Conspicuous Consumption

I live in an affluent community. The Land Rover and Bentley dealerships for Boston are here. A BMW dealership was also recently constructed here, and so we are used to seeing people driving around in nice cars. Seeing a BMW, Porsche, Mercedes Benz or Jaguar is no big deal, because they are all over the place, including the parking lot of the church.

But recently I have seen a large uptick in the number of high end vehicles on the road, like Lamborghini’s, Ferrari’s, Rolls Royce’s, a Lotus and even a Maserati. While I have occasionally seen these around, recently it seems like a daily occurrence that I see at least one of these cars, and so I wonder what’s going on.

I have two theories:

The first is the simple one that the economy is doing better, and so people who can afford these cards are out buying and driving them again. But, I also routinely hear that the economy is not doing better, or at least for some people, so I’m not sure this is the full answer.

The second, and maybe more likely answer, is that people are feeling more confident in driving these cars. With the near destruction of our economy led by greedy people from all walks of life, I think it became temporarily unpopular or maybe even dangerous to drive around in such a conspicuous display of wealth. Now that we are a little further away from the collapse people are feeling able to drive these cars around again and so they are being pulled out of the garage and put back on the street.

A third possibility, and one that’s a lot more cynical, is that the people who are driving these cars simply don’t care anymore about what people think. They are doing fine and it doesn’t matter what is going on in the rest of the economy or country and they are going to enjoy themselves simply because they can, and everyone else can just go to %#@^!