Unpicking contemporary thrift: Getting on and getting by in everyday life

Helen Holmes, Sociology/Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester, 188 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

Email: helen.holmes@manchester.ac.uk

constellation; these are: financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment. I make two key arguments. First, that thrift is primarily about value and how value is perceived, produced and released through different contexts, motivations and activities. Second, and more broadly, I illustrate how thrift needs to be understood as more than a financial decision-making process or an act of consumption, and instead should be appreciated through the lens of the sociology of the everyday.

Thrift is often referred to as a vague and ambiguous concept (Miller, 1998). Its etymology reveals Puritan roots of morality, restraint and respectability, where money and resources are to be used cautiously. To date, the limited scholarly work available on thrift has been varied, but with a united focus on thrift as an act of consumption. As Podkalicka and Potts (2014, p. 231) note, a large part of this work focuses on understanding 'the origins and motivations of thrift behaviour' (Yates & Hunter, 2011). Other work has made headway in defining thrift, for instance distinguishing thrift from frugality (Evans, 2011), or detailing theoretical approaches for studying thrift (Podkalicka & Potts, 2014; Podkalicka & Tang, 2014). Much work on thrift is particularly focused on financial motivations – saving to spend or vice versa (Evans, 2011; Miller, 1998). With few exceptions (Cappellini & Parsons, 2013) there is very little work which examines thrift as a realm of activities which take place beyond the initial transaction.

Responding to this lacuna, this article draws upon empirical examples from a UK-based project exploring contemporary thrift activities within households. It adds to the body of work exploring the motivations for thrift behaviour, but through a particular empirical focus. My aim is to provide a different reading of thrift, one that is not only based on decisions regarding spending and saving, but which examines how thrift involves a multitude of activities and decisions, as resources move through the home. In line with Evans (2018a, p. 110), this approach pays attention to the 'ways in which the ongoing categorisation and valuation of things shape their trajectories'. I illustrate how thrift is ultimately about the values different activities and associated objects afford and enable. Part of this is to appreciate that whilst thrift is not solely about fiscal matters of spending and saving, it is also not just about consumption. As my empirical examples illustrate, to appreciate thrift only through the lens of consumption misses its everyday significance. In this respect, this article links to recent debates regarding the role of consumption in contemporary sociological research (Evans, 2018b; Graeber, 2011). Whilst consumption is an integral part of thrift activities, as an analytical concept it cannot grasp the entirety of thrift activities and motivations – not least those which involve production, but, moreover, how thrift is interwoven more broadly within the context of everyday life.

This article is firmly positioned in the emergent field of the sociology of the everyday (Back, 2015; Pink, 2012), providing a snapshot of the socio-economic importance of everyday contemporary thrift. In light of the continued economic uncertainty in the UK, an understanding of contemporary thrift is undoubtedly politically and economically valuable – not least for considering the myriad ways that people are getting on and getting by in times of economic uncertainty. However, whilst undoubtedly connected, it is not my intention to position this piece within the realms of work on austerity. As I have argued elsewhere, the practices of getting by during times of economic crisis are not new (Holmes, 2018); rather I wish to illustrate how thrift is not just about finance or consumption. Activities such as making, repairing, sharing and lending are not extraordinary, nor are they

always austere; rather they are part of everyday, mundane household activities (Hall & Holmes, 2017; Hall & Ince, 2017; Pahl, 1984; Wheeler & Glucksmann, 2013). I do not purport to have uncovered a 'new' form of thrift. Instead, I offer a different reading of thrift which embraces the multiplicity of thrift activities and motivations, and their importance within everyday life.

This article stems from research exploring everyday contemporary thrift through the lens of materiality, temporality and practice. I begin by positioning thrift in relevant scholarly debates, illustrating how this article both develops and enhances them. My methodology follows, before I introduce the constellation of thrift and its overlapping, competing and interwoven extremes of motivation: financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment. These are then fleshed out in the main empirical section of the article using three moments of household activity – shopping, cooking and repair and making – to illustrate their articulation and influence. As I argue in the proceeding discussion, these 'moments' reveal how value is perceived, produced and released through different thrift activities and how thrift is 'more than' just consumption and/or production.

