During the Great Depression, I have read, Americans spent their pennies from heaven on small luxuries: an afternoon hiding from the rain in wet galoshes at the movie matinee, a Baby Ruth, a soap from Woolworth’s that washed away the smell of cabbage and replaced it with the pretty scent of lilies of the valley. Alluring bottles of Cashmere Bouquet, Florida Water, or Tabu perfume. The poor and huddled masses darned their stockings, put cardboard into their shoes to hide the holes, and made Max Factor and Louis B. Mayer into moguls; they saved up for weeks to buy a little glamour in the form of face powder, platinum-blonde peroxide, or Pond’s Cold Cream. Sales of Hershey bars climbed as high as the Chrysler Building: “A nickel bar that tastes like a million bucks,” the tagline read.
Pondering this week where I’d stash my cash, if I had any cash to stash — apropos of the possibly pending global financial collapse — the strategy of parking money in companies that manufacture small indulgences seems about right. A year from now, the lights may have gone out and the internet may have ceased to function; we may all be eating boiled potatoes and dandelion greens (scavenged from the yard) for dinner every night; but we can make believe and add a little Hollywood dreaming to the long, dark night by applying damask-rose-scented mud packs to our face.
The common understanding among ignoramuses like me — who read women’s magazines from time to time, or watch advice segments on “Good Morning America” but really know nothin’ about nothin’ when it comes to Wall Street — is that sage and seasoned investors buy gold or silver when a recession is coming. They also say it’s safe in a recession to invest your retirement money in utilities, like the electric company.
Maybe so, but if I had ready money to hide under the metaphorical mattress I think I’d lay off the gold bars and go for the emotional investment instead. Find a company that produces budget luxury. I feel a lipstick boom coming on. Not lip gloss, not buffing lip scrub, not lip stain, but lipstick. In a tube that snaps shut. Perhaps with a jeweled clasp. Or, is there a publicly held American perfumer to invest in? Tariffs will wallop French perfume houses; so what about domestic manufacturers of trendy scents?
I’m googling around instead of emptying the dishwasher. Estee Lauder apparently has a factory up the Island in Melville, and Estee Lauder is the parent company of Le Labo and Jo Malone. Hm. Elizabeth Arden owns perfume factories down South. Hm. Estee Lauder had a huge Depression-era perfume hit with Blue Grass, a fresh, lavender scent evoking the moneyed ease and rolling horse paddocks of Kentucky Derby country.
Every once in a blue moon I have an insight about investing that I do not act upon. I am far from business-minded and all of this is purely in the realm of daydreaming and time wasting.
I remember the day in 1997 when I was sitting at my desk, high up in a building that we jocularly called “The Death Star” — the black-windowed skyscraper at 1633 Broadway in Manhattan, opposite the Winter Garden Theatre, where “Cats” was still running — and it occurred to me that if I were wise and energetic, I’d invest in this new online bookstore called Amazon. I actually did have a retirement fund in those days and could have done so. This was before the dot.com bubble burst and I was safely ensconced in a comfortable corporate career in print journalism (lol!). But I did not invest.
Another lost moment came maybe a year later, around 1998, not long after I had moved from one glossy magazine at the Death Star on Broadway over to another, glossier magazine at the Condé Nast headquarters on Madison Avenue, where the radiators and the smokers huffed and puffed and all the girls had traded their opaque black tights in for bare legs. What happened in 1998 was that my friend Jonathan Magidoff called me up and scoffed and shouted at me down the horn — that’s “the land line telephone,” for you young people — when he discovered I was still randomly using WebCrawler, Dogpile, or Ask Jeeves as my World Wide Web search engines. Jonathan Magidoff suggested I migrate to a new search engine called Google, and I did. It was obviously, patently better. I thought if I were smart, I’d put my money on Google. I did not. I was not, as it turns out, smart.
I also had a vague plan circa 1999 and 2000 to put my retirement money into cardboard-box and packaging manufacturers in support of the roaring online retailers of the new millennium, but I did not buy stocks in International Paper, either.
There may be no one on God’s green earth who is worse with money than I am, but I still feel entitled to my opinions, and in my opinion investing should be a bit mystical, a bit emotional, and I don’t think I’m wrong. For example, my other big idea, circa 2001, was that a wise person would invest in freight trains, Union Pacific or Norfolk Southern. Trains would be carrying all those cardboard boxes from Amazon, presumably, especially once it became prohibitively expensive to supply Mack Trucks with diesel. But, you know, the deeper reason I wanted to invest in trains was because, you know, I do love trains. Don’t we all love trains? Trains are the right thing. The arc of investment is long but it bends toward justice. (Sorry, Dr. King.)
When I was a student back at the East Hampton Middle School, I suffered from insomnia — partly due to anxiety and a tendency to live too much, as the kids say, in my head, but also because I drank way too much “green box” iced tea, and in the absentee-parenting milieu of the late 1970s and early 1980s, no adult was monitoring my unhealthy caffeinated beverage consumption. So I would lie awake under my rosebud comforter, beside the bedroom window with the ruffled curtains from Sears, in our old house behind the Star office, and count the passage of the hours by telling time according to the haunting sound of the late-night Long Island Rail Road trains as they honked and blew through the village. That’s 10:10 p.m. . . . that’s the 1:40 a.m. eastbound . . .
What are Americans likely to spend their money on in the possibly-coming recession? What feels mystically right if I plunk my soothsayer turban on my head and consult the stars?
When I was in Florida last week, I read about a private passenger railroad company called the Brightline — good name — that is having success carrying tourists and commuters between Miami and Orlando. Hm. Privately funded passenger trains for economical escapes (with a whiff of novelty and the new). I’d put my money on that. If I had any. Trains and any American perfume manufacturer selling the luxurious-yet-reliable fantasy of sunshine, suntans, mermaids, and happiness with orange blossom eau de cologne, if there’s anyone out there?