President - the epitome of anti-Coupon Culture - is almost too good to be true, and the election of Mike Johnson, while way too soon to tell, could turn out to be a first positive step in the right direction. Then again, the enshrinement of the “right” to kill your baby in supposedly Conservative Ohio shows that Coupon Culture will not go down without a fight. But the real challenge we face will be in the church at large; and if we’re being honest, the only way that changes is by the grace of God. The good news?
He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster. - Joel 2:13