The constellation of thrift emerged from repeat discussions by participants about what motivated their different thrifty activities. As Podkalicka and Potts (2014, p. 231) note, 'the central dimension of thrift scholarship is focused on understanding the origins or motivations of thrift behaviours'. Yet to date, much work on the motivations to be thrifty is focused on distinct categories. For example, Podkalicka and Potts (2014, p. 231) describe how thrift behaviours 'are centrally organised along an axis bounded by choice and necessity'; whilst Yates and Hunter (2011) determine between reactionary thrift and individualistic thrift – the former being based around environmental concerns whilst the latter is structured by expressive choice. I argue that these classifications not only

simplify thrift behaviour but also reduce thrift to only being viewed through the lens of consumption. As I illustrate, thrift motivations are not clearly defined as either one thing or another. Rather, such classifications should be seen as reference points, extremes around which to organise the varying motivations; motivations which overlap, intersect and compete. Furthermore, this polarisation of the motivations of 'choice' versus 'necessity' in past literatures on thrift is somewhat misleading. Every thrift behaviour requires a choice to some degree, even if that is a choice about which activities are deemed financially necessary.

The constellation of thrift is designed as a means of making sense of the interwoven and often competing motivations to be thrifty. Rather than an axis with two polar opposite positions, the constellation enables the fluidity of thrift to be captured; and the 'grey areas' where many thrift activities reside to be exposed. That being said, the constellation can only be explained using some form of classification system – Table 1 illustrates this. The categories in Table 1 are not catch-all, definitive classifications but rather extreme points of reference around which motivations reside to differing degrees. As Evans (2011, p. 554) found in distinguishing between thrift and frugality, in practice 'any action is likely to contain elements of both or sit somewhere between the two'. I propose that the constellation of thrift has three extremes – financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment – each of which occurs within a loosely defined context, with particular beneficiaries, types of activities and, importantly, a perspective on value. None of these categories is mutually exclusive, but rather thrift activities regularly contain elements of either two or all three extremes to some degree.

Dealing briefly with each of these in turn. First, financial necessity is one extreme which resonates with previous literature on thrift as an activity revolving around saving and spending, and ultimately shopping. Yet, as I illustrate through the empirical moments below, whilst many thrift activities are financially motivated, this is not always about spending or saving money. Whilst the activities of financial necessity are heavily associated with shopping, my research has revealed that they are primarily about exhausting the value of what one already has. Second, conscience – this is the most complex of the

constellation extremes, covering a broad moral and ethical context, including but not limited to: environmental matters and issues of sustainability and waste (Elliott, 2017); concerns regarding ethical consumption and production (Hall, 2011); and health-related issues (Burningham & Venn, 2017). This article will not engage in depth with these differing types of conscience but rather illustrates how these different concerns emerge through thrift activities. Needless to say, all thrift activities are bound by morality and the need to be doing the right and 'proper' thing (Miller, 1998). The significant point here is that conscience ensures that value is deemed to be released through thrift activities in the most appropriate and proper way. Activities are chosen that are deemed to have the least impact and the best for the particular conscientious concern at hand. The final extreme on the constellation is enjoyment. Enjoyment has been somewhat relegated over recent years in debates around consumption and, to some extent, production. Replaced by more serious concerns focused on the need to understand how consumption and production practices impact on the environment, the pleasure associated with engaging in certain household activities (which as I go on to argue can be viewed in ways beyond the categories of consumption and/or production) has been overlooked. This is despite earlier work which illustrated the enjoyment found in activities such as shopping, DIY, making and mending (Campbell, 2005; Gregson, 2007; Gregson & Crewe, 2003; Miller, 1998). The constellation of thrift reveals how enjoyment is found through activities where value is perceived as being produced or added through engaging in a thrift activity. Often such activities involve making or transforming something and enjoyment is experienced not only through the activity but also through 'gifting' the item to someone else.

