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No, You Can’t Get an Upgrade

UNFILLED HOUSING Left stranded by the economic slump, fewer Americans are moving, according to the Census Bureau.Credit...Kirk Condyles for The New York Times

We are not going anywhere.

That is what we learned from a report last week by the Census Bureau which found that fewer Americans are changing residences than at any time since 1962, back when there were 120 million fewer Americans than today.

The numbers are yet another worrying beep from the array of gizmos that monitor our economic coma. But the report also signals a profound, if barely noticed, change to our national psyche, one that goes far beyond the way we think about housing.

For decades, Americans have been known as epic consumers, but it would be more accurate to call us epic upgraders. During all those years of packing up and moving, we were headed to a bigger house, at a better address, perhaps for a higher-paying job. We were trading up, and that urge — to acquire something bigger or better, preferably something bigger and better — is a quintessentially American urge. It is so neatly woven into the double helix of our DNA that we hardly notice it.

When we buy a television, it’s rarely because we lack a TV. We want a thinner TV, or a bigger TV, or a TV with features that sound beguiling even if we have no idea what they do. Like the DynaLight Dynamic Back Light Control on the latest Toshiba high-definition set. What is that? We don’t know. But we’ll take two.

Or we would if we could afford them. To fully understand our collective shock over our pulse-less economy, take a good look at the upgrade cycle that we’ve been gleefully riding for at least three decades. Until last year, if you were living the 2.3 version of Life, you had your eyes on version 2.4 and odds were pretty good that you’d get it. Maybe on an overextended credit card, or from a loan that you really couldn’t afford. But you’d get it.

Now, if you’re living Life 2.3, your ambition is to avoid Life 2.2.

Forget the upgrade. The game now is avoiding the downgrade. This is grim and troubling, in part, because so much of our consumer culture is built around the enticements of the Better.

Entire corporate strategies target the bottomless American appetite for the upgrade. Holders of American Express’s regular old green card might eventually get an invitation to upgrade to a gold card. (More privileges, more perks! For a fee, of course.) And once you’ve swiped that baby for a while, you might get an invitation to upgrade to platinum. (Yet more privileges, yet more perks! And higher fees.) If you behave yourself with the platinum card, you could join the purportedly exclusive ranks of black card holders, who pay a one-time initiation fee of $5,000 and then $2,500 annually.

All of these slabs of plastic do basically the same thing — help you acquire stuff — but they also confer ever larger increments of cachet on the holder. This allows you to upgrade your material life while signaling, to anyone who can see you in midpurchase, just how upgraded your material life already is.

No company has exploited America’s upgrade fever quite as deftly as Apple. The company is one of the very few that has kept most prices at prerecession levels while managing to report profits, as it did last week. Of course, Apple makes wonderful computers, software and gadgets, but is also brilliant at making everything you bought from it nine months ago seem slow, fusty and passé.

The compulsion to upgrade is most glaring in cities — particularly New York and Los Angeles — which are filled with the upwardly mobile who relocate in search of upgraded opportunities surrounded by savvier, richer, trendier people. These transplants are constantly trading up not just their jobs but their group of friends. Everyone in New York and L.A. has had this experience: you make a plan for dinner with a buddy, which he cancels with a lame, last minute excuse (“I’m just exhausted”). What you both know is that he got a late-breaking better offer. He upgraded his dinner.

The cities themselves are constantly being upgraded; there is scarcely a block in Manhattan that is far from a construction site, or a building that’s just been knocked down to make way for a bigger, better building. The upgrade-seekers of the city intuitively understand the city’s own upgrade addiction and are remarkably tolerant of the noise and inconvenience. Contrast that with Paris, a city that radiates a contentment with its present state. You can walk for miles without seeing a crane, hard hat or jackhammer.

In the United States, upgrade-mania has bred a sense of entitlement, which has only stoked upgrade demands. In recent years, when anything went wrong in any transaction — the airline misplaced your luggage, Little Caesars sent you a medium with pepperoni and mushroom and you hate mushrooms — you were owed an upgrade. A business class ticket, an order of crazy bread, something.

Perhaps the sense of being owed an extra won’t go away any time soon.

But there has long been an on-again, off-again war in the American soul between the forces of consumerism and the countervailing force of austerity. The consumers have had the upper hand for decades, but we might have little choice now but to find comfort in the words of the philosopher and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.”

Obviously, this man didn’t live in the age of Canon Elph, or the XBox 360 or the Range Rover LR3. But we can’t afford that cute new, teeny weeny digital camera in the Best Buy insert, so we’ll have to stick with the now ungainly looking model we bought a year ago. We can’t afford the Elite Passes and Gold Club memberships that were the open sesame to spiffier rental cars and bigger hotel rooms, so we’ll have to get used to compact vehicles and the double at the Motel 6.

And the house you own? Well, if you can still make the mortgage payments, learn to love it. Because for the time being, it will have to do.

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