"Insourcing" is the new word

There’s an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning -- Home Economics of Anxious Times: Dyeing Your Hair in the Kitchen Sink. It caught my eye because I’m a confirmed color-at-home person. My cousin is a hairstylist and she used to cut my hair when I lived near her so I was always a bit spoiled with haircuts, but even back then I had no qualms about coloring my own hair. She would color it occasionally but most of the time if I saw a color I liked in the store or in a beauty supply shop I’d simply grab it and try it. My hair has been every color from plum to pumpkin. I’ll try just about anything, including highlights, streaks, lightening. You name it. I’ve never really had any disasters. If I don’t like the way something turns out I just color over it. No big deal as far as I’m concerned. I don’t do a lot of heat-damaging things to my hair so it stays in surprisingly good condition, despite all of the coloring.

At any rate, I clicked on the Post article and discovered that it was about the current “economic downtown.” That means recession or near-Depression to the rest of us. It’s about some of the ways people are economizing in the current economy. Apparently the new word is “insourcing.” That means that people are trying to do things for themselves, especially those expensive little luxuries that they were formerly paying others to do for them. More people are coloring their hair at home. They are buying sewing kits so they can do their own tailoring. They’re doing their own landscaping.

Within one week, Mary changed the bulb in the headlight of her Mercedes, cutting out a $120 trip to the mechanic. The couple made a cake for their 11-year-old daughter's birthday party instead of spending $50 at the local bakery. And Chris, who works in a management job, picked up some cans of paint from the Sears in Fair Oaks to help a friend redecorate -- seven hours of work but a savings of roughly $1,000.

Now, I don’t want to seem callous, but, Mercedes aside, these are things that I ordinarily do for myself anyway. When I have a headlight out, I change it. I bake my own birthday cakes for people. And I can’t usually afford to pay people to paint my rooms. Okay, if I need the outside of my house painted, I would probably call professionals, that’s true. I’ll grant you that. I’m not keen to get up on ladders.

I do pay someone to mow my yard. That’s mostly because a) if I depend on myself to do it I will procrastinate and my grass gets too high; and b) I break every mower I touch. But I do not pay my neighbor very much to mow my yard when he mows his at the same time. It’s not the $500 per month lawncare described in this article.

I don’t have a personal trainer to dismiss.

Wal-Mart said sales of herb gardens and tomato and pepper seeds are up, an indication that shoppers are trying to save money by growing their own food, spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said. In Wal-Mart's auto department, sales of oil, filters, grease and funnels have also risen as more people opt to be their own mechanic.

I must hang out with very poor people because we have always done these things.

Brenda Waller, 42, of Herndon said her consulting firm has frozen salaries, and she's worried about the future. She has called off the lawn care service for the coming summer and asked the woman who does her nails to cut them extra short -- so the manicure will last longer. And no more pedicures. But she is holding on to DoodyCalls, a company that cleans up after her pets in the yard. Founder Jacob D'Aniello said his Charlottesville-based company grew by 21 percent last year.

Again, these things don’t seem to apply to me. I do my own manicures and pedicures -- GASP! And I pick up after my own dogs.

I almost left out the most interesting part of the article:

Underhill, the retail consultant, predicts consumers' newfound self-sufficiency will last even after the recession is a distant memory. "Americans have always taken some pride in doing things for themselves," he said.

I think that it used to be true that Americans were self-sufficient but not anymore. I think it's only a myth now, like the days of the Old West and Pioneer Spirit. Americans don't do that kind of thing now. We go shopping. We buy online. Have you taken a good look at American kids recently? They would rather stay inside and play games (sorry Matt) than go outside and do anything. Most people do seem to want everything to be done for them. I think when this financial mess is over they will go right back to the same lifestyle they were enjoying before it was so rudely interrupted.

I think all of this is my way of wondering if these economic bad times are truly affecting everyone in our country equally. I think, perhaps, it’s those who have benefited most from the big salaries, the housing boom, and the joyride on the stock market during the last decade who are feeling the fall now. The rest of us are surely being hurt by bank problems and credit drying up. Some industries may be losing jobs. But I don’t know if our daily standard of living is being impacted as much as some of our wealthier friends. In my business, freelance writing, I haven’t noticed any change at all. Nothing has changed for me. Unless, of course, I wanted to go to the bank and try to take out a loan. Then I suspect it might be much more difficult than it would have been a year or two ago.

My dad was born in 1907. For him the Great Depression was something that he lived through by trying to sell things door-to-door in order to support a wife and young son. That had to be incredibly difficult. It affected him for the rest of his life. When I was a child in the 1960s and ‘70s he would rant about turning the heat down in the house to save money and turning out lights in rooms when we weren’t using them. He kept our kitchen cabinets full of canned food, “just in case.” I think he was haunted by the feeling that you could lose everything and that you had to conserve what you had.

I grew up being influenced by my dad’s way of thinking. I won’t throw anything away. You never know when you might need it. I am loath to pay people to do things for me. Who knows how, or if, our current economic situation may affect people’s thinking in the future?