These three extremes of motivation on the constellation offer reference points around which to explore thrift activities. As I illustrate, participants interweave elements of each to explain why they engage in particular thrift activities. However, it must be stressed that whilst the constellation offers a means to explain thrift motivations, there are other factors at play in such decisions – such as time, convenience, quality, choice, care – all of which compete with a desire to be thrifty. Thus, like any practice, thrift activities are personal and determined by specific contexts and circumstance (Evans, 2011; Miller, 1998; Podkalicka & Tang, 2014).

The first moment I use to illustrate the constellation of thrift is shopping. As noted, shopping has been closely aligned to thrift in previous scholarly work. It therefore makes an ideal example to reveal how thrifty shopping is not just about monetary motivations of spending and saving. Indeed, whilst money was a concern discussed by participants when asked about their shopping activities, it was not the only concern. Participant Joanne is a case in point. Joanne is a pensioner; a former missionary, she owns her two-bedroom terraced house but receives only a small income from a state pension of £110 per month. As Joanne notes, 'living on that amount of money, you have to be very, very careful'. Thus, being thrifty is a financial necessity. Joanne employs numerous shopping strategies to save money, such as shopping in charity shops, keeping a track of what she is spending whilst

out food shopping and waiting for items to be reduced before she buys them. Yet Joanne's thrifty shopping activities are also motivated by environmental concerns:

I can buy a big bag of carrots, you know, like a kilo or something; the bigger bags are much cheaper. What would normally happen to carrots? They would go to waste. I can keep them for weeks by cutting the ends off! So no food waste.

In this instance financial necessity is closely interwoven with conscience. Joanne buys the big bag of carrots because it ensures she has more for less. Cutting the ends off the carrots not only means they last longer, but also prevents food waste, an environmental issue she expressed concern for during the interview. Therefore, Joanne engages in classic thrift practice in that she is saving money, but she also engages in this practice to save resources for environmental reasons. Joanne is concerned primarily with getting the most value out of the carrots, and, in doing so, ensures that this value is released in an environmentally 'appropriate' way.

This notion that being thrifty is tied to environmental and ethical concerns, as well as financial reasons, was similarly evoked by other participants. Participant Debbie is a single parent to two teenagers and works several jobs to get by. In her own words 'money is tight'. Debbie has noticed her food shopping bill has increased over the last few years and in an attempt to save money she buys certain products in bulk, uses lower priced supermarkets, and sometimes shops online. Yet Debbie's thrifty shopping practices are also motivated by an ethical and environmental concern to reduce waste. As she states:

I don't like wasting anything, yeah. There's no need. There's food, and there's people – that's what annoys me about supermarkets, I see people that don't have any food, really. And I don't like wasting money.

This quote illustrates how Debbie engages in thrifty activities to save money, but at the same time her concerns extend to both environmental and ethical matters. Supermarkets are viewed as creating food waste, which to Debbie is problematic and potentially unethical when there are people who do not have enough food. For Debbie, the value of all food should be released 'appropriately' through people being fed. Another participant, Alex, a married, retired teacher, noted how he wanted 'to be thrifty because of environmental reasons'. This extended to buying local products where possible and to 'making choices' depending on environmental information, such as how far something had travelled. As he notes below, recently these activities had included eating less meat:

We do try to – I suppose that's slightly thrifty – we do try to eat less meat for environmental reasons, but when we do eat meat, we'll as far as possible buy it locally.

For Alex being thrifty is very much entwined with conscience for the environment – one could argue to the extent that financial necessity plays very little part. Another participant, Heather, a divorced retiree, living alone, noted similar thrifty concerns. Heather disliked supermarkets due to ethical concerns, and also liked to shop locally to support local businesses, even if this did mean she had to frequent lots of different shops to get

what she wanted. In both of these examples the value of shopping activities undertaken and objects purchased is 'appropriately' realised through ethical and environmentally motivated actions, even if at times this was at odds with a desire to be careful financially.

