Today I am thinking about the TV show Breaking Bad<\/i>. No, not because I am excited about the recently announced August 11, 2013 second half premiere of season 5; I have Ted Beneke on the brain. For readers who are not Breaking Bad<\/i> watchers (or for those who are, but have forgotten some of the minor characters), Ted Beneke was the president of a family-owned fabricating company that employed Skylar White as the bookkeeper. Skylar White used $600,00 of the proceeds from husband Walter White\u2019s meth manufacturing operation to close an IRS audit of Beneke Fabricators and pay back taxes Ted owed to the IRS. OK, got all of that? There will be a quiz on Tuesday\u00a0:).<\/p>\n
Ted is on my mind today as an example of \u201cconspicuous consumption,\u201d a term coined by sociologist Thorstein Veblen in the 1899 book \u00adThe Theory of the Leisure Class<\/i>, and today defined by Wikipedia as \u201cthe spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury goods and services to publicly display economic power \u2013 either the buyer\u2019s income or the buyer\u2019s accumulated wealth.\u201d In an attempt to save his troubled business Ted sold many of his luxury goods, but after the cash infusion one of his initial purchases was a new Mercedes-Benz car. When confronted by Skylar about why he did not spend the money on seemingly more important items such as re-hiring furloughed employees, Ted responded that he has to look impressive when he meets with business clients.<\/p>\n
I bought a \u201cnew\u201d car last month, partly because my current car is not a pretty sight, with its peeling paint and cracked windshield. \u201cNew\u201d is in quotes because the car is a 2007 model with 67,000 miles on it. That\u2019s an improvement over the current 2000 ride, but it\u2019s the first time since my initial car purchase in 1987 that I have not selected a new car. (The current 2000 Honda Accord was a gift from my mother-in-law to my wife when she went to graduate school in 2010.) The initial 1987 purchase at the beginning of my sophomore year of college was a 1979 Honda Accord with 120,000 miles; it had 190,000 miles when I bought my first new car (a 1992 Acura Integra) in 1991. I subsequently leased three new cars. When the last lease expired in 2010 my wife and I decided to not get another new car in order to save money for her graduate school expenses; I rode the bus to work and used the Zipcar car-sharing service while my wife used her mother\u2019s car in North Carolina.<\/p>\n
While I don\u2019t need to be quite as concerned with appearances as businessman Ted Beneke, I don\u2019t want to look shabby as a new Dean! My initial preference was to lease another new car, but I\u2019ll be putting too many miles on a vehicle in the next couple of years to justify leasing, so I decided to investigate used cars. I ended up with a Nissan Murano SL. The \u201cL\u201d in SL is for \u201cluxury,\u201d so I\u2019m happy. A Murano is not a Mercedes by any stretch of the imagination, but it has style, so I don\u2019t have to worry about the negative perceptions of owning a \u201chooptie,\u201d a car with problems. I suppose, though, that driving a hooptie would invite less scrutiny than if I were rolling around a college campus in a $100,000 car. I won\u2019t have to worry about the latter possibility for many years to come\u2026if ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I am thinking about the TV show Breaking Bad. No, not because I am excited about the recently announced August 11, 2013 second half premiere of season 5; I have Ted Beneke on the brain. For readers who are not Breaking Bad watchers (or for those who are, but have forgotten some of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1927,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2516,22214],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-conspicuous-consumption","tag-media-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1927"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/dean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}