For others the financial necessity of being thrifty was more explicitly at odds with their conscience about being thrifty for other reasons. Diana, a co-habiting parent of one, who works part time in the voluntary sector, exemplifies this internal dilemma. Whilst Diana was in a stable financial position, previously she and her partner had lived a particularly frugal existence to pay off a large amount of debt. This has seemingly left them in position where they are always careful with money, but occasionally this meant going against her other convictions to be thrifty for conscientious reasons. Using Amazon to buy books was a case in point:

Well I go on Amazon even though I'd rather not ... they come to your door and it's cheaper. But I don't like the sound of Amazon as an employer.

For Diana buying books from Amazon involves a certain amount of guilt. She uses them because they are cheaper, but they go against her thrifty conscience which is ethically and environmentally concerned about buying new, and workers' rights.

Interestingly, whilst financial necessity and conscience were closely related by participants, enjoyment at being thrifty was not something which was discussed directly with regard to shopping. Whilst Miller (1998) and others (Gregson & Crewe, 2003) discuss the pleasure of finding a bargain, this was not readily expressed by participants in this study. The only inference made was by Debbie who talked about 'not minding the challenge' of having to be thrifty. Whilst shopping is an activity readily associated with thrift because of its focus on spending and saving, this section has illustrated how shopping also evokes 'thrift' motivations other than financial necessity: primarily those related to conscience around environmental and ethical concerns. Yet it similarly illuminates how no one motivation is central, rather thrift activities are undertaken for a variety of interwoven motivations and personal reasons. It also illustrates a productive element to these traditionally consumptive activities: for example Joanne's production of the carrots. Importantly, it begins to reveal the role of value in these activities and how value is realised and released through different motivations.

The scenario of cooking illustrates a similar interweaving of motivations on the constellation of thrift, albeit an activity which extends beyond the point of purchase and which is a productive practice. Joanne conveyed perhaps the most extreme of these, describing how if she was 'desperate' (financial necessity), she would 'put peelings in soup' and 'chew the ends of chicken bones' to get by and provide herself with the best nutrition she could afford. In this example, Joanne is exhausting value through her thrifty cooking. However, for most participants cooking, like shopping, involved a range of thrifty and entwined motivations. For some, like Debbie, financial necessity was interwoven with varying issues of conscience:

... and it's difficult, I think about what food I'm going to cook. Am I going to put the oven on just for that – no. ... I am conscious of – yeah. One because of the climate, we have to think about the energy we use, and two because of cost.

Debbie describes her concern over the cost of using energy to cook entwined with an environmental concern for energy use. Yet, Debbie's concern for saving money and saving energy is also entwined with a concern for her family's health. Debbie talked a lot about ensuring her children had 'a proper meal' with 'veg and stuff' because 'there's loads of rubbish in pre-packed food'. Thus, Debbie's motivations to be thrifty regarding cooking are difficult to separate out, revolving around a variety of influences from being financially careful, to environmental issues and health-related concerns as part of caring for her family. Debbie wants to exhaust value by being careful with resources, yet this is coupled with achieving this 'appropriately' in a way that neither harms the environment nor impacts negatively on her family's health.

Whilst Debbie's motivations to be thrifty when cooking are oriented between the 'financial necessity' and the 'conscience' extremes of the constellation, Alex's were at times positioned within all three. Like Debbie, Alex was concerned about the environmental impact cooking had, noting how they would often batch cook/bake, in particular bread, because 'you're getting more for your energy'; this also implies a financial implication – saving energy means saving money. However, Alex also talked at length about the enjoyment he experienced from cooking and baking:

Interviewer: How often do you bake?

Alex: Twice a fortnight.

Interviewer: What for?

Alex: Well it's because you can give things to other people and they seem to like them.

Although Alex's overall cooking practices are motivated by his financial and environmentally conscious concerns, there is also pleasure in these activities. Here Alex describes how he bakes because he enjoys gifting the things he produces to others. Through this practice Alex incorporates elements of all three extremes of motivation into his own personal thrifty context. Value is all at once exhausted (getting the most out energy), appropriately released (not wasting energy) and produced/added (producing something to gift to others). Cooking further highlights how motivations to be thrifty interconnect and compete, and are not just considerations about spending and/or saving; but rather are complexly interwoven with value.

The final moment I use to illustrate the constellation of thrift is activities of repair and making. Like cooking, repair and making is an activity somewhat removed from an appreciation of thrift as directly related to spending and saving and of all the moments is more related to production than consumption. It is also an activity which divided the interview participants, some of whom were very engaged in it, others not at all. Of those

who were, and who expressed this as a thrift-related practice, a similar pattern emerged with regard to their motivations and how the extremes of financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment interweave and sometimes compete. Importantly, repair and making was an activity regularly linked to enjoyment. Participant Joanne was particularly vocal about the pleasure she gained from this:

I do this for pleasure; here is an example. This is a sheet. And this is the first time I've done this, but I think it might be quite a common pattern post-war. You would use your sheet until one of your kids stuck their foot through the middle because it was so thin; you would cut it in half, put the outside ends in, and then stitch it back. So this is what I'm doing. But I don't have a sewing machine so I'm doing it by hand ... why chuck it out?

Whilst most people may be inclined to throw out a sheet with a hole in it, Joanne is resurrecting a wartime practice of salvaging sheets by cutting them in half and sewing the less worn parts of the halves back together. Despite the time this takes by hand, this is a thrifty practice done to some extent for financial necessity but it is also something Joanne explicitly enjoys. Joanne is exhausting the value from the sheet, but at the same time is producing value from the enjoyment of the process and the repaired product of the thrifty sheet.

Heather was another participant who undertook repair and making on a regular basis. For Heather, practices such as making curtains, cushions, knitting clothes and making cards were motivated by financial necessity, conscience and enjoyment:

I have made cushions out of pillows in the past. ... I've always been used to cutting up any bits of old fabric that are past even recycling to make floor cloths and things. ... I mean it was out of necessity as well, to save money, but I did enjoy doing it. I cut up old Christmas cards and birthday cards ... and make new ones ... just cutting down on the world's creation of everything that is being churned out ... to save money ... and to do the whole made-y thing as well.

This quote shows how Heather's making activities are motivated by a mix of all three extremes of motivation on the constellation. As Heather states, this is to save money, exhausting the value of items she already has, but in an 'appropriate' way and from this she produces something new, thus value is added.

For others, engaging in repair and making was much more orientated around financial necessity than enjoyment or conscience. For instance, Debbie had trained herself to mend her washing machine by watching professional repairers, to save herself the cost of getting it repaired. As she noted 'it boils down, "This is going to cost me money", I'll remember how he did it!' Therefore, like shopping and cooking, repair and making reveals how thrifty activities are motivated by a variety of influences, as well as personal circumstances. Overall, and as I go on to explore further in the discussion, thrift is determined by the value varying motivations afford.

Nonetheless, it is important to stress that not all activities which involve shopping, cooking and repair and making (alongside many others) are undertaken with thrift in mind. Whilst this may seem an obvious point, it is one worth mentioning, otherwise every household activity involving some form of resource can be interpreted as incorporating varying flexible elements of thrift practice/motivation to a lesser or greater extent. Participant Joanne emphasised this when she stressed that the pottery making she enjoyed

was 'just pleasure. It's not thrift, it's pleasure.' Joanne clearly marks out the boundaries in her activities. Pottery making involves no engagement with thrift or motivations to be thrifty, whilst many of the other household activities she undertakes do. Of course, this distinction may be clearer for some than for others – once again highlighting how thrift is contextual and driven by personal circumstance. As I argue below, we therefore cannot only appreciate thrift through the lens of consumption and/or production, we must view it as a practice of everyday life in its broadest and most encompassing sense.